I love to cook, but your time and effort are also worth money.
Man Idk why you got downvoted for this.
IF (all caps) you have spare cash, it can be worth it to order / eat out instead of buying + preparing + cooking + cleaning up.
There’s the taste and satisfaction factor too if you’re not a confident cook. Good, satisfying food is a great boost if you need it.
Again, BIG IF. I understand not everyone has this leeway but if you do, it’s very helpful when you don’t have to spend energy and time to prepare meals
Absolutely. There are certain things I never get in a restaurant anymore. Steak, for example, is very easy once you learn how to cook it and gets marked up a lot.
But sometimes a fast food burger just hits. And even if it’s $7 that’s still less money than I would spend to buy the individual ingredients to make it.
And there is an argument to be said for the economics of a centralized source of food versus distributed ones. Cost of labor and profit margins aside, cooking food in bulk for more people in one place uses fewer resources than that number of people buying food themselves from a store and cooking at home. And sure, restaurants have a lot of food waste, but I can guarantee supermarkets waste a lot more.
plus if you’re not an experienced cook and don’t really know what you’re doing (hell, even if you do and you make a simple mistake), a ruined meal means all those ingredients and all the money spent on them go to waste.
As someone who only learned to cook as an adult, my experience has been that if you’re careful it’s nearly impossible to ruin a meal. Even if you mess up the spices it’s probably salvageable, and with a timer having food burn is really not a concern.
Agreed, so long as you use good ingredients to start with the resulting meal is almost always passable at the very least.
Yea I do that.
I do also believe that removes a potential 3rd space of which there are already few (in the US anyway).
So now I have to be weird on the internet instead.
Considering how many people get freakin’ McDonald’s delivered, learning to cook for yourself isn’t exactly to blame.
Host a potluck dinner. Be the third space.
Hey, I think you’re pretty darn nifty.
Thanks, you too
Prepare your food with affordable ingredients in your work to save time and money
Y’all act like knowing how to boil water and saute an onion costs $800.
Learning to cook is freedom.
Cooking for others is a joy. People can share this joy together. Host a goddamned potluck. Many hands make light of work.
Find recipes that fit your budget.
40,000 years worth of humans have figured this out. This is your right.
If you don’t have a good sized freezer, buy one. It’ll pay for itself pretty quickly.
I have a five quart pot.
Every once in a while I’ll whip up a big mess of chili [or lentil soup or stew…] and freeze it in pint size containers.
“Affordable” ingredients? You’re paying!? I pluck mine directly from my bountiful garden. When we want to splurge on meat, we kill the fatted calf, etc. It’s basic stuff.
The account is money you save my only be a few hundred a month, but if you invest that money into the s&p from age 20-60. That would be 3.8million dollars.
Going out in essentially eating your retirement.
Careful those people who know door dash is a scam but keep using it anyway might see this
Making your lunch for work seems like too much extra work, I just cook extra for dinner and use that for lunch next day.
Lots of good YouTube and other resources on how to do this. Joshua Weissman and Jeremy Ethier have some good starter videos. I think Bobby Parrish has some series on cheap and healthy options as well as an app. It is doable it just takes a little bit of research and planning.
Personally, I just that the economy was so good that fast food and other food outlets sold healthy food at cheap or affordable prices so that I never have to worry about it.
But capitalism sucks.
Aldi was a life-changing experience for me. Buy bread 50% off and freeze. They used to discount meat, but almost completely stopped at mine since inflation shot up. Still, lower prices and freezable items
Affordable by who?
