The Great Generational Food Fight of 2026 | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. So Telsey Gabbard has apparently resigned. I'm seeing that on the Fox News up on the TV here in the studio, the head of the or the director of National Intelligence. I don't see any explanation as for why. On the crawl Trump is set to speak in New York soon, they say, don't know any other information. Oh, I'm seeing some fire in York. Is saying that her husband is seriously ill. I'm not Yeah, I did not know that. So she may be leaving to take care of him, depending on what that illness is. But all right, so we'll, yeah, we'll see what happens if Nick, if we see Trump start talking about it or anything. If I don't know what the venue is going to be it says he's going to be in New York City speaking, So I'm not sure if he's doing like a rally or if it's like some sort of meeting or whatever, but we will endeavor to jip it. As they say in the biz Join in progress, jip all right, is there a human right to door dash? I know it sounds stupid, but David Stroms makes the argument that this will be the argument David strom at hot air dot com. Because remember, you've got a lot of people in America nowadays who believe that, you know, food is a human right, healthcare is a human right right, all sorts of things are. Housing is a human right, like all of these things are human rights. That obviously means gov CO should provide by taking from some people and making their lives less affordable and giving to other people who have done very little to make. Their lives affordable. And so, if you are already coming from a perspective that food is a human right, which spoiler alert, it is not, because you don't have the right to anybody else's. Time or labor or stuff. And that's what that would require, right, You claiming a right to something means that it is something that is inherent in your in your life, and that is not dependent on you being around any other human being. Those are your rights. They are yours. Now. If your right requires. Me to grow food and give it to you, well what about my rights? Right? Your rights can't infringe upon mine because those are those would be in competition with each other, right, So. That can't be a human right. Now. If you believe food is a human right, and you believe that food comes from somebody who knocks on your door and drops off something you ordered off of your smartphone, right then then you it would logically follow then that door dash could be a human right or uber eats or how many of those things are there. I don't want to leave anybody out like all of the I'm just I'm gonna say. I'm gonna say uber eats or door dash, and that's inclusive of all of these types of companies. Okay, this is a debate that erupted online and it is it's pretty stupid, but it speaks to something else. So this is how it started. An account Ali Voss. She posted the younger and the poorer generation the more they eat out and door dash. Okay, so younger and poorer the generation, the more they eat out and get door dash or uber eats. So if you look at, for example, the baby boomers, sixty two of boomers go to the grocery store, sixty two and thirty four percent eat at restaurants. That's how much each generation spends on food over a This was over a nine month period. Okay, so sixty two percent went to groceries, thirty four percent went to restaurants, and only four percent went to delivery, mainly because they don't know how that that crazy app phone thing works. That's I had to get the had to get the grandkids over. To set it up for them. By the way, it's even more pronounced for the generation older than the boomers. They're at like sixty nine percent groceries, twenty nine percent restaurants, and. Two percent deliveries. Now, I don't know if like pizza delivery counts with door dash, because I don't see those things as the same, although nowadays I've noticed that if you order from a pizza place for a delivery, a door dash person shows up or Uber eats like somebody who delivers food for those companies, I guess they've like subcontracted with the pizza parlors because like when I back in my day when I worked, I worked at an Italian restaurant in my hometown. And I remember when they first implemented delivery, Like when I was a kid and we would get pizza, one of us would have to go with mom to go to the pizzeria and uh and go with her so we could hold the pies. And that's what they're called up up north, they're called pizza. The pizzas are called pies. And so you would get the pie and the reason why was this way, you know, because you'd have to transport it home, and so you didn't want the cheese to slide all around and the pizza to fall on the floor and all of this. So you know, one of us kids had to sit there and hold the pizza on our laps and then we would start screaming and because the pizza was burning our legs. And then mom would give us her purse and we would put we would sit it on top of the purse, so we have. To hold the pizza. Okay, Then they implemented the pizza delivery, and then when I got a little older, I went to work for this pizzeria. And this was a mom and pop shop, right, not a chain or anything. But I remember working there. I was back in the kitchen and there would be because it was an Italian restaurant as well, and so the they would have the drivers coming in and they would be hanging out up in the front and if it was a slow night, like they just didn't make any money. And I didn't realize it at the time, but like, how much money are we paying these drivers on like every night of the week. You got to have at least one driver sitting up there in order to make the deliveries, you know. And I mean that was old school too. They're working off of paper maps and stuff. They're like trying to figure out how to get to a house and all of this and GPS back then. So I don't know if pizza