But I think with new generation, this culture is changing slowly.

Also, cooking at home doesn’t really make sense from an economic standpoint when you think about it.[1] Like everything else, cooking has economies of scale and specialization, so it’s cheaper to cook for many families at once. It only seems cheaper because we don’t account for the labor and opportunity cost of the (usually) women who stay home to cook the meals.

[1] Assuming you don't assign an intrinsic positive value to the time spent cooking or getting a home-cooked meal. That may be true for many people, but then you're talking about how people relatively value their free time versus time spent cooking, which is a different issue.

But eating out also causes negative externalities because the incentives between restaurant and food consumer aren't properly aligned.

Restaurants have every incentive to offer cheap, unhealthy, but more addictive foods because the resulting health issues are externalized towards the buyer and to the rest of society.

It's this incentive structure that gives rise to Supersized sodas, unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden, etc.

One way to look at it is that the industrialization of food production (including cooking) is better at moving atoms around and making whatever people choose to eat cheaper, but worse at managing the bits of information that help people make wise decisions on what they actually should be eating.

It's also harder to verify that you got what you paid for -- my family used to go to the market every weekend to stock up, and you become intimately familiar with what's in season, what is fresh, and what tastes good, but it's easy for a restaurant to buy cut-rate produce and then dress it up with seasoning and technique.

> cooking has economies of scale and specialization, so it’s cheaper to cook for many families at once

I'll try to add a little more value to the conversation - there are a lot of hidden costs in cooking at home. A kitchen could take up valuable real estate that is significantly underutilized compared to a commercial kitchen. A personal kitchen also has maintenance costs on top of cooking and cleaning each meal.

I do acknowledge a lot of value - you get to cook exactly what you want, how you want, when you want. For many, cooking itself is valuable (and not a loss of time) because it is enjoyable.

Another excellent example of why I've stopped listening to arguments of the form "X needs to be regulated because it produces such-and-such externality".

"Externalities" aren't just things you as an observer don't like. A negative effect on the buyer can never be an externality.

Some food I cook has to be prepared fresh. This becomes a last mile problem, where to have someone else do it they must either already be in my home or travel to it when I want food. There is still a travel problem if we instead say that I have to go somewhere else to eat.

I do cook some food ahead of time (lunch, for example) which would be more feasible. But I still have some problems with this. One of which is customization -- allergies, food preferences etc are numerous and present infinite combinations. That kind of customization eats into economies of scale rapidly.

Freshness is still a problem here -- say you can make food for the next week ahead, but that still basically means the travel/shipping time from the point of 'manufacture' is limited to a few hours at best if refrigerated.

Another problem is it becomes much harder for me to verify what was put in the food. There are strong incentives for a third party to put preservatives, sugar and salt, or cheap substitute ingredients that I don't want. You can work to regulate something like that, but it's expensive to police products with such a short life span.

Maybe no one has tried hard enough to solve this yet, or there are big cultural obstacles, but I'm not convinced that there really are economies of scale here, even if you account for unpaid labour.

These are real economic costs to outsourcing food making. I would love to outsource it, but there just isn't a cost effective way of doing it. I suspect that if the economies of scale here were real someone would already be doing it on a large scale and making a lot of money.

Cooking is the same thing. I could almost certainly earn an extra $15 each night driving Uber for an hour, instead of going home to my family. The fact that I don't do that puts a lower bound of $15 on how much I value that hour. If I'm forced to do some chore during that hour instead, like cooking or cleaning dishes, you have to account for the $15 in lost value of free time.

I think the hard part is that cooking and cleaning (some items) can be done while effectively multi-tasking, chatting about someone's day or collecting one's thoughts. I have a young daughter and when I put something in the microwave, cut up vegetables, fetch spices, or load the dishwasher, we can generally keep the conversation and activity going. Cooking or baking something from scratch is obviously much more time-intensive. Getting food delivered doesn't really save that much time. However, cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming are generally blocking activities and thus easier to rationalize outsourcing. I would agree that we as humans have a very hard time valuing our present and future time, so I would always love to have sometime critique my day. "Hey, you enjoy your job at tech company X enough for the next two years, so it seems like you can afford a laundry service for the next 10 years, time which you can spend more at playgrounds and working out, why don't you do it?"

