You could use a small breadmaking machine. Make a large tub of flour mixture and a vat of wet ingredients with a dedicated scoop for each. Or scratch a mark on the bottom of the bread machine itself for the level the wet ingredients should be at, so you don’t have to deal with washing an oily measuring scoop. Then just pour them in and turn the machine on three times a day. Many models have a delay start timer so that you can wake up to fresh bread.
Based on this, it sounds like you could have a hot fresh loaf every meal in exchange for a few minutes of pouring ingredients, mixing, and cleaning.
Here’s the catch.
The small machines make 1-lb loaves. A grocery store loaf is 1.7 lbs. Industry standard is 18 slices per loaf, so a 1-lb should give you about 10 slices. If you like 2 slices of bread per serving, each “small” loaf is enough for 5 people who want bread every single meal. Sounds workable for a family of 4-5 or a cafeteria setting.
If you were cooking for just yourself, you’d be throwing away about 2.5 pounds of cold bread every day. If you were cooking for yourself and a partner, it’s more like 1.2 pounds, but try convincing most people to not feel bad about that kind of food waste. Can’t just give away the extras, because it would all be partly-eaten loaves, not nice pretty whole loaves.
My guess is that the end result for 1-2 eaters would be you’d make one loaf per day and eat cold bread the rest of the time. That might still be an improvement. But then there’s that pesky hedonistic treadmill to worry about…
In my imagination, we’d have fresh-baked bread vending machines every city block instead of little free libraries. Bread takes around 1-1.5 hours to cool enough to serve. The vending machine produced bread only at high-demand times and could slice bread internally so that users could take away just the bits they wanted. Meeting the neighbors at the vending machine in the middle of the block to get your bread could be a pleasant social bonding experience.
You could combine this with a hydroponic GroShed. If it works as well as intended, you’d probably need to spend around $15,000 to for a GroShed big enough to make produce for a family of four. Imagine that it lasts 10 years and costs $100/month to run, and you’re looking at a roughly $2,600 per year for year-round, garden-fresh veggies. Unfortunately, you’ll still have to buy your fruit, and possibly your tubers, at the store.
If Whole Foods veggies cost an average of $3 per pound and your family eats its FDA-approved 5 servings per day of produce (roughly 1 pound per person), that might cost $4,400 per year. So you’d potentially be achieving some significant cost savings.
I’m being nice to the GroShed here, and not considering the opportunity cost of the square footage.
Your risk is that the GroShed doesn’t work out for some reason:
It might be tiresome to set up or operate
Hydroponic produce might not taste very good
Perhaps it’s limited in the variety or reliability of its output
It might break or be expensive to maintain
You might not actually follow through on eating 5 servings of garden-fresh veggies per day
This seems like another initiative that might be best executed on the scale of a city block.
Imagine if we altered the zoning of residential neighborhoods slightly so that it was normal for one chunk of every block to contain an automated garden + bakery. That sounds like fully-automated luxury gay space communism to me...
You could use a small breadmaking machine. Make a large tub of flour mixture and a vat of wet ingredients with a dedicated scoop for each. Or scratch a mark on the bottom of the bread machine itself for the level the wet ingredients should be at, so you don’t have to deal with washing an oily measuring scoop. Then just pour them in and turn the machine on three times a day. Many models have a delay start timer so that you can wake up to fresh bread.
Based on this, it sounds like you could have a hot fresh loaf every meal in exchange for a few minutes of pouring ingredients, mixing, and cleaning.
Here’s the catch.
The small machines make 1-lb loaves. A grocery store loaf is 1.7 lbs. Industry standard is 18 slices per loaf, so a 1-lb should give you about 10 slices. If you like 2 slices of bread per serving, each “small” loaf is enough for 5 people who want bread every single meal. Sounds workable for a family of 4-5 or a cafeteria setting.
If you were cooking for just yourself, you’d be throwing away about 2.5 pounds of cold bread every day. If you were cooking for yourself and a partner, it’s more like 1.2 pounds, but try convincing most people to not feel bad about that kind of food waste. Can’t just give away the extras, because it would all be partly-eaten loaves, not nice pretty whole loaves.
My guess is that the end result for 1-2 eaters would be you’d make one loaf per day and eat cold bread the rest of the time. That might still be an improvement. But then there’s that pesky hedonistic treadmill to worry about…
In my imagination, we’d have fresh-baked bread vending machines every city block instead of little free libraries. Bread takes around 1-1.5 hours to cool enough to serve. The vending machine produced bread only at high-demand times and could slice bread internally so that users could take away just the bits they wanted. Meeting the neighbors at the vending machine in the middle of the block to get your bread could be a pleasant social bonding experience.
You could combine this with a hydroponic GroShed. If it works as well as intended, you’d probably need to spend around $15,000 to for a GroShed big enough to make produce for a family of four. Imagine that it lasts 10 years and costs $100/month to run, and you’re looking at a roughly $2,600 per year for year-round, garden-fresh veggies. Unfortunately, you’ll still have to buy your fruit, and possibly your tubers, at the store.
If Whole Foods veggies cost an average of $3 per pound and your family eats its FDA-approved 5 servings per day of produce (roughly 1 pound per person), that might cost $4,400 per year. So you’d potentially be achieving some significant cost savings.
I’m being nice to the GroShed here, and not considering the opportunity cost of the square footage.
Your risk is that the GroShed doesn’t work out for some reason:
It might be tiresome to set up or operate
Hydroponic produce might not taste very good
Perhaps it’s limited in the variety or reliability of its output
It might break or be expensive to maintain
You might not actually follow through on eating 5 servings of garden-fresh veggies per day
This seems like another initiative that might be best executed on the scale of a city block.
Imagine if we altered the zoning of residential neighborhoods slightly so that it was normal for one chunk of every block to contain an automated garden + bakery. That sounds like fully-automated luxury gay space communism to me...
I think we’re talking past each other a bit. I’m talking about serving bread that’s had ~10min to cool, and is just cool enough not to burn you