I feel like the price of restaurant dining scales linearly to the number of people you're feeding, while cooking at home scales more logarithmically. [1]

If you're feeding one person, I don't know that it's that much cheaper to get stuff from the grocery store compared to just eating Taco Bell every day. If you're feeding 5-6 people, it's absolutely cheaper; I can make two large pizzas at home to feed 6 people for like $8.

Also, where are you finding $3 Happy Meals in the US?

[1] Probably not literally true, but more or less how I think about it.

If you can make feed N people for X, the only reason you can't feed one person for X/N is if you're buying too much of things and throwing them away because they go bad. This can be mitigated by freezing things, accepting eating leftovers repeatedly, making smaller quantities, etc., although indeed it's more difficult.

Yeah but if you have stuff that isn’t freezable, even if you’re ok with eating leftovers, you end up having to buy smaller quantities of stuff else you risk stuff going bad before you eat it. Smaller quantities tend to be more expensive.

For example, I don’t buy milk anymore since I do not remember the last time I have finished a carton. I keep some powdered stuff around because I sometimes use it for cooking, but I don’t buy liquid milk anymore. If I did need liquid milk, I would probably end up buying the smallest quantity of milk available to minimize waste, but they would probably be a much higher per-ounce cost.

That’s what I mean about it scaling logarithmically. If you can buy a higher quantity the prices get much cheaper.

You can always buy evaporated milk

Or freeze it.

https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/can-you-freeze-milk

I do that occasionally as well. In addition to the dry stuff, that more or less covers any milk need I might have.

My point was that there’s some items that would either lead to waste, or they gotta buy such a small quantity of it that the rate is bad.

In the sense that a 1lb thing of ground beef plus whatever fillers mcdonalds uses (I believe it's some kind of oatmeal) would probably produce like about 10 happy meals, and a 50lb bag of flour from winco (plus a few tbsp salt and water) would make hundreds of buns, I think you could get it way below $3 / meal. I mean, safeway often has ground beef for a few dollars a pound, that's a lot of happy meals.

In reality, these ragebait articles are written by young people (guessing young men) who have no experience cooking for a family.

Quick search... $3 for pack of 8 hamburger buns

$4 for 2lb ground beef

$3 for 10lb russett potatoes

$4 for four apples

$4 for a 52oz jug of OJ

$18 total for ~8 "Happy Meal equivalents", or $2.25 per meal, so less than the actual Happy Meal, but you need 1. $20 cash to buy the supplies and 2. the time/equipment/knowledge to prepare the meals.

Yes, the headlines are rage-bait, but fast food is still ridiculously inexpensive. Yes, you ca reproduce the fast food at home, or live on rice+beans, for less. But add some quality protein and a pile of fresh veg and the price goes up.

2 lb of ground beef is way more beef than a happy meal. A kids meal patty is only 1/10 of a lb, you've given enough for 20 kids meals.

The rest of your numbers are similarly off: - you are giving each happy meal 1.25 lbs of potato!? - apple serving size is 1.2 ozs - An average apple is 8-10 ozs, 4 apples = 26 happy meals minimum.

You realize how expensive fast food is if you are at all used to cooking at home from scratch all the time.

> You realize how expensive fast food is if you are at all used to cooking at home from scratch all the time.

But cooking from scratch all the time has a time cost, too. Many families are time poor as well as money poor so there's a balancing act to be done.

It does, but that is a highly subjective value that depends on the person in question. You can't just plug in the average wage for someone doing cooking for a living and assume it's meaningful. And you especially can't do that while running a clickbait headline that just straight up says fast food is cheaper without also explicitly and prominently explaining this caveat.

When I say "cooking from scratch", I specifically mean the super fast and easy stuff. Starting from raw materials doesn't mean you do anything complicated to it.

For the burger example: buying pre-formed burger patties is still massively cheaper. Throwing a pre-formed burger patty from your fridge in a pan and putting it on a bun with a slice of cheese will take you ten minutes. Microwave small potatoes while you fry. You are done. There is no prep, you have made 1 easily washed pan and bowl for potatoes and your plate.

