What happened to cheap food? Diners, Automats, and affordable eating

Today we’re talking about diners, cafeterias, and Automats: the missing piece in modern eating. If you’ve cooked in a small old apartment kitchen, you might ask, how did everyone cook all their meals here. The answer: maybe they didn’t. Horn & Hardart Automats and diners historically are a big part of city eating. What else comes up in the video? IKEA, Celebrate the Century stamps, horses, and a splash of Gilmore Girls.

The documentary: The Automat directed by Lisa Hurwitz

[jaelikesjackalopes]

Absolutely charmed by your dad calling this your “show”

[aformist]

It's also important to discuss the role these eateries play as "third spaces", crucial for community and personal mental health. I used to look forward to a cup of coffee and a matzo ball soup when I'd commute home at all hours. I'd finally get to relax, enjoy good food, and nobody bothered me to leave so I could catch up on some reading and forget about the world for a while.

[RedJezka]

Even in cafeterias, someone is still clearing the tables. Fun fact about automats, a lot of people really believed these places were fully automatic futurism, so when people in the back of house stopped refilling the compartments to protest their absymal wages, there was a great public confusion. It was called "The Strike Invisible" by the New York Sun

[hollygarfield]

i think this is part of why so many people idolize the college experience, because you’re in a community and you have those cafeterias, yea you pay an ungodly amount for them but in the moment it just feels like coming home to as much food as you need

[simplesimply]

Finally someone doing a video essay about how dinners WERE affordable. That’s how Gilmore Girls could afford to go out. So many forget that when doing how did Lorelai able to afford the house.

I grew up near a train dinner.

[s.stevens]

I live in the Netherlands and they have automats here! It’s so nice being able to grab food from the little cubby holes when I’m in a rush at the train station. And I don’t have to wait in line or interact with anybody. You literally tap your card right at the food item to open the door and go!

[kaylac]

Those places seemed like it made it easier to build community. Now it’s like, if you don’t have at least a +1 with you at a restaurant you feel out of place 🫤 great video ❤

[yacan]

I love the ikea cafeteria. I genuinely don't feel rushed and the food is filling, good, and affordable. I really wouldn't mind if it was a standalone diner or something

[annabellemitchell]

I’m moving to Hong Kong from Australia and it’s crazy because I’m Australia it is so expensive to eat out - 30 dollars a head minimum, but in Hong Kong there are places designed for people who don’t have kitchens, and often that’s cheaper than getting a larger apartment with kitchen space. It’s such a mind bend.

[howardadamkramer]

I lived in Manhattan in the 1990s. My kitchen was miniscule. But there were dozens of restaurants within a few minutes walk where you could grab a cheap meal for under $5. Not anymore.

[abesapien]

Just before the pandemic, I ate an old diner in Arlington Heights Illinois that my grandmother used to eat at. I sat down and had a giant BLT with massive fries for less than $6. The owners, who were elderly, refused to raise pieces. They were about service, not profits. THAT'S the kind of place where Seinfeld ate.

Meanwhile, Denny's is currently charging $3.89 for a cup of joe.

[lisahoshowsky]

I watch a lot of Japan content and it seems like they still have this eating culture, the kitchens in major urban area apartments are just big enough to let you cook some basics but then you walk out your door and you can grab cheap, filling, tasty food from a convenience store all the way up to a sit down restaurant. In North America we live in a work culture where it would almost seem more likely to see these kinds of places *now* and yet they’ve become almost all but a memory. I definitely feel like it’s a reflection on the capitalist zeitgeist we are currently experiencing.

[hexgirlveronica]

As a jersey girl it's absolutely horrible how expensive diners have gotten. One that my friends and I used to go to used to have a plate of mozzarella sticks for like $5... but now it's around $15. it's crazy

[specialkman]

I almost never take lunch to work anymore because I can get a gourmet lunch optolion at my work cafeteria for $6. This week's options include poached fish with polenta cakes, curry with rice and stir fry, and braised lamb shank with potatoes and squash. It's cheaper and tastier than I can make at home and I don't have to worry about any mess. More places should be available like that

[foxwilliamulder]

I hate cooking and I live alone. I ALWAYS fall into the "why can everyone else do it but I can't seem to?" mindset. I never knew anything like this existed until this video, this is the coolest thing ever. In an alternate universe where I don't have a million food allergies and I'm not limited to the 5 same options every day, this would be my haven. I love your line delivery style, this video was informative and also fun to watch, and no, those two things don't always go together :) You have a new house member!

[TigerofRobare]

One of the interesting things about diners is that a big part of their decline was from the change in the way their suppliers worked. In a traditional diner, you can have a large number of meals made from the same few ingredients andf you'd reuse whatever didn't sell during the day. For instance, unsold home fries and hashbrowns from breakfast could get turned into mashed potatoes for lunch, unsold meat and veggies could go into stews and soups and so on, so they had very little waste. Then in the 50s, food wholesalers started pushing frozen premade foods that just needed to be dropped in a fryer. It was advertised as convenient because it reduced cooking time, but it meant that diners had to use their limited space to store all this frozen stuff and need to invest in walk-in-freezers, they also had more garbage to deal with and if you're making frozen hash browns, you can't make them into home fries or take today's roast chicken and make tomorrow's chicken salad and chicken noodle soup if you have frozen chicken tenders. So it increased costs massively and reduced what diners were capable of.

Another big part is immigration. A lot of diners today are owned by Greek families, but that wasn't always the case. When they started they would be Jewish or Italian or Irish, but then the third or even second generations of these families don't want to get up at 3 am and spend all day over a hot grill, they want to work in factories and go to college, so in the 70s a lot of diners were sold to Greeks who were jhust establishing themselves in America, but now their children and grandchildren are reaching the point where they can't pass on their businesses to the next generation, and there isn't really a new group of immigrants ready to take them over.

[varnull]

On the topic of "why is this so hard for me humanity's been doing this forever" - we really haven't - ROMANS had fast food. It'd be unrecognizable to us as fast food now, but there were places for laborers to come and get cheap quickly-prepared food, socialize, etc for reasonable prices, where these places would take up a substantial part of their diet. I liked Invicta's video on it, but anyways my point is just how weird the moment we're in is. There's always been equivalents to things like the diner and automat, except now.

On a similar if a bit unrelated topic - "why is it so hard to maintain a home" - for most of history, half the home could focus on maintaining that home, and work itself was often integrated into the home already, so it was possible to maintain the home as part of one's regular labor. Now both partners are gone for the majority of their waking hours, home is a transient place left empty all day. I'm not suggesting we should go back to the same gendered labor divisions - but every household is working twice as much as they would have at any point in history. We should be working less.

[xbbzfuo]

I'm interning at a company that has a cafe for its employees, and realizing how sustainable and affordable it would be for me to get lunch everyday there was eye opening for what food should be like

[cruzerro]

We as a society kinda forgot how to go some spend time at some small restaurant/ cafe with out spending a lot or needing a reason to even be there

[BenRangel]

It's interesting how the view on eating out as a common daily thing in the early 1900s varies between countries and size of cities. I've been told my old relatives from a mid sized town in Sweden pretty much only ate at restaurants once per year. It was a huge deal. They couldn't even imagine someone eating at a diner several times per week.