> Does it really create more overall?

Yes, much more, in my case. My transition from a standard American diet took a couple years, but is one of the biggest improvements I've made.

I get most of my fruits and vegetables through a CSA or the farmers market, which use much less packaging than any store or restaurant I've seen. The farms are within a couple hours' drive.

I get most of the rest -- mostly dry legumes, nuts, and spices -- from a bulk food store a couple blocks away, filling containers I bring with me. I also avoid packaged food, as I document in this blog post: http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging, which has improved the deliciousness, freshness, savings, convenience, and healthiness of my diet.

I compost and recycle so my landfill garbage gets emptied about twice a year, as shown in this video: http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5.

One takeout meal produces months worth of garbage so in my case the difference is orders of magnitude.

And my homemade food is more delicious, convenient, cheaper, healthier, etc.

All the restaurants I know of buy their stuff directly from markets early in the morning.

In London, restaurants all pile down to Smithfields, Spitalfields and Billingsgate markets at the crack of dawn for their day's ingredients - they don't go down to their local supermarket and walk around with a basket.

They fill up their crates with the stuff they buy and head back to their kitchens.

> And my homemade food is more delicious, convenient, cheaper, healthier, etc.

I get everything else you are saying, but how is homemade more convenient?

Convenience is the most important reason (for me) to do take out. Normally its picked up when already out on the way home, no time spent preparing/cooking, no time spent cleaning up (except the extremely bad part of throwing it all in trash)

It's more convenient because I cook many meals at once so have several containers worth of meals in my fridge almost all the time.

Also, when meeting people, I have them over for lunch or dinner more than before learning to prepare food from scratch, business and personal, so meeting gets easier. And cheaper -- I save money cooking them and me dinner compared to eating out and just paying for me, though they usually bring something with them.

Plus it deepens the relationship faster to cook at home and share, so there's a convenience in shortening the get-to-know-each-other part of a relationship.

The picking it up takeout on the way home part is an inconvenience. As is dealing with paying for it. I pick up my CSA delivery once a week, but it's one of the highlights of the week. Seeing all the fresh fruits and vegetables, the anticipation, the creative challenge of figuring out how I'll combine and prepare them... I'd choose it over going to art galleries, movies, or many social things. In fact, I bring people with me to pick them up as a social event.

In summary, food becoming an enriching part of my life replaces a lot of time wasters. Healthier food means less exercise time and cost for the same fitness, etc.

> It's more convenient because I cook many meals at once so have several containers worth of meals in my fridge almost all the time.

Thanks for the reply. Do you by chance have a recipe list on your website somewhere for the meals you normally cook for the week?

I don't follow recipes, but make tons of vegetable stews in the pressure cook.

This video -- http://joshuaspodek.com/20-minute-vegetable-stew -- shows how I do it. The video isn't supposed to be entertaining or glamorous, just showing how I make a half-dozen meals in about 20 minutes' preparation time.

People give the stews rave reviews. The same technique as in the video with different vegetables gives very different stews. Following the same process as different vegetables come in and out of season... I've never tasted the same result twice, but they're always delicious.

I hope it helps.

If I'm hungry now, I can ...

1. Phone for delivery, and they will say "45 minutes" (it will probably be here in 35).

2. Phone an order for me to pick up, and they will say "half an hour", and I'll go and get it, and it will probably take me 10 minutes to get there and back, again 35 minutes.

3. Take a small detour, and spend 10 minutes sitting at the food vendor (as in your example). How convenient this is depends on how big the detour is. If you are on foot, even a small detour can add quite a bit of time. If you are driving, parking up and walking between car and vendor is an oft-ignored time sink.

4. Spend 20 minutes preparing and cooking, then eat. Put the leftovers in the fridge or freezer.

5. Get something I made earlier in the week out of the fridge or freezer, put it in the microwave for 3-5 minutes, eat it. (Granted, the same is true if you over-order your takeout)

Options 1, 2, and 3 all rely on the vendor being open and not too busy at the time I decide I want the food.

If you only ever eat out or takeout, hire a cleaner, and have someone do all your laundry, you might be able to get away without doing any grocery shopping. In which case, adding such shopping to your weekly routine might add an extra hour. However, if you do already have to do that shopping, then spending an extra 20-30 minutes each week in the supermarket choosing vegetables is likely to be more convenient than stopping off at a food vendor each day.

Depending on the variety of food vendors available on your route home, and the size of their menus, you may be stuck eating pretty much the same thing every night, or having to take larger detours, or make special trips to get something different (negating the convenience). If you cook at home, then there may be a few dishes requiring exotic fresh ingredients that you can't have, but beyond that, the world is your oyster. You can get a lot of variety from basically the same stuff put together in different proportions.

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Even harder is which is actually better for the environment?

For example, in many cases it is more environmentally friendly to use disposable paper coffee cups compared to ceramic cups, once the energy usage to produce and wash them is taken into account. See http://sustainability.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/Comparati...

