Oh my, I just realized that we have now everything we need to cook food at home. We don't need the restaurants anymore! The whole industry is going to be dead in few years.
I was a baker for some years about 23 years ago, I will tell any baker that they will make better money working for the company delivering the flour, probably have better hour and still get to eat baked goods all the time. Unless you are a craft baker you are just reheating frozen dough.
The quickest way to ruin the enjoyment of making food is to do it for customers. I've been told for those last 20ish years that I should open a restaurant, I always reply the same "I cook for those I love and like, not asshole customers"
The quickest way to ruin doing most anything you love is to do it for a living.
That’s why I never committed to professional arsonist and just burn things as a hobby.
based
I’ve heard “you love cooking? You should open a restaurant!” so many times and it’s such a horrible cliché!
Even if customers weren’t assholes, it would still suck. There’s no better way to kill your enjoyment of something than to do it for money!
Hospitality is both a satisfying and dreadful job at the same time. It doesn't pay enough for what the work is. But the fundamental work is satisfying. The only chefs I've known who really enjoyed their jobs were private chefs for individual rich families. Both were well paid and had a lot of creative freedom.
I really wish making food was a more viable commercial option. A few years ago I looked into setting up a food truck and holy shit are those things expensive. I occasionally go to food-truck-athons and even with how insanely overpriced their offerings are, I don't see how they can ever be profitable. Around where I live, you can't even get permits for a food truck unless you're associated with a physical restaurant.
End users aren’t the customer.
Yup, and there are a lot less bakers around now that machines do most of it.
No, I think there are fewer bakers.
They're also smaller
I don't trust small bakers...
How can a 50 year old (66 by now) look that young? Witchcraft or technoheresy!
Is this a grammer thing? I'm fairly certain I can use "a lot less".
Hmm nvm, I don't recognize the meme.
It is a grammar thing. You can have a lot less of a non-count noun, like sand. But you have to have fewer of countable nouns, like loaves of bread, or bakers of bread
Ahhh I see, thank you
This is a contested grammar rule that was based on one persons opinion in the late 1700s.
There are plently of examples in history and modern usage where less and fewer are used interchangably. It is not a fixed part of english grammar as much as an "internet gotcha" that is commonly repeated.
Non-countable? I think some vampires might disagree.
I also thought Thor relevant but I can't find anything to support that.
You can use "less" when it's a non-discrete plurality, such as water or sand (ignoring the technical fact that these can now be observed as discrete components below the macroscopic level) or money (the made-up kind, not necessarily the physical representations thereof). It's vastly more messy to have 1.78 bakers, and their families get really upset about it, so it's safer just to use "fewer."
To be fair, knowing what the first mass production machines looked like, some families definitely got back .78 of their baker.
Jk tho, thanks for the correction.
Baking bread has gone from an everyday job employing a significant fraction of the workforce to more of an artistic job that only a few people do. Bakers don't really compete with mass produced bimbos, instead they offer a premium product for people who are willing to pay more.
I think it's always like that when technologies get replaced. There are still people offering horse-drawn carriage rides, but it's a specialty service now instead of a common job. Same with many of the things you find on Etsy.
Jobs being replaced by automation wouldn't be a bad thing if the benefits were shared with the whole population and there were a social safety net for people whose jobs were eliminated. Unfortunately, the benefits always go to the people at the top. Some theorists have proposed economic systems where there are no people at the top, or where things are shared much more fairly. It's a sad fact that those systems seem incompatible with human nature as it stands. Country-sized experimentation with anarchism or communism still leads to people at the top who take a lot more than they give. Those systems seem to work fine in small communities where everyone knows each-other. But, not when they are implemented in countries containing millions of people.
The most effective systems right now seem to be mixed socialist / capitalist systems where unions are strong and willing to call major strikes and shut the country down. You still get "haves" and "have nots", but the "have nots" still get a voice and aren't completely trampled by the rich.
There is no one human nature, humans have a lot of different natures.
OMG we are so ~~cooked~~ baked.
