I have found it is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper to cook at home, even once you factor in the "lost" time.

The amount of time required to prepare incrementally larger batches increases at a sub-linear rate. The bigger your batch, the more food you get per unit of wall clock time. I try to prepare no less than 3 lbs of dry beans or 2 lbs of beef at a time. Anything less does actually feel like I'm wasting my energy.

>roughly an order of magnitude cheaper to cook at home

Why should this be the case in principle though? Do economies of scale not apply to food preparation?

They do and companies already take advantage of them. But even a fast food restaurant has a ton of additional overhead that you won't have by cooking at home (or some you won't include in your price of your homecooked meal): rent, salaries, utilities, taxes, shrinkage, maintenance, etc. So even if they can get the ingredients cheaper they can't compete with you on some of these factors and must also include others like utilities in the cost of the finished product where you will generally ignore them when thinking about how much it costs to cook dinner.

In a lot of cases it's simple price fixing. If you want to be shocked, compare the prices of frozen potato products (like bagged hash browns and french fries) to the price of potatoes. There's like a 200% premium for simply cutting and flash freezing them. The machines have got to pay for themselves in an hour.

Does it make economic sense? Yes, when you know that there is a frozen potato cartel: https://www.potatopro.com/news/2024/alleged-potato-cartel-ac...

If you want to make your own frozen potato product like this you also need to parboil them. Otherwise the results are acceptable but underwhelming.

Once you factor in rent, then cooking at home is maybe not cheaper. Rent and mortgages is the black hole sucking all money from the restaurants. Not ingredients or wages.

On the other hand, how high is the marginal rent of a kitchen at home? It's usually included whether you use it or not - and some parts like the fridge would take up space even if you exclusively ate out.

If you compare the cost of renting a room in a house, and renting an apartment it is a little easier to figure out. Usually room rentals will charge extra for kitchen access or just ban it outright.

Yes, but then you have to account for tax, pay, shipping, wastage, theft, and (most importantly) rent on both kitchen and storefront.

The homeowner does not charge themselves rent for their own kitchen, nor for their time.

It's not the case in many other places in the world. The ratio of cost for cooking vs. eating out is uniquely high in the US.

It's not an iron law, it's downstream of a hundred things, like property prices due to restrictive zoning, baumal's cost disease driving up wages, onerous regulation on food service, and a populace that seems to have collectively given up on seeking the best value for dollar.

Generally speaking the problem is rent. Restaurants are paying massive amounts of money to banks, property taxes, and real estate investors.

I can make about 2000 calories for about $2-5 using staples like rice, beans, flour, salt, yeast, pepper, etc... Generally, spices are pretty cheap. Especially if you go to the bulk section instead of buying the little jars.

The thing I see stopping most people in poverty is lack of access to a kitchen. No oven, no stove, no pantry, etc... A hot plate and a microwave if they are lucky. Also the usual health issues that come from deep poverty like executive dysfunction, depression, and other chronic illnesses.

> stopping most people in poverty is lack of access to a kitchen. No oven, no stove, no pantry, etc... A hot plate and a microwave if they are lucky.

How poor are we talking here? The most nominally poor people I know live in depressed post-industrial towns in Slovakia and I don’t think I ever saw a kitchen without a stove and an oven.

I'm thinking more along the lines with high rent/high cost of living locations like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin. Where the only affordable places are rooms in single family housing. Places where affordable housing is illegal or severely restricted.

> I have found it is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper to cook at home, even once you factor in the "lost" time.

I remember years ago, when I worked at Subway, so often I'd be ringing up the customer, tell them their total, and they'd be like "It'd be cheaper to make it at home!"

I never for the life of me understood how this was some giant revelation for some people. Of course it's cheaper to eat at home. The value proposition for eating out, even at fast food, was always convenience, not cost.

Of course, the counter-argument is always something about how a load of bread is $X, all the veggies are $Y, etc, and it adds up to like 3x the cost of the Subway sandwich. But everyone making that counter just completely ignores the fact that all those ingredients will make at least 5 sandwiches.

I love making my own sub rolls for sandwiches. They last a week on the counter so I can make them on the weekend and store them in the fridge then toast them in the oven. Subway used to be cheap but they jacked those prices up to the moon lately. Their prices have doubled in the last 10 years. Their produce is always soggy and wilted anyways.

Economists keep saying we are under 3.5% inflation which makes no sense. Prices in stores are doubling in 10 years which is more like a 7-8% inflation rate. Maybe it's local to me?

Nah, Subway has absolutely cranked their prices.

When I worked there in 2012, a footlong Roast Beef was $7.50. Now, just the six inch is $7.99, and the footlong is $14. Not quite a doubling, but still pretty nuts. That's about 4.6% per year, higher than the 3.5%.

Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). Put differently, if more people had time and money to do what you do, you wouldn't bother to do it, either.

