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.