Didn't you hear? Elon announced the total collapse of the baking industry within the next 6 months.
Classic Pump and dump. You're better investing in the fermenting industry in the long term.
This little machine is incredible. I disagree with OP’s premise, but this makes yummy little loaves.
I haven't tried that particular model, but bread machines are, indeed, great. Instead of buying large loaves (which go bad in a few days) when I need bread I can just buy flour (which keeps for ages) and bake my own whenever I need it. The process of loading up the ingredients takes a few minutes but beyond that you can just hit a button and let it do its thing, and the resulting bread tastes better than what you'd get from a store.
I can’t find a baker who makes loaves of bread to save my life. Even living near a major city, it’s all pastry. I just want to support a local business and have delicious fresh bread.
My neighbor is an independent baker. He makes "regular" bread in various types in addition to pastries.
He closed his retail business during COVID and never reopened it. He reports that it is significantly less hassle to sell directly to local businesses (restaurants, delis, etc.) and their only consumer sales are now made at local farmer's markets. Your local bakeries only sell pastries because they're the only things that sell. The reason for this is broadly speaking that individual consumers are whiny and entitled shitheads, and "the grocery store has it cheaper."
in germany bread baking is its own valuable branch of baking and it's often treated with a lot of sincerity
That's odd, I live in a pretty small city and there are multiple local bakeries. I just wish there was one a little easier to walk to.
I was thinking the same thing but I'm guessing it's the major city part that is the issue. Rent and labor probably make it too expensive in major cities.
I know it's not exactly what you're saying, but a lot of grocery store bakeries bake loaves of bread.
I remember reading about how in Australia we bake dough made in Ireland. As somehow it’s cheaper to mass manufacture shitty dough and ship it across the globe.
I’ll stick to a traditional bakery’s bread over a supermarkets if given the choice.
I just bake my own bread. It is healthier and with tastier flavor.
That's interesting, there's two bakeries with bread within walking distance from me. But they're not square loaves, it's sourdough and rodeo bread and challah and baguette and focaccia... And rolls, and yes pastries as well. Tbf, I live in Los Angeles so the unusual part isn't variety, it's the "walking."
Itt; people not understanding they are making an analogy
I used to have a naysayer coworker, and he was the most annoying shit. He'd always say things like, "In ten years, this building won't even be here anymore." Eventually, you just learn to say, "Okay, I'm just going to get back to work."
A bit of a tangent:
Bread machines are the absolute best for one thing: fresh baked bread ready for when you wake up, without having to get up at 3 am to do it. Load that baby up at night, set the timer, and wake up to your place smelling amazing.
This is such a weird post. Is it satirical? Baking as a profession functionally does not exist anymore.
That's fair, but we also get successful bread much more than half the time.
It's kind of similar, I think. I mean most store bought bread is low quality compared to the artisinal product. Corporations don't care if the product sucks so long as they can replace the worker.
The difference is that bread is a minimum viable product, while Gen AI slop tends to eventually become descructive vs. productive.
I had a bread maker and it drove me crazy. It was Schrodinger's bread box. Put in ingredients, wait, and at the end it's either oddly shaped bread or a brick. Seemingly absolutely randomly. I hated it with my whole heart and gave it to my neighbor, who could not cook so 75% or whatever was a good enough success rate for her.
Bread is not difficult to make by hand (well, sourdough at least is easy & forgiving) but it takes knowledge of how the dough should look and feel. Flour can act different on different days, the ambient temperature matters, and how old is your yeast, there is no way to absolutely standardize what is going into that machine.
That's a failed joke to me. When I was living in London I bought one of those and I was making better and cheaper bread that I could find, including electricity cost.
That thing paid itself very quickly and I was happier with it.
And the AI that's trying to moke is better than a dozen people in my company. We recently got bored of waiting for a tool and tried to just prompt it. In a few hours it was in better shape starting from scratch that another team has managed in over a month.
Of course I am proficient enough I could spot the issues quickly and prompt a solution
You forgot the "/s". In our current times someone could believe you really think that way.
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