Exactly why I don't want to go home to my second "job" as a line cook / dishwasher for an hour every day at a "wage" 5x lower than my day job.

But cooking to save money when you're a software engineer is almost certainly a poor use of your time. Better even to take on debt and spend your time studying for interviews to switch jobs to a higher salary.

I spend most of my productive time thinking. That happens while cooking, walking, reading a book, taking a shower, sleeping, etc.

I would even go so far as to say there is an inverse relationship between hours spent 'working' and productivity.

Spend more time poorly. It's great for your career.

You should absolutely cook if it makes you happier or healthier but not (purely) as a strategy to become richer when it's making you less happy.

I agree with what you're saying, but think your reasoning misses the forest for the trees a little :)

A rump roast, bag of veggies, and can of tomatoes in a slow cooker can make dinner for 4-7, is warm when you get home, and is way cheaper than takeout while also taking less time than takeout. With a family the scale makes the investment yield a better ROI at every step, while the marginal costs of eating our could be untenable.

In pure financial terms for a single high earning individual then, yes, you will almost always be better off to get your food sourced and focus on working more hours. That math changes when you're talking about multiple people, though, and start factoring in the opportunity cost of "eating out". Being at home coding, studying, or work-emailing in your productive home environment while a casserole cooks will yield better productivity than driving around getting food or being disrupted in a restaurant/coffee shop environment.

There are also externalities to consider: eating out leads to poor food habits which leads to poor health which leads to poor productivity and reduced working lifespan. Specifically, how many overweight IT people are dying from heart attacks before retirement age, and how would an analysis of total productivity reflect that massive lost productivity from losing 40+ hour a week over many years?

Equally as relevant: much of the "time loss" in the kitchen is just blatant incompetence with cooking. By pretending that food prep is an optional life skill thousands of productive work hours will be lost that could otherwise be dedicated to making your employer more money or building up your own business, while also fixing capital that could otherwise be gaining value in interest bearing bonds or assets.

"Home Economics" is all about saving capital through intelligent resource management. On the whole economics is an amazing reason to cook. Young, single, software types in urban centers with no special dietary needs or long-term health requirements slightly withstanding ;)

They're not, because presumably you value your free time at something greater than $0. Why don't I drive Uber for $15 an hour after work? Because I value those hours more than the $15 I could earn doing something else with them. If I spend an hour cooking and doing the dishes, instead of order Grubhub and throwing away the waste, you have to count the lost value of that hour.

Saving is also mandatory for people who aren't already rich to be able retire and deal with other crises in life where you need significant money (for example unemployment or health problems).

It depends where you live. In some countries, you can't find healthy food outside (e.g. infamously (parts of) the U.S.). In other countries (where cost of labor is high), eating outside is much more expensive than eating home.

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...

Yodsanklai appears to have been referring to the availability of healthy prepared foods, particularly restaurant foods. It is entirely possible to live in an area well-served with supermarkets and bodegas and only have 'unhealthy' restaurants to choose from due to the peculiar demands of that area. You can drive through parts of the US and see nothing but greasy spoons or pub food, while the local at-home cooks have access to a wider variety of healthy foods from the markets.

Not sure how the researchers at Stanford couldn’t conclude that poor people aren’t going to pay rich people prices

> would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand.

Most of the difference in what the underclass and others eat is because of taste. And Americans spend less of their budgets on food consumed at home than any other nation.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-prices/#consumer-expenditure...

And healthy food is at worst only very slightly cheaper than unhealthy food

http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/12/e004277.full?sid=820d6e1...

It's also more expensive to provide healthy, fresh food and restaurants being famously low margin businesses can't afford to give this to you unless you're in a wealthy area with others who are willing to spend for it.

Well, there's a big difference in cuisines. For instance, I've been to plenty of great Indian lunch buffets, but most East/Southeast asian food is not amenable to buffet timing. If you saute a leafy green, you need to eat it right away, or else it gets all wilty. There's nothing sadder than a bunch of pathetic looking spinach over a chafing dish or under a heat lamp.

Indian food usually tastes better the next day, after the flavors blend in to each other.

As for making sense from an economic standpoint, we should all be eating lentils and rice with no seasoning, with some vitamin supplements once in a while. Problem is, nobody wants to do that.

Cheaper for the restaurant, yes. In don't see why it's cheaper for me if you add the restaurant's margin to the price.