Is it the exact same thing taste-wise as your fast food meal? No, the potatoes aren't fried, sorry. Does it hit all the macro nutrients for far cheaper, and probably less time than even going to the fast food place? Yes.

Bag o'tots and an air fryer solves the "no fries" problem.

Tots > Fries

He's the young man who doesn't cook for a family I was talking about I'm guessing.

My kid is 30. But yeah I’m cooking for two, not four or five.

I would download the safeway app. Hamburger buns are $1 usually. Ground beef is $0.99/lb. 10 lbs of russett potatoes makes way more than 8 happy meals. frozen orange juice is like $1 each. This is insanity, and exactly expresses my point above. And if you go to a food bank, it's all free. Most are throwing away entire grocery stores worth of food.

McDondalds Hamburgers have always been 100% ground beef. The hamburger in a happy meal is 1/10th a pound 80% ground beef. So about $0.55 worth of ground beef; the bun is $.33, pickle, onion, ketchup, and mustard - $.05 (probably less but I don't know how to calculate), cheese $.15 (I can't find how many slices are in a large block so I estimated). Potato $.25 (again I'm not sure how many potatoes in a fry but this seems right). Soda - $.01 sugar/flavor, $.05 ice (they are selling Coke products not making the soda directly but even still $.10 is about all soda costs in bulk).

So $1.30 if you buy the food yourself and make it all at home from scratch. Add $.70 for a cheap toy and you have a happy meal (McDonald's buys toys in bulk - you can't get toys for that price unless you are buying thousands)

Above prices are what I'd pay at my local higher priced grocery store online - I can get better deals at other stores but they don't have a good online prices to look up.

> Add $.70 for a cheap toy and you have a happy meal (McDonald's buys toys in bulk - you can't get toys for that price unless you are buying thousands)

Most of the toys these days are cards, but you don't need to buy in that much bulk: https://www.orientaltrading.com/toys-games-and-novelties/nov...

The first one has 144 mini skateboards for 20 cents each.

What about if you add the following: the cost of the time spent preparing the meal. And the cost (mostly time) associated with cleanup- such as driving that leftover oil to the recycling center.

Do you get your McDs delivered to you instantly at no cost? If not, then takes less time to cook than drive to McDonalds, wait in line to make an order and wait for your meal to be cooked.

> driving that leftover oil to the recycling center.

Right, because people who don't have money/time to cook real food are definitely doing that. Besides, deep frying is not the only way to cook potatoes.

How long do you think it takes to grill a hamburger patty?

To your second point: This is where exact apples to apples comparison breaks down. The sane home cook skips deep frying at home and associated hassles unless it's a special occasion. Microwave the potatoes or boil. Fast, minimal cleanup, and now it isn't junk food either.

Well, I like deep fried potatoes, that's why I included it. I actually do deep fry my potatoes, straining the oil, re-using it, and ultimately recycling it. None of the alternatives are acceptable to me in terms of flavor or texture. Could you explain in more detail why you think that cooking potatoes not in oil makes it not junk food? (in the sense of, I've looked at a wide range of comparisons and it does not seem like frying in oil magically turns healthy potatoes into cancer daemons).

It takes me about 7 minutes to fry a hamburger patty on my Griddle (to rare!), ignoring the heat-up time and clean-up time. The actual cooking is quite fast. On the other hand, I can end up waiting an hour in line at In-and-Out. So while I agree that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the economics articles I've seen that compare bsed on fully loaded costs (to the best that they can) seem to conclude that fast food can be about 10-20% cheaper than grocery.

> it does not seem like frying in oil magically turns healthy potatoes into cancer daemons

well, akshually... https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamid...

however the main concern with fried potatoes is cardiovascular, not cancerogenic.

frying, roasting, and baking all produce acrylamides. There's a paper from sweden that shows you can even find acrylamides in bread that was cooked at standard temp.

