Buying Bread

The 'bread' thing really resonates with me. For all my childhood, our kitchen had 'white-sliced' bread for everything, sandwiches, toast, French-toast, etc. When I moved to Toronto for university, I had to run my own kitchen. And I found Rye Bread! and Pumpernickel! and Potato Bread! I went nuts! The first loaf of dark rye I brought home, I just sat in my kitchen and ate it, one ripped-off chunk at a time. Eventually I settled on 12-grain for sandwiches and French stick for dipping in soups.
I mentioned all this to my mother, and she said she thought something like that would happen. She knew it's a big big world and she let me discover it. Smart lady!

My kids don't eat as much bread as I do. They eat more pasta instead. I believe that goes back to the fact that they've never lived without a dishwasher. I have, and learned the value of a sandwich very early.

You've made me crave some rye now!

I never paid attention to how my mom battered and pan fried fish. While I was at university in Guelph, I wanted to make some so I looked up instructions on the internet. I decided to pair my fish with creamed corn.

I had made mistake of buying No Name creamed corn. I can tell you, it was not worth the 20 cent savings!

And what came out of the frying pan can only be described as "fish bits".

I couldn't make myself finish the meal. Good times.

It was a tragic surprise to discover that dirty dishes did not just wash themselves!

My mother used to come home from lunch and make me this wonderful sandwich everyday. I never knew it was an egg salad sandwich with scrambled eggs chopped to bits. I tried to recreate this no-name food from ingredients in the fridge including cottage cheese and mustard. I ate my sandwich, but it was the most disgusting food I've ever made. My mom later explained her secret ingredient was NOT replacing eggs with cottage cheese in an egg salad.

Doing taxes! Nobody ever taught me how, and I feel this is something schools should be doing.

High schools do not even make an effort to prepare you for this, and this is an area I find them to be completely deficient. Who cares who won the Falklands War, that won't even matter or even come up in your life until you're sitting around watching Jeopardy or playing Trivial Pursuit. The real things you need to learn, like how to do your taxes, how to budget your income etc... are not taught in school, and should be.

When young adults are clueless about basic things it really stumps me. As kids my siblings and I did laundry and we went grocery shopping with our mom. In college I met kids who couldn't use a hammer, read the half inch mark on a ruler or change a light bulb, yet many of these kids were in honors classes.

There are basic things your parents are suppose to teach you. It's like their parents thought "Well my kids go to school so I guess that covers learning!"

Of course there are infinite things that I don't know how to do but it makes me sad to see adults who were never taught the basics of "just figuring it out."

First time I went shopping for myself once I started college, I managed to get the food items into the trolley (cart) okay but once it was time to pay I just stood there expectantly and had to be told that it was my job to put everything onto the conveyor belt.

@GFlea:

That is how my parents are. They feel I should know just about everything by now just because I go to school, particularly in the U.S. They were immigrants, so they seem to expect schools to teach you everything there is you need to know in life. I wish there were classes that taught you how to do taxes, because I don't even know how the fudge that works.

My mom never wanted to teach me how to cook. Or how to handle money, and save. I had to learn these things on my own. I save money better than my parents though; they spend fat chunks of it all the time on things we don't even need... and then chaos breaks out every month when they can't afford to pay all the bills. As for cooking, I know a few things, but not enough. I'm not really allowed to learn on my own either (I know, it's weird), yet they yell at me for not "knowing how to do anything."

Had to learn how to do laundry on my own as well. My parents just worry about school. Go to school, then you will make good money in the future so you can support us. It's always about them really. And here I am totally lost about the real life and having to learn things on my own somehow, which is tough.

I didn't expect groceries to be so expensive. I thought since I was not buying pet food and cat litter that the actual food (okay, junk food) would not add up to much. I nearly fainted when the cashier told me my groceries would cost $75!

I think it's amazing this article is noteworthy because the poor guy was unprepared for the real world, and not because we live in a world where there are 11,000 kinds of bread!

FirstWorldProblems, the top thread at reddit addresses just that, with a discussion about Soviet breadlines, and how too many choices make life harder.

Mindy and kkirkpat remind me of the time I was about ten year old at a slumber party, and my friends decided to make scrambled eggs. No one knew how to do it, but one girl said, "My mom puts something white in it." The consensus was to add flour. What a mess!

@FirstWorldProblems

And none of them good...

My first year in college, I had to help my roommate with his first load of laundry. "So I pour the soap in the cap, and then dump it on the clothes? But the water's not finished running."

I didn't know a T-bone steak could be pan-fried until I went to college. I still don't think this is a good idea, but everybody has their own way of doing things.