Is he really saying that it costs 0.18 MJ to wash one cup? That's 1.7 litre of water raised 25 K or or 1 litre raised by 43 K. Washing my cup by hand I don't use anything like that amount of water.

I've just checked by washing my teacup.

I used 0.25 litre of water at 53 C. Incoming water temperature here is about 10 C so that means:

    0.25 kg * 4200 J.K-1.kg-1 * (53 - 10) K

  = 45 kJ = 0.045 MJ

So it sounds as though dishwashers aren't as efficient as people like to say.

Your calculation assumes that the production and distribution of 1MJ of electricity takes 1MJ of raw energy (e.g. in the form of Coal).

This is off by a factor of several. For example coal fired power stations are maybe 45% efficient. Then you have to mine the coal, transport it to the power station etc etc.

> Your calculation assumes that the production and distribution of 1MJ of electricity takes 1MJ of raw energy (e.g. in the form of Coal).

> Hocking assumed a new, commercial dishwasher running on Canadian electricity, requiring about 0.18 MJ/cup-wash.

Nowhere in the article does it say, or even imply as far as i can see, that the energy cost included cost of mining and transporting coal (or oil or gas or solar energy) to the generator.

If that was the intention then it should have been made much clearer because it dramatically affects the results. Where I live (98% hydro) the total energy cost of the energy I use from the grid will be lower than, say the UK (mix of oil, gas, nuclear) simply because the raw material cost is eliminated.

If these details are omitted from the article then the information cannot be effectively used except in that one location in the world where it was written making it rather difficult to draw useful conclusions for or against the use of disposable cups.

The footnote at the bottom says that 1 MJ will raise 3 quarts of water to boiling and that is clearly the energy delivered not the energy consumed in the total process.

So perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn here is that ILEA Leaf carries some rather sloppy articles.

Like I said.. it's hard to work this out, especially in any kind of generalized way.

If you eat at the same restaurant a lot, and it's a family restaurant that cares about the little things, you can usually arrange with them to give them some of your own reusable containers. Call for delivery, food shows up in your own little glass+rubber storage boxes, you eat it, and then wash it up (or, as the article suggests, get a maid to do that bit.) Every once in a while, bring the stack of clean boxes back to the restaurant for them to use again.

Note that this system is already how many catering services work. Except that in those cases, the caterer will also take away the containers themselves. (Personal catering—i.e. "an arrangement with someone who cooks to prepare meals for you and stock your fridge with them"—is a commonly-consumed service among both the upper class and the physically disabled. But oddly, outside of those two contexts, you just never hear about it.)

Don't you have to factor in the time to clean your pots, pans, plates, silverware into your "convenience" factor? Take out reduces the total time involved, but you may have to sacrifice food containers that are not re-usable unless you make a point of bringing your own take-out containers.

> They will buy ingredients in bulk, whereas I'll buy them in much smaller packages

Buy your produce in re-usable or recyclable containers, or grow it yourself? We pick up produce from a local farm, they bring it to the pick up site in re-usable plastic bins, we pick it up using re-usable cloth bags. Eggs are in recyclable containers.

It's really hard to grow your own pasta, and it comes from the store already in a package. It's hard to grow your own hot dogs, or vinegar, or ketchup. It's hard to grown your own pineapple in Minnesota, it's hard to find a farmers market with unpackaged soy sauce. My local produce stand won't let me buy a pocket full of rice.

I don't know where you can buy Franks Red Hot in a re-usable package, but when you find out you'll let me know, right?

Push a comment to the extreme and of course it fails. The point that takeout makes more waste than cooking at home is very real. I don't do anything crazy, have a landfill I'm my yard, etc. My neighbors had a family the same size as mine. Each week their trash cans (2 of them) would be overflowing and my single can was 3/4 full, sometimes​only 1/2. The only real difference - they ate tons of takeout, ready made it frozen and we eat out once a month and cook our own meals.

Yes my pasta comes wrapped in plastic and my vinegar in a plastic bottle like everyone else - but it doesn't compare to the waste of takeout and frozen dinners.

Can you buy a pocket full of rice? No, but why would you? Buy a huge bag at Costco and see how long that lasts. That is how you reduce waste per meal.

The comment above you had a ton of examples of where you couldn't get something in a re-usable package, and you responded by shifting the goalposts to just using less plastic.

One person above suggesting produce, then someone responded about pasta, hot sauce, and other things that aren't produce.

Even letting slide that moved goalpost, some things requiring packaging doesn't merit disparaging the idea of reducing packaging.

In my case, I stopped buying pasta and mostly replaced it with legumes, which I buy from the bulk food store with bags I bring with me, so I've achieved the same effect. As best I can tell, the legumes are healthier and taste delicious in my stews. Plus I've learned to make more foods in the process.

The point is, even if you can buy produce without waste (which you totally can at a grocery store too, my bell peppers don't come covered in plastic), there's more that goes into grocery shopping than just raw produce. The goalposts were "making entire meals", munin was the one who moved them up to say "look how easy it is, all my produce is waste-free". It doesn't matter when everything else you need to make your meals comes in non-reusable packaging.