Making food from scratch is cheap. It also doesn't take much time unless you want it to. Choosing not to cook has become performative learned helplessness.

I was far more likely to cook from scratch when I was poor than when I was not. And honestly, the food was healthier too. Basic life skills.

I really want the "cooking is too expensive" crowd to show me where they're getting their cheap food. I would struggle to make a homemade burger cost as much as a McDonalds quarter pounder. Even if I used twice as much beef.

Of course there's also eating of bad, expensive food. But being pressed for time is a real thing for some people. And IMO more importantly, if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?

Nobody says "if you want a really good office chair you have to build it yourself". Same for shoes, cars, bikes, a million things. You can do that, make your own bike for example, but to get up to par you need to spend vastly more time and money, it's basically using more resources to be quirky or make an experiment etc.

IMO the default expectation, demand, the thing we should organise to achieve, should be that what's available, what the market competes over, is good and gets better, regardless of the market. Not that it gets worse because the buyers get fleeced. Doubly so not food.

Because there are multiple competing axis for "good" as relates to food. There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.

What in my comment is that "because" supposed to connect to?

> if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?

Nope, doesn't work.

> There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.

You could say this about anything, you can either have cheap, good, and, say, extremely light-weight office-chars: pick two. That's absolutely orthogonal to what I said, and still applies to making your own vs. buying one that was made a lot cheaper be economics of scale. That trade-off applies in either case, so your comment is a complete no-op.

Why are so many things cheaper and get ever cheaper, while things like food, housing, education, medicine don't? Why does productivity rise so much faster than wages? Because there are no adults you can even discuss this with without their uneasiness forcing them to blurt out something, anything. Because people in golden cages can't even sit with what is. That's a provocative claim, an invitation for me to be proven wrong, but at least it actually relates to proceeding and surrounding comments and isn't just something out of a farmer's calendar.

I mean, that's easy. The things that get dramatically cheaper tend to be manufactured, automatable, scalable, and globally tradable. the things that keep getting more expensive tend to depend on scarce land and human labor delivered locally. Shit.

oh, and bought ingredients are excempt from that? growing them yourself is?

of course it's easy to just mindlessly say something, but you already showed that :P

The problem with food is that it is perishable which makes scale much harder to achieve without a lot of the product going to waste and thus negating the reduced costs. Preserved food you can heat up at home is quite cheap but personally I don't want to eat that every day.

At the current retail price, a half pound of beef is just shy of $5.

I consistently buy ground beef on sale for $5/pound. Looking at walmart.com right now, they are selling it for $6.44/pound. Maybe people think cooking is expensive because they, for some odd reason, are paying $5 for a half pound of ground beef.

And on Saturday, I bought a package of four 1/3 lb burger patties (ground chuck) for $7.99 and a package of burger buns for under $2 at a gas station. Kwik-Trip FTW.

That price depends a lot on where you live and shop.

Maybe stop shopping at Whole Foods, Market of Choice, New Seasons, etc.

At my local grocery store (Fred Meyer, a chain owned by Kroger), ground beef is as little as $5.33/lb. It only gets to $10/lb if you insist on buying the 93% lean, grass fed, organic beef.

If I get it at Costco, it's even cheaper.

The problem is I typically only want a single burger, but I have to buy the ingredients for four or more. To purchase all the ingredients to make a home made quarter pounder with cheese, I am spending around 40-50 USD. Sure, I could make five or six with those ingredients, but that is irrelevant if I only want one. And many of those ingredients are perishable. Unless I am eating several quarter pounders a week, I am saving money by getting a quarter pounder from Macca's when the mood strikes.

And here I was stupidly thinking that making meals at home was the default and eating out/getting takeout was the exception.

You would be correct. US BLS survey data consistently indicates that a majority of Americans cook at home and almost never eat out.

Affluent urban professionals, of which there are many on HN, may have their perception of the world influenced by living in a bubble of people that eat out several times a week. Until I saw the BLS data, I assumed more people eat out than actually do because almost everyone I know falls into this category. But having been poor once, I definitively know you can eat cheaply and well by cooking at home.

What? I make things from scratch because I'm broke AF.

lol amen. I don't understand where this myth of it being expensive to do things yourself came from. It's not only cheaper but way way way cheaper. And that's comparing it to crap quality stuff. If you compare to what something of the same quality as you make would cost, then the difference is just ridiculous.

I think the myth comes from the upfront costs of cooking equipment and spices as well as expensive proteins like ground beef. If you cook with mostly starches like rice or potatoes and just some meat, there's no contest. The other thing that can make cooking expensive is buying too many different ingredients to make a fancy dish and having a bunch of leftover stuff that gets thrown out. But that's where soups come in.

I think most people don't know how to cook cheap stuff and don't even know where to start. It is a bit of a learned skill. You get a repertoire of cheap but delicious menu items over time. It used to be that our parents would hand them down like sacred family heirlooms on notecards in a greasy metal box. But our parents were way richer than us and they only kept the most delicious ones.

