One roommate now will only eat with us if we add up the cost of ingredients and charge him fairly. Many of our dinners cost only a couple dollars.

Pasta with marinara sauce and dinner rolls: 1.33 / pound pasta, 1.80 jar of sauce, rolls 0.13 each. Serves 3-4 people for $5. 15 minutes (limited by water heating).

Tacos with guacamole: $3 pre-made guacamole, tortillas 0.5 / 12 pieces, beans 1.20 / can, salsa $2 / half bottle, tofu 1.5 / block, cilantro 1 / bundle. rice ~$1. Serves 3-4 people for $10. 20 minutes (lots of tasks, have to cook tortillas).

I won't break it down, but I can do a nice sushi dinner: various rolls, cold tofu, inari, miso soup, for 3-4 people for about $15. 45 minutes (lots of tasks).

In any case I can feed three adults for about ten dollars and 2/3 of an hour of my time. Usually there are enough left-overs to make a nice lunch for myself.

I enjoy eating out, and do so about once a week. Before I got married I ate out a lot. I would spend about $900 per month just for myself. Now I make an effort to cook dinner 6 days a week and spend a total of about 800 per month on food for both of us.

If I save approximately the same amount cooking vs eating out, but it takes me the same additional amount of time to cook (again, assuming you don't enjoy that), then as my income grows the smaller the savings become as a percentage and the larger the monetary value of a given amount of my time becomes worth.

For instance, pre-made guacamole, if it's actually made entirely from real avocados, is more like $6 where I'm at if you want enough to feed 4 people multiple tacos each -- so twice the price you're quoting here.

My general food purchasing scheme is to attempt to only purchase the foods I can get at the best prices. If I am shopping and see a 10 pound bag of organic carrots for less than $5 I will buy it and have lots of carrots that week. For example: carrot salad, egg-rolls (carrot filling freezes well), soup, or stir-fry.

I can always buy tortillas for about 3-4 dollars for at least 6 dozen. I freeze them into one dozen stacks and defrost in the microwave until they can be teased apart and finished on a pan.

Some of the best deals I get are at Whole Foods. They often have very good sales on frozen foods. Otherwise I get foods at Costco, a local family market, and Trader Joe's. In the summer I occasionally go to a flea market to get specialty items and seasonal produce.

A jar of $1.80 pasta sauce around here is probably going to be more closely related to ketchup than real pasta sauce.

> tofu 1.5 / block

Hm. You clearly have much better food prices than I do in general, I guess.

Everyone can always opt out if they're willing to drop enough things. A trivial way to opt out is to commit suicide. But are other ways too, such as moving into the wilderness and trying to make it there on your own. And that's comparatively much "cheaper" in poorer societies, since there is less to give up.

For instance, whereas in Medieval times serfs might have ran away from their lords and into the wilderness in order to avoid law and taxes, the majority of present-day criminals are found and captured in their own towns, while disgruntled citizens consider themselves to have little option but whine when it comes to taxes.

"Late stage capitalism" does indeed produce enough goods and services that people have the option of opting out. There's some pretty neat survivalist gear for sale nowadays. But they never really do.

That and to your last point is what I was thinking about. It's harder to "opt out" of a subsistence farming existence than it is to opt out of a society where you have access to time- & resource-saving technology that enables you to multiply your abilities, as well as basic necessities at a price that allows you to have disposable income.

That's one of the gripes I have about some of the faux-sustainability crowd: it's not sustainable if it's predicated on a USD$100,000+ income.

From a societal evolution standpoint it's been selected for extinction and we're keeping it alive because... why again?

One reason is because not all fresh goods (e.g. produce and meat) are created equal. Hand selection of those items is part of getting the most value our of your food dollars. You can likely overcome many of the other issues; price comparison, new product discovery, etc.; but you're still left with the inconsistency of items that come from dirt.

You do realize that many places have these things called seasons? I do have a farm stand just down the road from me which has excellent (albeit a limited range of) produce in August. January? Not so much.

We're just not the agrarian society that would be conducive to providing "hyperlocal produce / butchers".

High quality food delivery is certainly possible. From what I've seen of Instacart delivering from Whole Foods, it works pretty well. But it's a premium service and isn't available where I live.

