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.