The story of frying and cardio is still ongoing; I've seen several full reversals in the public health field over the past 30 years. It's really painful being a quantitative physical biologist watching the press around papers that when carefully inspected provide little to no evidence supporting their position.

people trade time for money. Cooking yourself is often a family affair and so a cheap use of the little free time and money a poor person has, it pays back well because a boor person isn't then looking for something else toespendmoney on for entertainment.

> A Happy Meal is frequently sold for $3.

Not anymore. I just checked, a hamburger happy meal at the McD's nearest to my house (i.e. not an abnormally expensive location such as an airport) is $4.49. Extra $0.20 to add cheese. This is for a 1/10 lb hamburger (!). As others have pointed out, I think it's very possible to acquire the ingredients for this for less than that, assuming you can buy enough for 3-4 at once.

> assuming you can buy enough for 3-4 at once.

I don’t think you can make that assumption. For someone living alone, that burger from McD’s may well be cheaper than the equivalent made from supermarket ingredients. When I used to live alone, I stopped buying salad ingredients because they would usually go off in the fridge before I used them all. It was cheaper to eat out.

I think that's partly why stuff like frozen pizza is kind of a meme with single people. Stuff in the freezer can generally keep for years before it really has anything off with it, and even after it starts getting a bit off, it's probably still not going to kill you.

Frozen pizzas can be had for as low as like $3.50 if you get them on sale, and since they keep forever in the freezer there's no reason not to stock up at that point...

I lived not-quite-exclusively on frozen pizza when I lived alone for about a year. It wasn't healthy for me, but it was pretty cheap living, at least in the short term.

Most fresh ingredients last at least a week. What kind of salads are you making that a single person can't finish before they go off?

I was out a lot anyway - lunch with work, dinner with friends, weekend catchups with family and so on. When you live alone, you need to leave the house to socialise. I was only home for meals a few times a week. And I didn’t want salad every time I made food for myself.

So yeah, usually I’d buy salad ingredients, make one salad (or veggie sandwich or something). Then a week later I would take a look in the fridge and notice my ingredients had gone bad. I did this several times before I gave up.

You have to use each chain’s app, now, to get what used to be menu prices. They figured out they could raise menu prices a ton and lots of folks would still pay it, while still keeping poor folks paying them money by providing the app option.

It’s still pretty cheap if you get whatever’s the best option from the deals and freebies they offer in the app, rather than buying whatever you want off the menu.

Who you calling poor folks!? I make big-tech SWE money and I never order from McDonalds without using the app. I guess I’d actually call it “price sensitive” vs. “price insensitive” which IMHO has only a moderate correlation with income.

> You have to use each chain’s app, now, to get what used to be menu prices.

Yes, I used their app. I have kids so I know happy meals used to be crazy cheap. They've gone up substantially in price in the past 3 years.

We used to get McDonald's once in a while as a quick, cheap meal that our kids liked. At some point within the past year or so I realized that it's not actually cheap anymore - I think they've raised their prices more than many competitors. IMO, they are now roughly at the same prices as some much more appealing options, so we don't really go there anymore.

We’re in the middle of moving so normal meals have been rather disrupted. We’ve used a 20 nuggets + 2 large fries deal a few times, about $9 with tax. Feeds three kids and then some.

I see a lot of single-happy-meal deals, but few for multiple, so that’s kinda been our go-to instead. Gotta go with what the app wants you to get. I much preferred when the menu prices were just pretty-good all the time…

Did you check on a delivery app, or in store? App prices will usually be inflated

Just the lowest price in the first row of Google shopping. Admittedly unscientific. Just trying to get a ballpark sense for relative prices.

As noted elsewhere, I’m an empty nester. Cooking for two adults, both of whom are athletic and celiac, so my perception of what’s cheap is WAY skewed. We eat lots of fish, chicken, and fresh produce.

I used the McDonald's app, creating an order for drive-through pickup (they don't seem to put prices on their website that I could find). So, I believe that should be their regular menu prices. I didn't look at 3rd party websites or apps because of the extra expense.