My brother in law thought that his dog's droppings always disintegrated within a week or two. Didn't realize that his father went out to collect and dispose of them.

I come from a relatively poor family that lived 60 miles away from the nearest city (pre-Walmart). I did not realize until I went to college that you could go clothes shopping *any time you wanted to* and not just at the beginning of the school year and Christmas.

Just wait until that poor kid discovers this:
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh158/Schrobblehead/beerisle-1.jpg

In college I had the joy of taking a person to their first super market. The island he grew up on the market was a little smaller than a 7-11. He said he had heard, expected and saw from the outside that they were bigger but nothing really could prepare him. Think that was the first time I had ever walked every isle of a super market.

It was a good thing it was a smaller super market because we spent 2 hours in there just to get some soup and chips. He went back everyday for nearly 3 weeks.

Lucky for me my mom has been making me learn how to do all this since I could walk. Asian moms teach their daughters how to take care of a household and a husband!! Though I had a friend who didn't know how to do laundry and bubbled up the whole dorm! (with dishsoap)

@Gellener: I never learned to do my taxes either. Every year my mom files all of our taxes, and every year I ask her to tell me when she's going to do them so I can do it with her, and every year she forgets. I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate and I'm not her dependent anymore.

I was also floored by how expensive groceries can get. And how difficult it is to go into a store and buy only what you need for the week, no more and no less. And how truly impossible it is to live on minimum wage.

I didn't know you could buy Parmesan Cheese in any package except a green canister. And SHREDDED Parmesan? Praise all the gods!

my parents never taught me a thing about finances, ie: 401(k), tax filing, investments, credit cards, etc. They threw me into a world where I had money but didn't know wtf to do with it.

-Taxes aren't terribly difficult. The first time you're doing them, you'll be young and probably won't have a lot of different investments, so you can ease into it. Software to guide you through it can be had for the price of a couple cases of beer or half a week's groceries.

-I thought I knew how to cook when I went off to college, because I'd make a dish or two a few times a year when I was in high school. There were definitely some rough patches as I had to quickly expand my repertoire, and I learned to keep some spaghetti and sauce on hand in case whatever I was actually trying to make turned into a total disaster.

btw this was my favorite from the thread

[–]changtronic
For sandwiches, use either potato bread or Pepperidge Farm bread. It's a little more expensive, but it's wrapped twice for freshness and it's a hearty slice.

[–]Sylraen
Listen, man. I don't need another step between me and toast.

I grew up helping with (doing) most of the household chores so laundry and shopping was no problem. However, the horrible taste of sour milk still lingers in my mind as being very surprising. Milk never sat around long enough to go bad back home so it never occurred to me not to buy an entire gallon for myself.

I am an embarrassed mom---my son told me the story on Saturday about going to the post office to send some safety glasses back, and finding out the post office does not box things for you. And when my oldest son was in college, he called home asking about his stinky dorm room, and would it be okay to just splash bleach on the floor?? yikes.

My parents never taught me quantum physics. I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive them......

my parents raised me and my siblings with the idea of "we want you all to be able to manage everything yourselves, in case something happens to us and we`re not there to help you out". So I had to cook, clean, do groceries, do everything from a very young age.

They`re both just very horrible with money, so I`ve had to figure that one out myself, how to save money, how not to spend too much. I`m horrible with taxes myself, but luckily we have free programs here that you only have to click through to check if all the information is correct, and then you`re done. It`s the only time of the year I don`t mind the Big Brother effect.

Still, the amount of bread as shown on that picture is just insane. I don`t like how you can`t go to a supermarket to simply get some bread or coffee. It HAS to be a specific flavour or whatever, because there`s no such thing as "just bread" or "just coffee" anymore. The amount of times I`ve stood in the supermarket, loudly proclaiming "I just want some laundry detergent!"....

When I first had to file my own tax returns, it was simple because I was single and didn't make much money. Just reading the directions was enough. When the process became complicated, I started paying someone else to do it.

Maybe I should get a simple form and see if my teenagers can read and understand the directions this year.

I'm grateful that my parents prepared me for all of these basic life tasks. The only task that befuddled me was using a credit card for the first time during my senior year of college.

My brother was one that when it came to drive, didn't know the local roads too well, for he was always reading while on car trips, even local. I am the opposite, plus like to explore.

As for food, being on my own lets me make choices I the normal cook/shopper does not make.

My parents taught me a lot about cleaning (I started doing all my own laundry when I was 10) but they didn't teach me much about cooking. When I moved out on my own (and to some degree still) I could only make pasta and food that came from a box. I've had a lot of cooking accidents, and it doesn't help that I live with a boyfriend who really can't cook at all.