is included in delivery, but even now, like I don't even really I don't do pizza delivery. I'll go pick it up even to this day anyway, So those are your boomers. Sixty two percent grocery Thirty four percent of the budget goes to restaurants go to gen X the Best generation. Fifty three percent grocery budget to thirty eight percent restaurants, nine percent delivery. You look at millennials, you're at forty six percent grocery, thirty nine percent restaurant, and fifteen percent delivery. And then you go to the gen Z and gen Z. Twenty two percent delivery, thirty two percent grocery, forty six percent restaurants. Okay, to all the gen Z listeners, this is not a good way to spend your money. Okay, it's this is not a good way to spend your money. You are going to spend way more for food then you have to. So if you are trying to save money, if you're having an affordability crisis of some kind. Go to the grocery store. Buy more of your food there, make your food, bring it to work, take it with you, get snacks. All of that. You will save a lot of money. I'm talking hundreds of dollars a month. If you're spending forty six percent on restaurants and another twenty two percent, that's like two thirds of all of your your food is paid for through delivery or restaurants. That is not economically financially wise. And this has prompted a firestorm. You know, stories are powerful They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. 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The uh Yes, the Great Generational Food Fight of twenty twenty six, all because of a breakdown in spending habits by generation shows that gen Z spends forty six percent of their food budget on restaurants, and then another twenty two percent, so a total on delivery. So a total of sixty eight percent of the food budget goes to goes to restaurants and delivery, which is restaurants. And that maybe maybe just spitballing might have something to do with your overall financial picture, because we hear a lot about how gen Z doesn't have any money right there, They're poor, we can't afford homes, we can't afford this or that and whatever, and then we find out you're spending wait, you're spending sixty of your food budget on restaurants. First off, your food budget must be massive, has to be. I do our budget for our house, so I know what we spend on groceries. Christy eats out more than I do, and I eat out maybe once a month maybe. And the reaction online when people in the older generations, like Gen X boomers, when they started saying like, well, that's way too much money. You shouldn't be If you want to save a bunch of money, then don't eat out all the time. And the outrage that ensued from this, how dare you. How dare you say, Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure you're not eating out at all, And I'm thinking I don't. I don't. When I was younger, I did, But even then I wasn't eating out like every day. But if you're eating out and you're spending sixty eight percent of your food budget on restaurants and delivery, that's every day. And there are people that are complaining, like I just went out to lunch and it cost me twenty eight dollars. This is unaffordable, blah blah blah, Like, yes, twenty eight dollars for every day lunch, that's crazy if you're making If you're making fifteen dollars an hour, your lunch just basically was two hours worth of work. That's how I would always think of it, two hours worth of work. Oh what do you suggest I will? I would suggest you brown bag it. No, you don't do that. I actually do every single day. I pack my lunch and I bring it in here. Every single day. I eat lunch here in the studio, and I have a little cooler bag. I make basically the same thing every day because I'm a simple man. And and I even suggested a little bit of a life hack. You just get a tray of chicken, cost you twenty bucks, cook it all, bake it all, shred it all down, throw it into the fridge, and then just pull out of that. And then I add a vegetable boom done. Lunch takes like as long as it takes to microwave the pouch of the vegetables. And you can get those for two bucks. So my lunch is costing me like two dollars and maybe fifty cents, not twenty eight dollars. And if you're spending twenty eight dollars, that difference there, say twenty five dollars a day difference, not even counting dinner. But I'm already by the end of the week, I'm already up on you one hundred and twenty five bucks two point fifty for the pay period five hundred a month that I am saving that you are blowing on. I don't want to say avocado toast, but okay, avocado toast, right, Like, that's what we're talking about here, Come on, people. So then Taylor Lorenz enters the discussion online and everything just turns to crap as soon as she does that. She says, this is because this is a former reporter, like a like Washington Post and all of this, and she made her whole career dosing people online for saying problematic things and then wearing a mask for like well even still today. Anyway, she says this is because meaning the gen z and Millennials, her generation that she claims to be a part of. But people think she's probably a gen exerp. But anyway, this is because they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. They don't have the time or capacity. You don't have the time. You don't have the time to make a lunch. I just said it takes you. Like a package of steamable vegetables thrown in with some shredded chicken literally takes me seven minutes. And here's the thing for you Millennials and gen Zers. You can scroll your phone while you're waiting on the vegetables. So it's not even like I'm asking you to sacrifice any kind of screen time, right, you can still scroll through the stuff while you're waiting on the vegetables to cook, and then as soon as it's done, you dump them in with your chicken. Mix it together with like some