Yes these are awesome for that perfect blend of fast, easy, and not quite junk food. I wouldn't recommend having one 7 days a week but you can pick one up in place of fast food and feed you and your kids guilt free.

> EDIT: I don't want to entirely rag on McD's.

I love McD's and the mere existence of the McDouble[1] proves that the human race is doing just fine.

[1]: http://nypost.com/2013/07/28/the-greatest-food-in-human-hist...

Rotisserie chicken shredded makes a good meat for a chicken alfredo pasta, or on a pizza for BBQ chicken pizza, etc.

And the difference in price with a raw whole chicken (usually less than 3 dollars) was well worth it for the savings in time and avoiding the fast-food stop when the kids were losing their minds in the back seat. We lived about 30 mins from the grocery store, so munching on chicken was a good way to keep the kids (both less than 4yrs old) calm and happy.

Also, you can take the leftover carcass and use it to make wonderful chicken stock. Just throw the bones and bits in a bag in the freezer. When you have a few carcasses and some free time on the weekend, follow any recipe and make stock.

You can then freeze the stock and use it whenever you like.

(If you're wondering why, since Canada would be the easiest market to ship that same cheap US beef to—AFAIK US beef doesn't meet Canadian agricultural regulations.)

They're costing $0.99-1.49 in the states depending on location (and usually more than $0.99.) They're $1.69 in Canada (Bacon McDouble is closer to $2.19) as of last year.

This article ignores an important aspect of time. I earn about $90 an hour. So between cooking and doing dishes, let's say i remove the wait times and stuff where i could do other things, I am still using up about 10 to 15 minutes extra preparing a fresh chicken.

I understand I don't work 24/7, but still, even my downtime matters so even if I cut down that price per hour in half, I'd still rather get a pre-made chicken especially during the week when time is of the essence.

Obviously facetious but hopefully you get my point. Not all time in our lives is billable. You don't get paid for washing your own clothes, cleaning your kitchen, taking your kids to school. It's life. You do that for you. While these are all things you can pay somebody else to do, it's really not until that point you can start comparing time values. If you are, you're probably not in the demographic that buys cheap rotisserie chicken.

Or you're some sort of robot who never sleeps and only works. Again, thanks for putting your zeros and ones aside for a few minutes to talk to us.

However, my value for my most productive 8 hours of the day is directly correlated to what i do in my "downtime". So if i went drinking for 4 hours one night, it would reduce my productivity during my best hours during the next day. So whatever i do during my down hours matters. Sleep matters, rest matters, food matters. So i have to optimize those as well. So my price per hour never goes to zero at any point in the day. Which is why i trimmed it to half in my final part. So that 15min is still worth a dollar value, no?

The "I make $___ an hour" claim only holds weight if your alternative to whatever activity would be to actually charge money for that time. Presumably you're going to make your own dinner most of the time so your hourly rate at work is largely irrelevant.

I'm not posting this just to be a jerk; rather, I think that too often we spend time trying to justify a behavior that is not at all damaging, but somehow seems "bad."

If you don't like doing X and you can afford to pay someone to do it, then go ahead, do so and get on with Life.

When a cook’s time is included as labor costs in the above calculation, whole chickens become more expensive than rotisserie options.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/02/2...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-th...

http://www.eufic.org/page/en/show/latest-science-news/fftid/...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2782060/

"Results There were 19 independent cohort samples from 13 studies, with 177 025 participants (follow-up 3.5-19 years) and over 11 000 vascular events. Higher salt intake was associated with greater risk of stroke (pooled relative risk 1.23, 95% confidence interval 1.06 to 1.43; P=0.007) and cardiovascular disease (1.14, 0.99 to 1.32; P=0.07), with no significant evidence of publication bias. ... The associations observed were greater the larger the difference in sodium intake and the longer the follow-up."

It's not controversial that sustained salt concentration is bad for cardiovascular healthy, or that higher salt intake correlates with worse cardiovascular health in large populations. The issue is whether healthy _individuals_ should care about salt.

Or to put it another way, salt isn't like sugar. A high sugar diet leads to insulin resistance, which leads to higher blood sugar concentrations, which leads to higher rates of related ailments.

It was once thought that a high salt diet directly led to hypertension, etc, etc. But that doesn't appear to be the case. Healthy people seem to have no problems clearing an excess salt (in amounts significantly greater than thought) from the body, even if sustained over their entire lifetime. And, somewhat contentiously, some research suggests that the recommended salt intake might be detrimental for some people, with the negative effect being masked by the subgroup who benefit from lower salt.

That's my understanding of things, anyhow.

It's probably a little like acidosis--a rare condition that gave rise to fringe concepts like the "alkaline diet". Consuming acidic foods is never going to cause problems for healthy individuals. The mechanisms for maintaining blood pH (calcium, rate of respiration, etc) are just too robust to even be minimally taxed by acidic foods (excluding extreme scenarios). If acidic foods cause or contribute to bad blood pH, you already have other serious problems.

The difference is that a substantial fraction of the population does have trouble excreting excess salt, and this readily shows up in epidemiological studies of dietary salt.