Based on the percent of people who were able to do it before there were fast food restaurants everywhere, I think people will manage to figure it out.
The only reason they have not is due to lack of incentive (sufficiently cheap food at restaurants).
> 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.
For example, if restaurant or prepared food prices went up 5x today, basically everyone (with space and appliance to cook) has the capability to buy a pan, spatula, bowl, fork, eggs, salt, pepper, and start making scrambled eggs for dinner.
And then they would watch a YouTube video and try lentils, and rice, and etc. And in a few weeks they would have a bunch of dishes under their belt.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that it takes time for people to work out specific budget changes as well. Not everyone tracks their finances aggressively, and it's not surprising to me if restaurant prices go up that it would take maybe a year or two for people to start looking at their budgets and thinking, "hey, I could cut a lot here."
A 5X price increase overnight is something that would be impossible for people not to notice, but I suspect anything that's an impulse buy where the price goes up slowly to be somewhat lagging with people's reactions to those prices, and then similarly lagging with them taking the time to implement changes as a result. See also stuff like streaming services, where someone might keep a streaming service after a price increase even though they wouldn't have signed up at that price. Both inertia and just general lack-of-insight into those price increases can slow down consumer reaction.
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.
