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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Having to learn cooking skills is definitely a factor (some say it should be taught at school) but speaking only for myself I actually know how to cook half-decently, I have the hardware and I'm in the same boat as the parent: I order and/or take away most meals during the week. It's not a lot more expensive that cooking yourself and it's a lot quicker and more convenient. When I get home from a day's work I often can't be bothered to spend even 30 minutes cooking and cleaning. Now I mainly cook on weekends when I have the time to do things right and I can actually enjoy it.

I too wonder if overall it's a bad habit (socially and environmentally) that I should try to change or if it's just a reasonable and efficient way to get food in the 21st century.

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I'm glad that I didn't have to scroll too far to find someone raising the environmental question.. I think the problem here is delivery/containers

I live not too far from a very good couscous restaurant, and the tradition among the maghrebi matriarchs is to come to get takeaway with their own pots. I've picked up on the habit and it's a really good compromise - minimum eoclogical impact, delicious food, in the comfort of your own home (useful when you have babies)

>It's not a lot more expensive than cooking yourself

What?!?!

I get the feeling your definition of "not a lot more expensive" is a lot more inclusive than mine.

Obviously cost of home cooking vs prepared depends a lot on where you'd eat out and what you'd make for yourself but in my experience fast food off the value menu is about the only thing that's close to cost competitive with cooking for yourself. I would have to eat almost exclusively organic and add a lot of wild non-frozen seafood to my diet if I wanted to make the cost of preparing my own meals close to the cost of buying Chipotle/Five Guys quality prepared food. Maybe the numbers are different for people who shop at Whole Foods or otherwise go out of their way to increase the cost of groceries but your statement that eating out is close to cost competitive with cooking for yourself seems like it's from another universe.

>Obviously cost of home cooking vs prepared depends a lot on where you'd eat out

Given that most delivery services have a minimum, it's pretty difficult to spend less than $15-20 to get your food delivered.

In my experience, it's about $2-4/meal to cook, $12-15/meal to eat out, and $20+/meal to get delivery. Imagine that over a year. If you're cooking at $4/meal vs eating out at $12/meal, that's ~$3000 over a year!

On the other hand, you are paying for convenience and some people are willing (and able) to shoulder that cost.

To play devil's advocate, if you factor in the cost of your time, I would expect home cooking to be extremely expensive for most of the people posting here.

Only if you count cooking to be work.

I completely agree! I think you need to differentiate monday evening family cooking with a nice relaxing recipe on a saturday afternoon for friends

20 minute mental break to prepare some food is a great way to keep energized for more work.

A game changer for me has been a high quality rice cooker. Put rice or quinoa in the cooker as soon as I wake up and my at my “lunch break” I prepare some other stuff, eat and get back to work. I work from home all day generally.

Well I should've mentioned that I live in Paris. Obviously if where you are you can get groceries for cheap then I'm sure you can easily beat the restaurants. Buying fruit, vegetables and meat/fish in small shops in Paris can be ridiculously expensive. Restaurants generally buy in bulk from vendors outside of Paris with much more reasonable prices.

Cooking would probably still end up being cheaper in most cases but not by a huge margin. But then again Paris might not be very typical in that regard, food is notoriously expensive here.

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