> It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it.

Nobody is saying people can't cook. They're saying it'll take a little while for people who aren't used to cooking to change their habits and pick up some planning/organizing/cooking skills again that they might have lost. And they're saying that price (a lack of sufficiently cheap food at restaurants) will be the driving force behind that change.

A good lot of the people from that time are dead and they become fewer every day. Meanwhile, their children, who grew up since then, have radically different baseline expectations about what a meal should taste like, how big it should be, how filling it should be, how convenient it should be, etc

It’s very different to recall the habits of a received culture than it is to adopt a new culture that is completely alien.

In some post-apocalypse, of course people will figure this stuff out, but expecting that to happen just because of incidental market relationships in an otherwise healthy economy is a fantasy.

It takes the passion of a wellness geek or absolute desperation to throw away all your preconceptions about how you’ve related to food your whole life. It doesn’t just happen because prices crept up a little here or sank a little there.