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I consider 2019 the first full year of my adult life. I lived in a new city, paid for car insurance, and lacked a team of a few hundred people across fifteen dining halls whose job it was to feed me. Over this time I’ve learned some important things about myself, but I’ve learned more about food, because I have to keep buying and eating it to survive.

Here are the three most life-altering things I learned about food in 2019:

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1. If you make a lot of chili, you have to eat it all week

At home in Carmel, dinner would be made, and then the entire thing would be eaten. Rarely would anything be left the next day, especially by dinner time.

When you cook for yourself, you have to eat it all, which is hard to do when you’ve made approximately twelve servings of chili. Though it is possible to make less chili at one time, it is nice to have food prepared so that you do not have to make more. But food can also go bad, which means you can’t leave it around for too long, even in a cold place. So when I made chili, I would eat it about one-and-a-half times a day for a whole week.

Usually, because I like chili, this isn’t a bad thing at all. I only ran into minor difficulties when I had planned a couple meals out with friends and chose not to discretely eat four-day-old chili under a restaurant table in a desperate attempt to deplete my trove of spicy stew.

And yes, I am aware you can freeze chili, and that eating it for a whole week straight is never actually necessary. But CanYouFreezeThis.com says that vegetarian chili doesn’t freeze well, and that’s what I make. Plus I like the endurance element, and garlic.

2. Dinner out can be expensive

I’ve mentioned this before, but growing up, we rarely got appetizers or desserts (except at Friendly’s) with dinner. My parents would sometimes split a beer. In America, they give you pretty large portions, so appetizers always seemed unnecessary. And there was ice cream in the fridge at home.

At one point this year I went out for an Italian dinner where there was wine and appetizers, and it cost about 50 dollars per person. I happily paid because it was good and I have a job that gives me money, but it was more than I had ever paid for dinner.

I asked my friend Dan, who was visiting from New York City, how much he normally spends on dinner when going out. He said that he and his gang of Wash U friends typically spend between 40 and 60 dollars each. That is a lot of money. In 2004, you could buy Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour for $29.99. When you factor in inflation, that’s $40.59 for a game that has provided me with countless hours of entertainment, taught me the name of every golf club, and empowered me to clobber 350-yard drives as a mutant, anthropomorphic piranha plant. Dinner shouldn’t cost more than that, unless it’s very good. Neither should anything else, including rent. #Yang2020.

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3. If you make food with better ingredients, it tastes better

They ran out of regular eggplants once at Stop and Shop, so I bought an organic eggplant. Unfortunately, it was better. The same applied to canned tomatoes that were about a dollar more than the cheaper ones. I imagine it applies to most other things as well.

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I think I was once under the impression that if you combine a lot of ingredients, the individual parts cease to matter, but it turns out the taste of the ingredients affects the taste of the food. My morning oatmeal was better when Hershey’s cacao powder wasn’t available and I was forced to buy Trader Joe’s Organic Free Trade Cacao Powder. And eggplant parm tastes better with better eggplant and parm.

Did I already know this deep down? Probably. But you can’t hide from the truth; it will find you. Democracy Dies in Darkness.