My go-to lazy meal is 1 1/2 cups of rice and beans, a few cups of stock, a cup of salsa, extra flavoring as desired, whatever veggies and protein I have around, all thrown in the pot for 25 minutes. Then I take out the pot and put it in the fridge. That will last two people a few days. Very little prep for a massive amount of food.
You can also make yogurt overnight for maybe a 75% savings over store-bought.
I have optimized what I do quite well, or at least I'm much faster than I used to be. But for example this last weekend, I made some stir fry in a large batch for this week's meals. By the time I left my parents' house (long story but I basically can't cook at the house I live in), I had used up three hours. That was prepping four bell peppers, an onion, garlic, cabbage, broccoli, and chicken, cooking them, and cleaning up afterward.
I'm sure I can speed my prep up even more, mostly with knife skills. But at this point, that's how it is.
I factor in eating because I clean up after I eat. Most of the stuff I make is best fresh out of the frying pan with very minimal resting time.
But anyway, I'm not here to argue. If cooking at home works for you in 15 minutes, fantastic! I can't do that, it never works that quickly. I was mostly wondering how the parent poster's drive-thrus were so slow that they could cook faster because where I live, I never spend more than five minutes in one.
Big Mac, no bun, extra mac sauce. /s
We season and bake our veggies. It adds to cost, but doesn't make me want to toss my food in the trash.
It's just that it's the flavour of the vegetable, which isn't full of sugar, salt, or msg unlike the very optimized processed foods
And I don't find any need to put butter or other stuff on the broccoli. Usually just a smidge of Tony Chachere and garlic powder.
You are what you eat. Eat garbage fast food, and you will feel like garbage. And your body slowly accumulates all that garbage.
Traditional dine in restaurants are usually just as unhealthy as eating fast food as well.
It's actually shocking to me that garbage food has been normalized to the point where eating healthy is "what I ate when I was a broke in college." and that we must be miserable eating healthy.
Wow that's crazy.
I happen to love cooking, so to me it's relaxing. My wife doesn't like to cook, so I do most of it. But even still, as much as I like doing it, there are definitely days when I don't feel like all the work. And if I'm going to put the effort into making stuff, I want to make something good, and often something new, and that takes a lot of time.
And while brown rice is much better than white rice. If you want white rice, go with basmati. It tastes much better, cooks faster, and is hard to screw up. I don't understand why people use any other white rice. There are tons of other kinds of rice that are worth exploring too. They all have much more interesting flavors and textures than plain old generic long-grain white rice.
It's low status to eat well on home cooked foods, and high status to eat poorly at well advertised garbage restaurants
Going through the drive through at McDonalds certainly will not raise your status in America.
All these carbs can and probably will be bad for your health, regardless of where you get them.
The easy things to fix tend to also be less healthy for you. And the less time and money you have, you tend to lean into this trap even more.
Life isn't quite that simple
It's not hard to optimize for speed. White rice, beans and frozen veggies boil in 10-15 minutes and don't even require attention for the full timespan. Cleanup consists of putting things in the dishwasher. And I don't know why you would factor in eating, going to McD won't teleport it into your stomach. Time can be further amortized by making several servings, putting them in the fridge and warming them up in the microwave later.
We're comparing to fastfood here, not a high end restaurant course.