In-person shopping for food (including travel to/from the place of purchase), food prep, cooking, and the associated cleanup is an enormous time sink. Perhaps you have free time or are already used to spending a lot of it on these tasks, but let's not pretend that it's "not that much". It's huge.

Shopping for the four of us in this house takes about three man hours a week. Cooking about 15. That is much less than an hour a day per person. If we felt like it we could optimise the shopping even further by only shopping when we were already passing the supermarket on the way to or from work.

If we felt like it we could do the shopping online and cut it down to a few minutes a week.

Cooking Sunday dinner for four today took me less than two hours. Would have been faster if I had not prepared everything from scratch.

18 hours per week, and a lot of that is spent whether you are cooking for 1 or for 4, so those that live alone are talking about 15-16 hours per week. A whole waking day.

I think my mother realized this implicitly when I was a kid. She wasn't so motivated to cook when it was just for herself, but was when it was for the entire family.

I guess in the end, it needs to become a team effort for a team result to become efficient.

I'm interested in the recommendations here to help solve that problem, there are some new ones I haven't heard before: https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/ost9hc/folks_in_vh...

We share the work between the four of us so it is much less than an hour a day per person. I bake a large loaf every other day, it takes an elapsed time of 24 hours but only 15 minutes of that is actual work.

It depends a lot on how varied a menu you want/require (or your spouse does....)

Cooking with variety (or "buy whatever's on sale") is really hard if you also want to do it cheaply (minimize waste & spoilage, especially). Cooking the same few meals, maybe with some seasonal rotation, is easy because you can get the measurements of what you need each week ver exact to keep spoilage very low, and arrange them so waste from one meal always goes into another later in the week.

Like anything, it’s a skill that you develop over time. Certainly at the start, you might find that cooking respectable meals takes more out of you than just ordering them. But at some point, with enough practice, this flips for most people.

Of course, there might also be some survivorship bias here. And food delivery changes things (but, so too does grocery delivery).

I'm a good cook and have been cooking my whole life. Cleaning easily takes as much time as the cooking, sometimes more.

Well if it is just an equation of time for you, is there any sort of multitasking you can do to get more out of it? I find that I’m able to pay full attention to audio-based media when cooking meals I’ve made before, and especially when cleaning up. So if any of your day is otherwise spent with audiobooks, news, etc, maybe you could do your cooking with the time you usually spend listening to those, and sort of get it for free?