I Don't Give a **** "What a 40-Year-Old Physician Eats on $850k in California's Bay Area"

And who TF is subscribing to Bon Appetit?

Ya’ll. Recently I subscribed to Bon Appetit because I needed to switch up my meal game and was tempted by their $1/month subscription. Then I received an email titled “What a 40-Year-Old Physician Eats on $850k in California’s Bay Area.” I wanted to throw my phone against the wall.

If you don’t subscribe to Bon Appetit, then let me fill you in! The food magazine continues to reaffirm their pretentious reputation by using the most unrelatable characters as a source of relatability! I was quite annoyed for awhile, but their August 6th newsletter of The Receipt really pushed me over the edge.

According to the magazine themselves, “The Receipt” is “a series documenting how Bon Appétit readers eat and what they spend doing it. Each food diary follows one anonymous reader’s week of expenses related to groceries, restaurant meals, coffee runs, and every bite in between. In this time of rising food costs, The Receipt reveals how folks—from different cities, with different incomes, on different schedules—are figuring out their food budgets.”

But mind you, most of the social media posts that advertise The Receipt follow individuals who make over 100k.

And now that I did some research to look into the majority of the contributors for the Receipt, most of them either make an absurd amount of amount (over 200k/year), or no money (less than 40k/year). And don’t even get me started about the 31 year old content creator who makes over 300k per year but spends $1,200 /month on rent. SOME PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO LIVE BELOW THEIR MEANS.

But reading “The Receipt” about a man who is only 10 years older than me and makes my annual gross salary in just a month makes me wonder, who TF gets to eat well? And if I’m subscribed to Bon Appetit, am I part of the elite?

How did I subscribe to the same magazine as a man whose rent is more than my net monthly income? I can’t even read the entire article. Maybe it’s because I had a glass of wine. Maybe it’s because it’s 10:26pm and I still have yet to pack for my first international trip in less than 48 hours. Maybe I just want to write an angry post about how no one, not even a doctor, should be allowed to make almost $1 million a year when I’m sure many of the patients he’s tending to can’t even f***ing eat.

I don’t know about ya’ll but I grew up on s*** a*** food. And it doesn’t take much for me to sus out my clients in the same position. I’m not blaming my parents at all. They had limited incomes, 4 kids, and had to save every penny. But as a Registered Dietitian, I can’t believe my parents were forced to feel the pressure to make sure we were eating “healthy” when all they could afford to feed us as kids were hot dogs and peas. Just kidding, sometimes we got a slice of ham with applesauce for dinner.

Our eating habits did get better over time. Chicken breast with corn and a side of BBQ sauce was a staple. There was a noticeable shift in the quality of our food, which I didn’t know until my dad told me several years later was around the time they paid off their mortgage. I am lucky. But the income disparity amongst Americans is f***ed¹, especially when we’re all given the same advice and expectation on how to take care of ourselves.

Now that I’m the same age my parents were when they bought a house, and I will literally never own one because the average monthly payment for a 30-year mortgage in the U.S. is 77% of my take-home pay, I wonder… Who gets to eat well?

No one.

According to CBS, 17% of individual Americans make over 100k / year. (Most of them must live in Seattle because I can’t tell you how many people I know who make more than that and “can’t keep up”).

But when you make that much you can eat take-out whenever you want. You can get your groceries delivered. You may not have the time to meal prep, because literally no one does, yet it doesn’t matter because your company likely has a cafeteria. If you work for a tech company, you likely have at least one daily meal paid for. Wealth accumulates wealth. Wealth accumulates health. Wealth allows you to slice your garlic paper-thin such as the 40-Year-Old Physician because the reality is he rarely needs to cook, and has such a financially nourishing lifestyle that his brain and body actually have the capacity to care and enjoy slicing ones garlic for maximum pleasure.

Meanwhile most Americans barely have the time to heat up a frozen meal let alone afford it.

Culinary exploration is for the elite. Which is really too bad because I personally think it’s necessary. I can’t tell you how much my clients culinary competency is impacted by their income. When you are living off a normal persons salary and working a normal job, you do not have time to care about your food. You do not have time to consider nutrition. You do not have enough time to notice the relationship between nutrition and pleasure.

But when your income pays for most of the services in your life, one gets to explore. One gets to explore every type of mushroom available at the grocery store so much that they may haggle a local farmer for their prices. They can afford to be fearful of meat that isn’t grassfed. Or, like our 40-year-old Physician friend, they don’t bat an eye at spending $98.11 on food on a Friday, because they’ll spend $324.02 on food on Sunday.

1. Especially when people who I consider my friends will talk about how its not worth renting because you would make a better return on the money you save if you didn’t pay for a mortgage. Excuse you… that makes sense if you can afford a mortgage and can actually invest the money you’d be “saving”. Since the rest of us are just pissing it all away, I would KILL to make any money back on my housing.