I'm a pretty reasonable cook, actually. I spent a couple of years challenging myself to improve: I can make a reasonable pizza with home-made base and sauce (albeit American deep pan style rather than Italian), I'm fond of cooking Chinese food (because in the UK takeaway Chinese is very hit-and-miss), and I enjoy baking.

I haven't done any of that for years, because now I'm living with crippling depression, and I often face the choice of spending my energy for the day on work, on housework, on life maintenance, or on eating well. I only get to choose one at the most. So most days I live on ready meals, supermarket pizza, pasta, etc. I buy Joylent (EU version of Soylent) because I reckon it's got more nutritional value than most of the ready meals I'm eating, and it's very quick to make - useful on days when I have to drag myself out of the house and don't have time for breakfast. It's also cheap - which is good, because depression means that I don't get many billable hours worked these days.

So, yeah. I'm probably nowhere near the common case here, but I just wanted to present a case study to show that not all of us meal-replacement users are just "people who haven't learned to cook properly yet" or "people who don't care about food". We're a diverse bunch.