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
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.