A few months ago, I took this video at a supermarket hot bar:

Addison Del Mastro @ad_mastro

I can hear Gordon Ramsay saying, "That isn't fried rice; it's dried rice!"

1:21 PM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

As I wrote in a piece at the time for The Spectator, I found that rice while waiting for my second takeout order of the night. My first order? My wife had a long evening work event, and I had a craving for sushi, so I’d gone to a well-reviewed sushi place nearby and ordered the triple spicy roll combo. It’s my old favorite from when I’d go get sushi in town back in college. Beautiful rolls almost overstuffed with minced tuna, salmon, and yellowtail; spicy mayo, a little scallion, and maybe a little tempura crumb for a crunch.

This is what the filling of my rolls looked like:

What that is is a stale, soggy mix of probably 80 percent oil-soaked breadcrumbs and 20 percent shreds of fish. It was so full of oil that I could squeeze oil drops out of a chunk of filling. Almost nothing but bread, rice, and oil.

And three of these rolls were $20.

I’ve noticed a lot of other inflation-related (I guess) data points. The price of decent, sturdy floor lamps seems to have exploded. Remember those workhorse halogen lamps that used to set curtains on fire? They were a dime a dozen in any box store in the ’90s. Any lamp built with metal that thick, and with that much weight, seems to be well over $100 now. Maybe not even at that price point. (My wife and I recently returned a $100-plus lamp made of lightweight plastic resin and thin steel.) The cheapest models have gotten flimsier, and the good models have gotten pricier.

Back around 2012, my parents bought a little cordless vacuum cleaner for quick messes, for around $30. My wife and I were looking for a cordless vac recently for our new house, and I could not for the life of me find any cordless model under $100. They seem to have evolved into much fancier machines that rival corded full-sized vacuum cleaners. That convenient little cordless unit with a price tag low enough to buy on a whim has disappeared.

Plastic utility shelves. My dad bought a whole bunch at Home Depot in the early 2010s for $35 a piece. Four or five levels, all plastic, but pretty sturdy. Anything like that today, even junky looking ones with thinner plastic, is double, or much more.

I’ve been buying a particular frying pan at Marshall’s for eight years now. It’s nonstick, and I replace it every couple of years. It’s $20, and for the convenience of nonstick for certain foods (eggs, par-cooking stir-fry ingredients), I like it. But the last time I replaced it, it had become much thinner and lighter all around. Same price, same brand, same size. Not the same. The base has already developed a little bow after a couple of months.

It feels kind of like we’re in a leaner time. I very rarely buy things or have restaurant meals these days that truly feel like great values, let alone deals. That’s a subtle but big shift I’ve noticed compared to 10-20 years ago. (The one exception is post-Christmas sales—I got two beautiful prime ribs for $5.99 per pound, and a whole leg of lamb for $3.49 a pound, the week after Christmas. They’re almost giving away the cards and wrapping paper.)

The psychology of inflation is tough. Groceries and shopping are probably the smallest major category in our spending. Mortgage, utilities, gasoline, phone, internet…all bigger or close. But those just sort of happen in the background. With groceries and shopping, you see the creep of price increases and corner-cutting pretty much every day, sometimes multiple times a day.

The other major point of my Spectator piece was that cooking at home becomes more attractive when inflation gets worse. Not only that, but the worse the economy is, the more of a relative improvement home cooking becomes. That’s because groceries are generally groceries. The price can go up, but chicken breast is chicken breast. (If it’s bad out of the package, returns are no hassle.) I think I’m probably better at cooking than maybe half the restaurants we eat in.

You have a lot more control over what you’re eating when you can buy, store, and prepare the raw ingredients, versus counting on a restaurant, in a tight economic time, to do a good job in the hidden kitchen. I’ve noted before that the backdrop of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares series was the Great Recession. You feel bad for many of these owners. But you don’t want to be their customers either.

Sometimes, among housing advocates, you’ll hear a suggestion that we should permit and build more kitchen-less units. Kitchens add a lot of expense to apartments—plumbing, gas or heavy-duty electric hookups, appliances, cabinets, countertops—and there are, probably, people who eat out enough that they would do fine with a microwave and a single electric burner from Walmart, rather than a full kitchen, for basic home cooking. Or people who are pushed out of the housing market because of the cost embedded in that kitchen.

Much as this might sound modern and suspect, it was typical of the boarding house and residential hotel units that every city had a century ago. Cheap, flexible accommodations helped new arrivals, or people in precarious situations, get a foothold. Where did they eat? An ecosystem of inexpensive establishments existed to serve people in situations like this. Basically, what boarding house rooms were to apartments, those dining establishments were to modern restaurants.

On Twitter recently, I saw someone suggest, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that there should be dining halls and meal plans for adults, just like in college. You buy a plan, you swipe, you eat, maybe you meet some other people like you. No cooking. No dishes. Maybe no kitchen.

Today, this reads to a lot of people as lazy 20-somethings who won’t grow out of college, get real jobs, get married, and start families. It looks like trying desperately to hold on to the college experience. But it’s really more like an echo of our country’s past.

If you graduate at 22, and marry at 30 (even grant that you live together for a year or two), what are you supposed to actually do for those six-to-eight years? If the answer isn’t don’t do that—which, given the structural factors that encourage it is almost like saying “be Amish”—then the answer has to be building housing that works as a functional and affordable bridge between college and marriage.

This makes some conservatives uncomfortable, because they see it as making easier a lifestyle that they think shouldn’t be encouraged. But I think this is an underrated reason why housing has exploded as a political and social issue for people in their 20s and 30s.

“The left wants us all to eat bugs and live in pods and be single and childless and dependent on the government” carries no water with me because the reality that nonsense is pointing to far precedes that way of describing it.

I think one of the arguments against kitchen-less apartments—like the arguments against windowless bedrooms, or the arguments in favor of single-family zoning—is that if you don’t mandate a certain minimum standard, then you just won’t get it. The market will squeeze it out even as an option. It’s very similar to the reasoning behind forced lunch hours in unionized workplaces; if lunch is optional, the people who skip lunch to work longer will set the tone for the workplace.

That’s kind of correct as far as it goes, but it misses the point too. Nolan Gray explained it in his book on zoning, Arbitrary Lines. When you set such a minimum standard, you might think you’re making sure everyone gets at least that. But what you’re really doing is establishing an arbitrary floor, such that anyone who can’t afford that floor gets nothing. That’s not absolute—there’s subsidized housing, and there is a certain standard below which housing units should probably not be permitted. But the standards we’ve mandated are probably too high.

I’m not sure how I got here from mediocre sushi, but that’s okay.

Related Reading:

More on Pro-Family Urbanism

Cooking Day

Coffee Shop Kind of Day

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