Where I live, buying fresh is cheaper than packaged. What’s missing are basic cooking skills. And before you get into “urban” vs “rural” arguments, I live in South Philadelphia and travel regularly to rural MN. It’s true in both places.
The common advice of "learn to cook" comes across similar to "Don't bother consuming mass media produced music -- just make up a song, sing into a microphone and play back the tape. Isn't that good enough?" Yes, I can "survival cook", and follow recipes, but more often than not it just doesn't taste right, or I burn myself, or most commonly I get half way through and realize I'm missing key ingredients. And that is the big problem, many recipes are fairly detailed but a good home cook can easily formulate their own recipe only loosely based on an original (substituting or omitting spices as needed).
Nobody is saying "make gourmet meals" or be the next Gordon Ramsay every time you step in the kitchen. It can be immensely cheaper to cook most of your meals than eating out or buying packaged food, even if that's just basic cooking.
I meal prep all my lunches for the week and they are not glamorous by any means, but I don't spend much, have a well balanced diet, and it doesn't take much effort.
Not nearly as many people as you think have that kind of time.
Then it takes 2-5 minutes every day to put on a plate and reheat in microwave. Orders of magnitude less time than going out and maybe even ordering in. Make a big pot of soup for dinner and big pot of something less liquid to take with you in a lunch box and you are set.
Learning to cook is one time investment that will save you huge amount of time.
Right, an investment many people can't make.
Also you realize you're now suggestion an entirely lifestyle shift, not just a meal-based change.
For one thing, the restaurant meals are often loaded with salt, sugar, butter, or other things our biology makes taste so good, but aren't good for you at all.
For another, you gotta start small. Learn the basics, if you will. There's also a difference between, say, when me and my wife make fresh pasta on date night vs when we use dry pasta (or better yet, a chickpea/edamame pasta) for meal prep. The first takes longer (way longer), and is more indulgent, but the second is more practical.
I'm not sure this argument holds. I cook most of my meals but even at the grocery store, things from the large farms are much cheaper than the smaller, local ones.
On the rare occasion I go to the butcher, it's significantly more expensive than going to a regular market, nearing the price of a meal at a restaurant.
Obviously the quality is way better but they don't really sell similar quality things, probably because they can't compete in that market.
It's generally cheaper to spend the gas money to drive to the nearest large city and buy fresh foods from Aldi's or Cub foods than our local grocery store the 8-9 months of the year that farmers' markets aren't open.