Except for children and the infirm nobody is owed food prepared by others, but I find it hard to reconcile the need to live as frugally as people who went through the Great Depression with the idea that we're in an age of unmatched prosperity.

(I'm not American so I might be missing some nuance)

We're in an age of unmatched credit creation, not prosperity. If you start thinking about it that way, it should solve the mental dissonance.

It is not super fair to tell people having enough food all the time is a luxury they cannot afford.

Where exactly is the line when it becomes entitlement?

For me, it’s somewhere well short of regularly eating food that costs 5x (or more) what the equivalent, nutritious meal prepared at home is.

As far as I can tell, the primary fault there has been our failure to teach basic life skills (home cooking), learning skills (teach yourself how to cook), or problem solving skills (realize that you have a problem that can be solved by teaching yourself to cook).

You can teach yourself basic cooking (from zero) in less than 10 hours. Maybe even less than 5 hours.

It's insanely easy.

Teaching common sense and making the right decisions? Superbly difficult, probably impossible - at least at scale.

Before we can even get to addressing making the correct choices, we need to expand the universe of potential solutions that people even bother to consider. That’s the hard but doable task of counterbalancing the widespread consumerist propaganda (advertising) with awareness and practice making and repairing things, and working against learned helplessness.

We need to ensure that people consider cooking instead of going to a restaurant, changing a flat tire instead of calling roadside services, using a screwdriver to tighten up a wobbly chair instead of replacing it, repairing a ripped seam instead of throwing out a garment ...

None of these things are particularly challenging, but they’re so far outside many peoples’ experience that they may as well be impossible. Many people will still decide to have a professional do these things for them, but it’ll at least be a proper choice instead of being forced into it by circumstance.