I'm not going to say it's necessarily more complicated of a problem -- I chose the word "complex" purposely -- as it mostly just simplifies down to being more training data for the AI produce picker (or what have you), but it sure seems like the failure rate would scale up rather quickly in real world scenarios. That would just lead to waste we wouldn't otherwise have.

Or maybe I just prefer to pick out my own produce. It could go either way, CV isn't my field.

Either way, handling pantry goods in this way doesn't sound particularly unreasonable.

Many, many millenials aren't as fortunate to have a high-paying software engineering position like yourself.

For them, $20 per dinner every night is simply impossible.

If the price of not making that grocery run for 3 years is "I get to do a startup without permission of investors", would you still do it?

I do. I have a list, so I'm pretty much on auto pilot in the store. This is 45 min that I can let my mind just shut down. Completely analog, no screens, no job, no worries. Nothing. Just walk the isles, load a cart and scratch a list.

> who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, I'm wondering where the value proposition for groceries is when I can order from a huge variety of nearby restaurants,

If you don't enjoy cooking, then there really is no value proposition. Unless you think you may get to the point later in life where you wish you'd saved a bit more money. But you're young so you're still bullet proof.

> Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option, I'm not sure I'm saving money by shopping for food...

With proper meal planning and preparing, there shouldn't be waste. But again, you don't enjoy cooking, so that's the hurdle.

Considering my company provides breakfast and lunch, the high price for dinner isn't that bad. Also on weekends we're usually not home to cook, which increased the probability of wasting groceries we didn't eat during the week.

As millennials without children and good jobs who don't enjoy cooking, there isn't any reason to spend the time planning meals, renting a car and going to the grocery store on the weekend when I'd rather be doing anything else. If I lived in a smaller city, where I had a house and a car without an app that delivered healthy food, then it would have to change, but thats a boring life.

I'm disappointed when it costs more than $10 total to feed my family of 5 a hot cooked meal. 1.5 lbs of beef, 2 vegetables, and a few cups of milk is ~$10. This will increase as my kids get older, but God I can't imagine spending $20 per meal per person on food. Plus, the kids get to help see how the food is prepared, our oldest (7) can help cut veggies, everyone can help set the table, and best of all we know every last ingredient that does (and doesn't) end up in our food.

I assign a value to my free time too, and preparing fresh meals with my family is pretty damn valuable.

Cooking at home after with all that just reminds me that I'm not cooking with a family or whatever. I'd rather go sit next to strangers and have some human interactions with people who aren't Millennials working in tech.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...

http://www.guidingtech.com/13245/youtube-channels-learn-basi...

It will take some time to learn, and some epic failures, but within a few weeks you'll be making great food you can't wait to eat!

I guess so, relative to ordering cooked meals and groceries on line. But it's not quite binary. Any hunters and gatherers on Hacker News?

LOL.

That only works when you are choose to use that free time earning at that rate. Otherwise you are simply using mental gymnastics to validate your choice (which, since it is your money and your food, certainly does not require validation from others).

You can write off those last 30 minutes of work a day as the part that feeds you but ultimately you're spending over the odds for food you could have made yourself.

No robots yet but I hope that's not far off.

Honestly I feel almost guilty when they roll up to the deliver the groceries.

My local store uses Rosie for online shopping and states that only advertised specials are guaranteed to have the store price.

hmm, sure is a lot of energy waste though for every meal delivered.

Maybe in downtown, but I don't think the millennials who oppose grocery shopping are all clustered around areas where electric bike delivery is available. The would seem to be a very small representative subset.

I've tried grocery deliveries. Invariably not everything you want gets delivered. Produce and other fresh items may not be as good as you expect. Maybe if I had Instacart with Whole Foods but then I'd spend more and it's not available where I live anyway. Lots of people aren't quite as adverse to getting up from their computer.

I'll caution against drawing an equivalency between a lifestyle of eating take-out/delivery food vs. cooking (cooking, not heating up boxes of stuff) food you prepare at home.

In the former approach, you take what shows up. You can only control what you order and where you order from. In the latter approach, you can control what's going in to about as great (or little) a degree as you care to.

YMMV of course.