like some olive oil or something boom, like that's what I eat for lunch every day. She says, they don't have the time or capacity. I don't know what that means, Like you don't know how, you don't know how to create a home cooked meal. She says. It's an issue countless people have tried to raise with leftists, but big leftists online continue to shame and abuse poor people for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor. Years ago, when I was a reporter and I was covering a bunch of different deals related cases here in Mecklinburg County, And once you cover one or two of those, you start getting inundated with people that are asking, you know, give my story attention and then I'll get my kids back, or I'll you know whatever. And there was one woman I went to visit in her home and she gives me her crumpled up and like coffee stained, food stained reports from the DSS social worker, and she's showing like how you know, she's complying, she's doing all the right things whatever. And I'm reading through the report and it says repeatedly that they keep telling her that getting McDonald's for your children is not financially sound. You're better off buying food and making them lunches. And while I'm reading this, her child is sitting at the kitchen table eating McDonald's like so like they try to educate her, they're telling her these things, but she just doesn't want to listen. I guess she thinks that it's more economical to go get a happy meal every day for two meals a day than it is to make a sandwich. Giving some really important life lesson advice here, you can save a lot of money if you go to the grocery store and you can mass produce a bunch of food and you can then brown bag it to lunch. Cooking doesn't have to take a lot of time, trust me. Like I even though I was a trained professional in the kitchen, I was never a chef, but I've worked in restaurants in the back of the house and so I was cooking and stuff. So I do know how to cook. I just don't enjoy it. Like some people get all. Christy likes to cook, I don't. She likes to try new recipes. I don't. I don't need to. Do all of that stuff. I don't. It doesn't matter to me. I look at food as fuel. Part of this also, like growing up, going out to eat was like a once every two weeks maybe kind of a thing we like when we were real little, my parents never took us anywhere. They had four kids, They're not bringing us out in public to a restaurant. So, like we were older by the time, like we went to restaurants, and even then it was a special occasion. But that sort of gets into your head, you know, like, oh, I'm out to eat, so it's a special event. And then as I got older and sort of the whole you know, economy and society sort of shifted and you had more and more restaurants all over the place, and now you could go out and try all these different places. And then it became this thing where it was like, oh, I'm out to eat, so that means it's a special occasion. That means I can eat whatever I want because I'm out to eat. It's a special occasion. And that is how Pete ended up at two hundred and sixty five pounds. But then again, PhD weight loss. I go in there, it's like you start identifying some of these patterns and it's like I don't actually have to treat any time I'm out to eat as some sort of special event where I get to just ignore all of the healthy eating habits that I have been undertaking, especially if you eat out often, which I don't. Again, I maybe like once a month, I'm eating out. All right, let me go to the text line. Jonathan says, Hey, remember the thirty minutes or thirty minutes or less or it's free? Yes? That was was that Domino's that did that. They would guarantee that they would have your pizza delivered within half an hour or you would get it for free, and so we would always give them the wrong address. I'm kidding. No, Yeah, those days are gone. Jeff says, I have gone back to picking up my pizzas because when a pizza joint contracts out to third parties to bring the delivery to your house, you have virtually no recourse if the order is screwed up. It's a real pain and much easier to just go get it. Same here, man, Same here. There's a pizza joint that's about four miles away from the house, and unless there's some reason I can't leave to go get it. I go get it. I will go online. I will order it online, and then I will go pick it up. And I don't even need to like recruit some neighborhood kid to hold it on his lap on the way home, because I've got well space in the back of the car that i can just just set it down in there and then I just don't make any crazy, you know, turns on the way home. But yeah, I've done that too, because they charge you for the delivery fee, and like you order pizzas them before you know it, you're pushing you know, sixty bucks or something, seventy dollars. It's it's outrageous. Three three six numbers says a five pound bag of rice is three forty nine and a five pound bag of potatoes is two forty nine. They are calorie dense, inexpensive, and can be prepared in a multitude of ways. In short, I can and have eating for nearly a week on less than ten dollars. Suck it up, buttercups. Nobody said life was ever an all inclusive resort. Yeah, I actually this was a trick I learned from a friend of the family. He was he's Ironian, and he would always have a bowl of rice in the fridge. He would he would cook up a whole. Pot of rice and then he would put it in the fridge and then you could just add rice to whatever meal easily, right, So you don't have to wait to cook all the rice. Whenever you want it for lunch or dinner or whatever. You could just take a couple take a cup of. It, throw it in your food, and boom done easy. Like if you do that kind of prep work on the front end, which is what I do with the chicken, do mass production and then put in the fridge and then just pick off it for you know, like I well, I