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.