I remember the first time hand-washing some dishes with my father. We had a dishwasher, but were doing some hand-washing of the extras. My Dad said that you have to rinse the dishes in warm water (not cold) or else the dishes "would never dry". At that moment I thought I had learned something magical. I thought that there was a case where water never dried. I thought that this was a very serious and important procedure to learn. Somehow, that not doing the dishes right, that this would change the properties of water. Lol.

Wow, I learned EVERYTHING growing up. Between my mother having a husband and 7 other children to care for so no time to do everything for us and a school district where we actually had classes on all this stuff, I never really had a surprise when leaving home.

We had cooking that was integrated with math and shopping in 4th grade. Maths classes included banking and filling financial forms (taxes). Health and gym classes included instruction on nutrition and the necessity of excessive. We had auto shop, general shop (woodworking), home economics, typing (business), Art, all kinds of music, and the standard reading, writing and history.

I guess we really don't fund schools all that much anymore.

I knew how to do laundry, how to cook, how to shop, how to garden, and how to take care of bills....but NOTHING prepared me how to take care of a newborn!!!

I was lucky growing up in an family where my parents and much older siblings tried to teach me as much as possible.

The one thing however I still cannot work out is which toothpaste or cleaning products to buy. I mean there is about 100 different toothpaste tubes on the shelf. There is far too much variety and each one looks identical. I think sometimes having less choice is better.

bakery section, get it fresh sliced

But how can this be? Aren't most of these people young enough to say they lived with a good part of their lives using the internet? Even I, who has only had about one-fifth of their life with a computer know that there are websites and youtube clips on everything from how to fold sheets, how to wash clothes, how to scramble eggs, how to do taxes, and yep, how to use a credit or debit card. All the basics are there.

When I was in high school in the '60s, there was no such thing as a course in "Home Economics" for boys, and even had there been, it would have been roundly ignored/despised. I have heard, however, that some schools have taken the Home Economics curriculum and simply repackaged it under the title "Bachelor Living", which then became a popular elective.

My mom cracked up laughing when I called her at 23 years old, having lived in an apartment for a couple of years, and asked how to "brown" ground beef. She got very quiet when she realized I was serious. Why can't the recipe just say COOK the ground beef?!

I lived in an apartment my senior year of college, and am very, very grateful for that. It was good practice...my parents paid for rent and food like they would if I stayed in the dorms, but it was up to me to pay the bills on time and stay within my food budget. Granted, I ate a lot of pasta and burned several dishes while I learned how to cook, but I learned a lot (and made a lot of calls that began with "Hey Mom, dumb question for you...").

My dad taught me a lot about finance, but we still pay someone to do our taxes.....

I had a roommate that thought the landlord supplied all of the necessities in our apartment: toilet paper, paper towels, soap, etc. When I asked her to pay me back for these items that I had been buying for the first month or so, she was taken completely by surprise and argued with me about it! She also took her clothes home every week to have her mother wash them for her. She was 24 yrs. old.

When I was 24 years old, I also took my laundry home every week -because I lived within driving distance for the first time in years and had no washer or dryer. I never expected mom to do the work, though. My budget was so tight that it made a big difference from going to an laundromat.

Just about everything JohnJ said in regards to schooling. When I reminisce about home-ec class in front of my students, they used to look at me strange. I discovered why. Their home-ec class does not teach them how to shop for groceries, how to make a budget for a household, how to take care of a house, or do laundry. But they sure as hell know how to make pigs in a blanket from a package of crescent rolls..
Young adults who work as baggers at the grocery store, who apparently still live at home. Because they do not understand the concept of why you do not put the bread in the bag first. They will only understand this when they begn to do serious grocery shopping for more than just themselves.

I kind of went off and rambled there...but

Protip, make your own bread. Once you try a slice you won't believe that you ever tolerated the chemical laced stale sandpaper you get from the store. It's surprisingly easy to make.

I was never taught how to cook, so when I moved out of home I bought a variety of simple cook books and followed the recipes. Over time I learned how to create my own recipes. I still don't get it when my friends who have lived out of home for years say to me that they can't cook. If you can't cook, it just means you're either too lazy or too stupid to follow instructions.

Jessss, I have run into so many people who don't bother to read written directions that I think that itself is something that must be taught to kids. Such a simple habit makes so much difference! Don't know something? Look it up! Ask! It kills me how many people don't think of that, or else refuse to do it.

Growing up, I didn't know that some people use boxer shorts as underwear. I thought they were just some fancy shorts :)