Not even talking about taxes, labor, equipment, housing and food safety costs the restaurant has (and will pass on to me) that I don't have when I cook myself.

(The quality control I have is another point, though not a purely economic one)

If you labor for yourself you don't pay taxes.

I have only ever spent more than that at a restaurant the #1 Grill at the Balmoral aka the best restaurant in Scotland and that was only because my colleague from the press office persuaded me.

Cooking is mostly a leisure activity so you actually do other activities like watching you favourite TV show, calling and catching up with friends and acquaintances. Last but not the least, you actually know what you in putting your body.

ok I spent >3 hours doing a special recipe the other weekend because I like to experiment with cooking some times other times I just goto a pizza place.

I think E. F. Schumacher nailed it in his "Small is beautiful" and other works on how this reductionist view of analyzing behaviors/practices in terms of their to economic utility alone is the demon behind various problems of modernity

What? Not at all. Maybe in your country, it is.

I moved to Western Europe and was shocked how much less people eat out in France/Germany/Netherlands/Belgium.

What the hell? Buy some meat, vegetables. Chop them. Chuck in some soy sauce, garlic and ginger.

Don't like East Asian? Grab that red curry paste that lasts for weeks in the fridge and a can of coconut milk... Buy some meat and vegetables and chuck it in a saucepan. Boil some rice.

Don't like Thai? Buy some meat and vegetables. Chuck them in a saucepan with garlic and some herbs. Boil some pasta.

Don't like Mediterranean? Buy some meat and vegetables. Chuck them in a saucepan with incredible amounts of paprika and some potatoes.

Don't like Hungarian? OK. I'm being slightly flippant but it's really not hard. You get a few basic combinations and you vary them. A few flavourings, sauces or spices and the same basic principles will get you a good meal in 30-45 minutes whatever your preferences are.

I sometimes buy premade sauces (which are usually mediocre but give you a good base) and then add some fresh garlic, chilli etc to make it taste less shop-bought. Just make sure you always have a few staples in (rice, pasta, noodles, garlic, chilli, onion, ginger, soy, canned tomatoes - that kind of thing) and grab some meat and veg in your local shop. You can always knock something together.

While it might seem like there is a steep learning curve to cooking, there isn't.

Though, if you actually plan your menu, or plan dishes that can carry over to two or three nights, cooking is far cheaper.

True, but most people will probably cook maybe two to three dishes and make them last a week. Even then, you may spend about $30 for the entire week on materials. If you ate a typical fast food combo once a day instead, you're looking at roughly $50 per week.

This is meaningless; what's being compared? Yes, buying and cooking a prime filet is going to be more expensive than hitting up Wendy's, is that unexpected?

$4 of green beans + onions + vinegar and I've got a meal for 2 at less than what it'd cost for a single rib eye at a restaurant.

Value your time? Learn to use a pressure cooker, or slow cooker. Once you get good at prep work, it is 10-15 minutes to prepare all the ingredients and put them into a pot. I've spent that long finding parking in DT areas of major cities, not to mention waiting in line at a restaurant just to get a seat.

to avoid mediocre meals work you way up the difficulty chain and make sure to adhere to recipes. the number one way to make a mediocre meal is lack of preparation and the second is to short cut a recipe.

plus when you get the hand of it you can make larger meals and freeze/store what you don't eat then so you have something tasty all week long

There is a class of American recipes, designed for a mythical 1960s housewife, that amount to little more than dumping various factory-manufactured prepared goods together. Ignore those altogether. Although the meal might be edible, it won't improve your cooking.

There you go. No need to buy any more cookbooks.

I find it baffling how one can put themselves in a position to speak on behalf of the entire West.

Eating out is certainly the default choice for professionals in New York, London, Moscow, Dubai, Singapore, San Francisco, or Hong Kong.

In my experience, most people eat most of their meals at home, and lunch is the most likely meal to be eaten out. But some people eat out all the time. For most of my 20s I went out for lunch every day. Now I do so once a month or so on average.

To put this in perspective, a meal at McDonalds is affordable to most, if not all Americans. But the cheapest meal at a fast food joint (outside of a roadside stall) is affordable only to a minority.

I have loved this option, when I've visited places that have it. Much better than "McDonalds", every time. Life in USA is poorer because we don't have this.

