Thug Kitchen - Thug Kitchen 101: Fast as F*ck

Everyones busy, we fucking get it. Whether its working multiple jobs just to make rent or chauffeuring your whole damn family around, weve all got too much shit to do with limited time to do it. Youre not alone. We wrote this book to tackle the #1 excuse we hear from people about why they dont cook: time. Everybody seems to have enough time to be caught up on their Netflix queue or the shitload of sports on TV, but when it comes to cooking for yourself, suddenly everyones too goddamn busy. Maybe you never learned and dont know where to start, or maybe you know how to cook but your time management is garbage. Whatever your exhausted excuse might be, were here to call bullshit and give you some advice. You cant write three cookbooks in 3 years without getting good at this schedule shit.

You dont throw your clothes away when they get dirty and just buy new ones because theres no time to do laundry, right? Fuck no you dont, and if you do, youre an asshole. But thats how tons of people treat mealtime. Fast-food companies rely on this myth of intelligent time management for your repeat business and that shit has served them too well for too long. Dining out makes up nearly one-third of the energy intake by US adults each year and the nutritional quality of that food is almost always significantly lower than food prepared at home. So basically were all eating the nutritional equivalent of Styrofoam for a third of our meals but were still wondering why we have all these goddamn health problems. Go fucking figure.

In 1929, away-from-home food consumption was only 13% of the average US households budget. By 2012, that amount had shot up to 43%, which corresponds to the rise in diabetes, heart disease, and obesity in the United States since the 1970s. And dont start with that but its always been like this bullshit. McDonalds first drive-thru opened in 1975, so weve got plenty of time to reverse this eatery epidemic before it becomes an ingrained way of life. If we changed once, then we sure as shit can change again.

We can already hear you saying, but its cheaper than cooking at home! Well we dont know what the fuck your budget is like but feeding a family of four at McDonalds costs an average $28 per visit and ya know goddamn well there aint any leftovers. For $30 you could make most entrees in this book with a side or a big salad and have enough left over to eat for another one to two meals.

So it shouldnt be any surprise that its mostly the middle and lower-middle classes who frequent fast-food and sit-down restaurants, not the poor. Study after study has found that the number of visits to fast-food establishments actually rises directly alongside income. This is not a them kind of problem, this is an all of us problem, and the sooner people own up to shitty food habits, the better. You can front like money aint a thing, but to most of us, money is very much a thing.

As youd expect, fast-food restaurants are only interested in your wallet. Your health and waistline mean fuck all to them. Theyll keep peddling shitty food under the guise of efficiency until customers stop lining up to buy it and start cooking at home. The people who dream up the new items that land on fast-food menus are not chefs or dieticians. THEYRE. MOTHER. FUCKING. MARKETERS. They want you to order their newest, most ridiculous sounding meal, talk about it on social media, and then just keep buying that garbage until they scheme up the next dish to push the limits of good taste and caloric density. The Doritos Locos Taco from Taco Bell is the best example of this. That travesty of a taco made over $375 million in its first year on the market. That one taco-pocalypse made Taco Bell more than 7,000 times the average household income in the United States in one goddamn year. ONE. DAMN. TACO. The over-the-top ad campaign, branding, name, and addictive tastes are all designed for one reason: to make those rich motherfuckers even richer.

Get on Team You. You work hard and deserve a diet that will support your ass-kicking lifestyle, not food thats gonna cause you to self-sabotage. If youre like us, you dont need any help with that shit.

Most people who dine out frequently dont realize that businesses have manufactured their meals specifically to keep consumers coming back for more. Customers have had their taste buds sandblasted to shit by the aggressive amounts of sodium and sugar that get packed into commercially prepared meals. People in this country consume 2,000 to 8,000 milligrams of sodium a day when they shouldnt have more than 1,500. HOLY FUCKING FRENCH FRIES. GUYS?! ARE YOU OKAY?!

Lets table all the unhealthy side effects of that shit because thats in our other books, Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a Fuck and Thug Kitchen Party Grub, and lets talk about how youre fucking with your palate. When you suck down that much sodium on the daily, youre fucking up your ability to enjoy healthier foods. Too much salt overstimulates your taste buds and then you cant taste the subtle flavors in food anymore, especially fruits and vegetables. Ya know, the kinda shit we should be eating. Without realizing whats happened, people combat the dulling of their palates by reaching for the saltshaker, making the whole goddamn problem even worse. And when most healthy food is bland and spiceless, nobodys craving that shit. And thats exactly what these fast-food companies want. Its tough eating at home when everything tastes like flavorless mush.

And its the same damn thing when it comes to sugar. The average American eats 2 to 3 pounds of sugar per week. Thats at least 1 cup of sugar a day. Walk into your kitchen right now and measure out a cup of sugar, then take a hard look at that shit knowing youre probably eating one of those every day. Its not entirely your fault though. Sugar sneaks its way into every commercially prepared food like bread, salad dressings, and pasta sauces in addition to the cookies and other sugary shit that we already obsess over. Sugar has the same effect on the palate as salt, so we crave sweeter and sweeter stuff to achieve the same kind of satisfaction that we used to get from a ripe peach. This has gotten out of hand and we gotta take back control of what goes into our food before we start just licking sugar and salt off rocks like a bunch of goddamn goats. Its not a good look.