One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.

Many of those old recipes on the notecards relied on heavily processed, shelf-stable industrial ingredients from a century ago that few people would use today. The recipes were commonly disseminated by companies as a form of marketing for their product. We have unimaginably superior access to diverse and fresh ingredients today compared to many of the recipes that e.g. my older relatives used.

Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.

Archive has a bunch of older recipe books. This [1] is a collection just from the 50s which would be primo processed time (mass canning/etc just after WW2). I could not find a single recipe with anything like what you're describing.

[1] - https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&...

Blessed is the person who decided to exclude recipes from copyright law. They will forever hold a place in my heart.

That’s a limitation of your source. Several recipes that I’ve seen passed down from that era were like this. Many of those recipes have an origin that can be googled.

I am an accomplished cook and I have a lot of recipes passed down a century or more first-hand. Many have the property I described. I know many other people with similar family recipes.

Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Most of the product types you're describing didn't meaningfully exist until the 50s (which is why I used that era) as WW2 greatly expanded production of crap food and subsequently led to a wider public introduction. So having family recipes using them from a century or more would be quite odd.

Beyond that, what do you think is more representative of recipes of the past? A selection of hundreds of recipe books with thousands of recipes, or the family recipes of yourself and some acquaintances?

That might have been the case in the US but definitely not everywhere.

There's a specific category of people who get weird about this on social media. Shorthand for it is "burrito taxi discourse". There's usually a long list of excuses, some of which may have validity, some of which are a bit stretched.

I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper.

Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.

I definitely don't agree with this part. Home cooking is often significantly better than restaurants. Not only are cooking and running a restaurant very different skill sets (and 'just hire a really good chef' isn't really viable for a typical restaurant), but you also have issues of scale. Creating a diverse menu that can be created, on demand, in a short period of time imposes significant limitations on what you can produce.

Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices.

The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.

Scale does matter, though. The little thing that elevates restaurant (and especially "street food", for some reason) is usually garnishes. Small amounts of fresh ingredients are a big pain for home cooking because they require disproportionately more effort. Whereas the things that do do better at home tend to be long slow dishes that you don't get in restaurants because of the lead time.

It's certainly very easy to do better than chain fast food. And my opinion of a certain local cafe was diminished once I got a Costco card and recognized the muffins.

I suspect if the thing that elevates food for you is garnishes, then you're probably speaking of a way different class of food than the average person. But in any case, what sort of ingredients are you talking about? Typical garnishes are things like herbs and they take quite some time to go bad.

> Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation).

It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support.

I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.

I think a lot of it is depression and anxiety causing executive dysfunction. The claim about "Lack of Time" usually indicates that the person doesn't have the energy or wellbeing to engage in activities like cooking or cleaning. If there is one thing that poverty and financial instability do, they destroy your mental and physical health.

It's usually faster making a meal at home than ordering from a restaurant, if you are smart about it. And it's always cheaper and healthier as well. And tastier.

I find it apparent when I very occasionally take a break from making my own stuff from scratch and get a takeout.

Totally, a huge swathe of things are better and cheaper when your make them yourself, you just need the time. Shame we've given up all our free time to work so we can buy worse alternatives.

> Shame we've given up all our free time to work so we can buy worse alternatives.

Not true on average. The average American spends 4-5 hours a day on personal screen time.

And those who complain about not having time to cook I'd bet dollars to donuts are pulling that average up, if my personal lived experience is anything to go by.

There is a case here in terms of two income households being the norm these days, but that's really about it. The average person today lives a life of far more comfort and convenience than even in the 90's.

Doom scrolling is part of the free labour we are providing, in exchange for digital goods.

The average person doesn't exist.

For a lot of my friends it's not about time. They'll proclaim their lack of time to make a simple meal, doom scroll for hours then order take-away then doom scroll half and hour while waiting for it to come.

What about the rationalisations of those who cut corners and wine to make even more profit when they're already so rich it's become a health issue for them? How is it the sole responsibility of your friends to work around that?

The idea is basically that it's "just the way it is" that the food we can buy in supermarkets, that is made in factories, that GIGANTIC amounts of real estate and logistics and energy are devoted to, that is made cheaper than it would be otherwise (and that is true even if it was awesome quality and mega healthy -- it would be more expensive, but less expensive than doing it yourself, economics of scale etc.) sucks, is unhealthy, you "shouldn't eat that".

Just buy some veggies and do it yourself. It's not so hard to plant some tomatoes, either! Nevermind people in private jets doing airshows... I just can't with how lazy my friends are. It would take them 30 minutes max.

It's not that you're wrong, of course. Both "sides" matter, and you always should mostly focus on what you control. But at the same time, it's better to punch up than kick down or sideways.

Unintelligible. Re-write this into something coherent so I can respond if you like.

sorry, got no time to eat healthy -- too busy scrolling!!