The Ignorance Tax: Why Your 20$ Gourmet Burger is a Scam

A friend of mine charges twenty dollars for a piece of ground beef and two slices of bread. He calls it a "burger." In private, he calls it an "Ignorance Tax." We’ve reached a point where basic survival is marketed as a luxury, and frying an egg is treated like cold fusion. While the West pays a premium to be fed like infants, I’m sitting in my kitchen in Croatia, watching the world forget how to live—one overpriced burger at a time.

***

Last night, I committed a miracle. At least, that’s what a modern-day lifestyle influencer would call it. I actually made dinner.

In about fifteen minutes—roughly the time it takes an average Californian to find their car keys—I produced six gourmet burgers. Beef, veggie, and fish. All sourced from a local organic shop where the ingredients actually remember being alive.

I toasted the buns with ghee, caramelized some onions, and watched the local cheese melt over the patties like a slow, delicious tragedy. I assembled them with the precision of a watchmaker: a thin slice of tomato, a leaf of lettuce, a pickle. Total cost? About the same as a mediocre latte in San Francisco.

My wife, my daughter, and I “suffocated” ourselves in the goodness of it. It was healthy. It was fast. It was, frankly, a joke how easy it was. And that’s the problem.

The Teeth-Brushing Paradox

I’ve been cooking since I was fifteen. Not because I had a “passion” for culinary arts, but because life is a series of unfortunate events. My parents were divorced and busy; I lived with my grandfather, a man who viewed a stove as a decorative object. So, I cooked to survive.

To me, cooking is like brushing your teeth. You don’t stand in front of the mirror and congratulate yourself for five minutes because you managed to clean your molars. You just do it so your mouth doesn’t rot.

In Croatia—this little patch of earth that used to be Yugoslavia—a man in the kitchen isn’t a “sensitive modern hero.” He’s just a hungry guy. Roughly 90% of the people here, even the kids obsessed with TikTok, can actually whip up a decent meal.

We are like the Italians, but with more cynicism and slightly worse PR. We value the origin of the food, but more importantly, we value the “table.” In the States, dinner is the big event. Here, it’s lunch. Even in the middle of a workday, the world stops. We drink coffee, we eat, we talk. The capitalist model of “time is money” hasn’t completely strangled us yet. We still think time is for living.

Charging a Tax on Ignorance

When I lived in California, I felt like a wizard from a superior civilization. I watched people—educated, successful people—treat the act of frying an egg like it was complex engineering.

If someone “cooked” for you, it usually meant they’d taken three semi-finished products, dumped them in a pan, added too much salt, and called it a masterpiece. The flavors were aggressive, the execution was sloppy, and the conversation about the meal lasted longer than the eating itself.

I have a friend who owns a burger joint. I asked him once, “Why the hype? It’s a piece of meat between two pieces of bread. Why are people paying $20 for this?”

He looked at me with the weary eyes of a man who understands the decline of Western civilization.

“They don’t know how to cook,” he said. “That’s it. To you and me, it’s nothing. But I’m not charging for the meat. I’m charging a tax on their ignorance. I charge for the service of doing what they’ve forgotten how to do.”

The Survival of the Simplest

We’ve turned a basic survival skill into a luxury “experience.” We’ve made it so expensive and so hyped that we’ve lost the simple reflex of feeding ourselves.

Knowing your way around a kitchen is no longer just a domestic chore—it is the ultimate act of rebellion. It’s a stand against a system that wants to sell you back your own autonomy at a 500% markup.

Back in my kitchen, my family is full, the dishes are done, and I didn’t even notice I was “cooking.” I was just hanging out.

Maybe I’m ready to become a professional chef. Or maybe the rest of the world is just ready to admit they’ve forgotten how to live. Either way, the burger was great—and it didn't cost me twenty dollars to realize it.