Some meals are generally not regarded as cooking, putting cereal and milk in a bowl, making toast, slapping a few ingredients on a sandwich, those will always be cheaper and easier to just do yourself. Apart from that there are many meals you can easily make yourself and have last for 2-3 meals or amortize the time over the number of people eating it.
Tonight I'll be making spaghetti bolognese for under $10AU and it will last a huge dinner and two lunches, it takes under 10 minutes to shop for and half an hour to make, the majority of which will be spent on entertainment while I stir the pots every couple of minutes, the "damn good at packaging" is putting it in microwavable containers. If I was having this delivered I'd by looking at $20AU+ for a single meal, if it was eat-in I'd blow which of the time saving travelling and waiting to be served anyway. Other meals can be even less effort, like when you've got a rice cooker doing the heavy lifting.
Outsourcing food production saves little time, costs a lot more and will often deliver worse results, especially if you factor dietary factors into "worse results".
This is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long, long time.
Most families simply do not have the money for prepared food to feed their family regularly, and there's no evidence that this is changing at all. Grocery store ingredients are vastly cheaper than anything prepared, and food prep is fundamentally labor-intensive no matter what. The limits of cost advantages from scaling have already been reached: it's called the freezer section, but at most it's a moderate convenience for some.
Further, the graphs show for all income levels that "away" food increased substantially from 1965-1994... and then has stayed mainly the same, actually decreasing from 2004-2007 across all income levels, so there's zero evidence for any trend between now and 2040.
So... a third of meals are "away" and that's been stable over the past 25 years? Sounds to me like people eat lunch out... and that's it.