the advantage of fast-food over groceries, is that you don't have to worry about spoilage and waste. So the delta is probably less than you think. Now granted McD is an s-show, they are no longer the restaurant of the poor, You likely can get a better burger meal deal at a Chilis than a McD, as sad as that is.

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ac29 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even if you waste half your groceries its still cheaper than eating out. And wasting that much is difficult to do, most staples will last weeks to years without risk of spoilage.

There are some fresh fruits and vegetables that are exceptions because they dont take well to refrigeration or freezing but really not much.

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mbfg 5 hours ago | parent [-]

also, there is the case of the mismatched quantities for shopping, ie, the old hot dogs come in 10 packs, and rolls in 8 backs, etc.

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defrost 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Good grief .. you're serious?

Flour comes in sacks, meat comes in cuts - we've a quarter lamb in the freezer, part of that in the fridge, and yeast and flour enough for bread for the next six months.

We shop cheap, like the family has done for the past 100+ years, much of our food comes from the garden - our excess gets swapped with others excess (we have a lot of fruit, we never buy eggs, they come from people that can be bothered to run chickens).

It's a bit of work, we save money by not going to a gym and our life expectancy and cancer survival rates are much better than, say, middle north America.

	▲	__MatrixMan__ 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To cut mbfg a bit of slack here, your approach doesn't work in all situations. I admire your functioning community and supportive family and the fact that you've got time and space for things like gardening. If people can't live like you do, it's probably because they've been placed on some kind of economic hamster wheel, and rather than figure out how to get a quarter of a lamb their better bet is to emigrate or to disrupt the system that's making McDonalds feel like a relevant factor in a survival equation and build the community that you're describing in the wake of that disruption, which might be difficult if you've never been part of a community that functions in that way.

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strken 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is just wrong. Beans and rice are more than an order of magnitude cheaper than McDonald's per calorie and they're non-perishable. Combine that with whatever fruit and veg is affordable fresh or frozen, a bit of cheap seasoning, and you're still coming out ahead.

You obviously need access to cooking and storage facilities to eat like this, but the target audience of McDonald's is the time-poor, the resource-constrained, or the depressed and disabled, rather than just the money-poor.