posted online I said I eat off of that for a week, and people are like, well, actually, you shouldn't eat chicken after four days, Like yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been doing it for like four years now. I'm fine, Okay, Like I'm not. I'm not going to throw out a whole tray of cooked chicken because it's day six. Not happening, Kevin says Pete. They do not want to go to the store and buy groceries. And if you even mention that, be ready to be cussed out. We do volunteer work in projects in the Charlotte area where almost everybody uses housing vouchers. We were helping one family once and while there, the homeowner was ordering door dash from a chicken place. The homeowner was complaining about how it was going to be sixty dollars for one family meal. That's actually not bad for a whole family. I just suggested that I could help show them. I mean, I'm not saying that's a good price when compared to home cooking, but like to order out for a whole family sixty bucks, well, you could get a whole bucket of chicken. See, that's the other thing we did not have, like KFC in my hometown. We'd have any kind of fried chicken joint near me because like that's once a year we would get KFC on Christmas Eve when we will go into the city go to Grandma's house and my uncle Philip, we'd go and pick up a bucket of chicken. And I loved fried chicken. It was the one time. And yeah, if we ever got to a restaurant, I would always check to see if they had fried chicken, and I would always order the fried chicken. Once again, this is how Pete ended up at two hundred sixty five pounds. Okay, the homeowner was complaining about how it was going to be sixty dollars. I suggested I could help show them how to eat cheaper, and the homeowner proceeded to call me every name in the book, including but not limited to, a racist. While I'm there, while I'm there volunteering my time. Really, yeah, I don't know where this thought comes from, that like, oh, it's cheaper if I eat out, then if I go to the grocery store. I guess, like, look, I don't enjoy going to a grocery store. Well, I don't mind the grocery store. It's the people that I have to shop alongside of. That's really what that's the problem. But even I do that because it saves you hundreds of dollars a month. If you were expecting to hear pregaming with Brett, there shall be no pregaming today, nor a hangover. Brett winter Bal is on location up at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, and so we are foregoing the imbibing. Susie sent in this is this the Babylon b It looks something like it looks like something out of Babylon but yeh, it is there Babylon B line generation that put Nation thirty nine trillion dollars in debt, condemns gen Z for spending irresponsibly. Indeed, Dave says, great show, Pete. I submit that this is why these two groups are so unhealthy and having so many medical issues too. Matt says, I used to go out for lunch every day, whether it be fast food or a bodega in my twenties. As I got older, I learned how to cook. I would much rather cook a large dinner and take that for lunch in the next couple of days. It saves a crap ton of money. These young kids don't want to learn how to do anything new. But I guess that's all about being young and dumb. Yeah. Look, I ate out more often when I was younger, and I shouldn't have. And so like, I'm just I'm just like passing along this information, not in a way to like shame people or anything. But when I hear people complaining that they don't have any money to afford other stuff or whatever, well, one of the ways that you can, you know, cut down on your expenses is to don't eat out all the time. And the and like people who are getting six seven dollars cups of coffee. This is Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. He was on some podcast and he mentioned that it's like if you're starting out in the workforce and you know you're making thirty five thousand dollars a year and you're spending five or six dollars a day on a cup of coffee, that's that's crazy. And he got all this blowback, like, I don't ever buy coffee if I like, it's a special occasion if I'm going to go buy coffee now, like I and I drink a lot of coffee. Bob says, Pete, I am with you. I eat to live rather than live to eat. Have a pleasure. We YouTube, Bob Dan says, YouTube video show how to make anything. It's a great resource. Yep. Scott says, or use the leftovers from your takeout and eat them for lunch the next day. Yep. That's although nowadays I've noticed like the portions are getting smaller. Have noticed that now I also would point out that, and I think somebody said this on the text line. I may have already moved. Yeah, yeah, here it is Stan Not only is all the eating out cost you more money, it's a lot more unhealthy as well. The food you're getting that way is all from places whose goal is to maximize profits with no concern for your health. People are shocked to find out how much butter and salt is put into food that you eat when you go out, Very high in butter, very high in salt, because they wanted to take really good You would never cook with as much butter as a lot of restaurants do. Most people don't, but that's why it tastes so good. It's because there's all this butter. But it's also not very good for you. Andy says, I see this with gen Z's in my family, where it used to be people paid bills first and budgeted the rest to. Make ends meet. Now they get once, not needs first, and we'll figure out the bills later, which usually comes up short naturally. Yeah. I mean, that was the one of the things I did because I got into credit card debt when I was in college and then right out of college, and that was one of the things I did immediately was learned out of budget. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to vpetekalanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone. M m m hm.