Well, most of them did. This is the most literal example of 'survivor bias' imaginable. Look up 'sausage disease', to just name one.

EDIT: this line of thinking is similar to people saying 'let children roam free, most abductions are done by people the victims know anyway!' or the anti-vaxxer 'why vaccinate when measles is so uncommon!'. Well yes, all of those things are the way they are exactly because of the thing those people are railing against.

Your EDIT undercuts your argument completely, because it makes clear your utter innumeracy. Abduction is not a thing that USA parents should worry about. Automobile accidents? Childhood obesity? Absolutely they should worry about those, but you don't care because automobiles and lack of physical activity are integral to your comfortable suburban lifestyle.

My point still hold though. Indians still have a value oriented view to buying. Something is not bought just because you fancy it.But I think this is changing slowly. New generation is much more willing to spend for fun.

That is entirely opposite to my experience. I’m genuinely struggling to understand how you’ve drawn that conclusion.

It's the same in Pakistan, a country similar to India in many aspects, and I think it also has other causes besides economy/frugality:

– The rich have household "servants" to cook for them and their kids at any time.

– Even for the less than "rich" the women are generally expected (and usually content) to stay at home and cook for the family.

So why bother eating out? It's usually an expression of "going out"; doing something enjoyable/entertaining, taking advantage of a day off, a treat for the kids, or to hang out with friends you can't host at home.

Women in South-Asian and Middle-Eastern countries are also expected to cook for guests. The males hosting while the women hosts make tea for the guests is an iconic feature [TODO: find a better term to describe that] of society there.

The rich in India have cooks that work for slave wages. The rich don't know how to drive because it is so cheap to have a chauffeur.

I knew an Indian kid in Berkeley, CA who didn't get into any American medical schools. So his parents gave a big "donation" to a medical school in India and got him in. They got him a flat, a maid and a cook. That's what he had at age 22.

There's almost certainly a substantial genetic component. Punjabi Sikhs have a high rate of type 2 diabetes, despite below-average rates of obesity and tobacco and alcohol use. GWAS data suggests that most ethnic groups in India have an elevated genetic risk of type 2 diabetes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23300278/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636658/

While these are commonly found in some major cities in India, all of the items you mentioned are limited to specific regions of the country and few are traditionally Indian. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I think it's important to keep in mind the timeline of these foods in India when considering recent trends in health.

"Traditional" is a debatable term, but India has a far longer history of using sugar than the west. Jaggery and molasses are praised as health foods in Ayurveda, which isn't exactly helpful when you're dealing with a diabetes epidemic.

I agree with this including your broader point. The process of refining sugar was apparently developed in India, which (in hindsight) didn't set a great precedent.

However, I would emphasize that Western fast food culture is partially responsible for the problems today. The combination of glorifying Western (usually American, courtesy of media and entertainment) values along with the availability of these items inherently brings many of the advances and dangers from these countries to India. Most would agree that there is a fast-food "problem" among various communities in the US, and anecdotally, it seems like related problems are emerging in certain communities in India as well. Granted, India also has a rich history of more traditional fast, cheap, and easily available street food, which seems to be the closest competitor to Western fast food. It is likely that both have contributed to the current condition, though I wonder if the promotion of Western fast food has contributed to a rise in Indian street food consumption as well.

In addition to this sedentary is the another default choice of us Indians.

I first came across them in Eastern Europe, and they’re amazing. Home cooked meal fast for less than it costs to make it yourself.

Kinda like the ikea cafeteria but with better food.

Apparently there were dozens of milk bars in San Francisco generations ago

I remember getting incredible Banh Mis in Vietnam for 15-20k dong (less than $1).

It's just something they don't think of.

This is not my experience in UK. Are you American?

But don't they also have cooks who make elaborate meals for them?

I don't want to overthink this but some of the value in "eating in" sometimes feels like taking advantage of the fact that there's usually a woman at home whose 'job' it is to cook.

> > In West eating out is the default choice

Huh? if you're fresh out of school, maybe. Certainly not in families.

> > even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out

How does that even work? Anyone piling on debt to eat is, well, seriously lacking in financial planning.

I grew up solidly middle class and we never went out to eat besides occasional fast food if we were on a roadtrip, I wasn't even allowed to purchase school lunches. However, I had a stay at home mom that cooked everything!

