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.

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jandrewrogers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Petersipoi 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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customguy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	fragmede 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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TylerE 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	HeyLaughingBoy an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	Petersipoi an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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HeyLaughingBoy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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foxyv 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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somenameforme 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	AlexandrB an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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Amezarak 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.