Now, that I am an adult none of my friends that I would call "middle class" have a spouse that stays at home. Only those families that are very well-off have 1 adult that doesn't have to work and they tend to be rich enough that cooking most meals vs. going out doesn't matter much for them.

I think this is a case where "middle class" can mean a million different things. I don't think someone is colloquially middle class if they can't afford the crappiest house within 2 hours of their office (slight exceptions for major cities), yet others define it differently.

In my experience this is not true at all. I live in Australia, I host a lot of travellers from around the world: Western Europeans (English, French, Italians, Germans), Asians (Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Chinese), North Americans (US, Canada), South Americans (Chilean, Argentinian). None of these people eat out be default.

Any thoughts?

Yes. My thought is that when one is planning for others to live a certain way to benefit society, that telling them to go into debt to benefit society may work over the long term over a large population. However, this only "works" if you treat people as interchangeable numbers, and if too many of the people deviate from your plan, the debt driven society will stop working as planned.

However, when one runs their own budget which needs to last through the ups and down, and presumably get one into a better place than they started, saving or investing is better than going into debt.

Just because there are multiple books advocating you spend your money ... well - the old adage is, "Don't believe everything you read."

Agree very much!

> However, when one runs their own budget which needs to last through the ups and down, and presumably get one into a better place than they started, saving or investing is better than going into debt.

I think I should have clarified, I'm talking from a Macroeconomic perspective, when spending boosts economies and saving could lead to devastating deflation. But, on a Microeconomic perspective, totally agree with you.

> Just because there are multiple books advocating you spend your money ... well - the old adage is, "Don't believe everything you read."

Thank you sir for reminding me :)

I'm not arguing that expensive spending per se will improve living standards, but they do tend to boost markets, create new markets, improve the standard of living etc. Debt is one such expensive spending

What will do what you seem to want is buying from the 'road-side chai stalls' you say are dangerous?? Which is a pretty strange claim to make but I can almost see where you're coming from

That said, I'm not saying Starbucks is making us better. But a chai chain, nutritious chai stalls, is long pending for India. It's not dangerous, but we are better off choosing the expensive chai in the long run, in my opinion.

What about the fact that most Indians are lactose intolerant?

You are better off opting the expensive coffee with the alternative options for lactose intolerant people (soy milk etc.) when compared to buying milk from the road-side stalls (right?)

I have been having coffee almost daily for the past three years and I see a significant improvement in my bones and joints. I can feel it and pointed out by the doctor. Note, I take the coffee with whole milk and not the half-and-half or other kind.

So I would guess it does affect in the long run? Personally it did for me. Not sure at a Macro level.

I can't believe you are serious, you cannot just make such wild claims without any evidence.

Why don't you do an experiment, cut coffee from your diet while keeping your rest of the diet same with moderate exercise. I guarantee you there wont be any significant degradation in your bones.

Ping me in three years.

Much harder to throw money at luxuries when you're saving a lot.

I think this misses the larger point that Indians overall don't have that much money in hand to spend on luxuries.

I believe GNI per capita ppp [1] is the right comparison. (someone please correct if I'm wrong.) For india thats ~ $6K whereas for the US its ~ $57.5K, almost 10 times. (Also while the savings rate is more, the actual amount saved looks greater for the US.)

I think the parent is right, grand parent just proves the point of the article.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)...

Ok. But isn't disposal income one of the properties of Middle Class? The purchase of costly things only for special occasions is a lower (?) tier than middle class.

Perhaps the average income appears sufficient. But without that money changing hands the broader economy remains constricted. That is, if ya wanna have a Middle Class ya gotta act like a Middle Class.

Yes that is the unwritten rule.

The effects can also be felt overseas. The Chinese are less likely to put up with long wait times for permanent residency in the USA, and simply return home as opportunities and life back home can be just as lucrative. Not the case for Indians, clearly

This is the most underreported thing about India.

> The Chinese are less likely to put up with long wait times for permanent residency in the USA, and simply return home as opportunities and life back home can be just as lucrative.

In my experience, wealthy Chinese are willing to put up with nearly anything to obtain residency in a western country without deadly levels of smog or poisoned baby formula.

I don’t see it as a cultural difference so much as a result of what the article is referring to.