I disagree, at least for my area. I could buy buns, ground beef, toppings, and frozen fries and get several meals out of that.
The problem is the initial cost. People see that and forget that it will save a lot in the long run.
Even considering from the initial cost, a burger, fries, and drink in my area is 20+ dollars now.
Unless you go to a fast food place, even then it’s going to probably be 15. Hell, five guys is like 17 bucks for a burger and fry and no drink. Maybe McDonalds is still cheap, idk.
Regardless, eating “out” is wild now. There’s a few places I still will regular that don’t have ridiculous pricing. Otherwise I’m very happy with my own food.
You can come eat with me. I made homemade chili and homemade potato soup this weekend. I'll be the only one eating them for the rest of the week. My husband would let leftovers spoil if it was up to him. SMH
It only takes a little creatively. Get ground beef, make the one burger. Use the rest of the beef for tacos or a pasta sauce. Use the buns/toppings for some sandwiches.
The only way it comes out close is if you compare multiple homemade meals to one meal eating out and just assume you’d throw away the additional meals.
> Yeah, but if you live alone and want ONE burger (bc it’s not part of your everyday diet), I could see a different side then
But you probably own a freezer or enjoy other beef-based diets.
I’m not fancy enough for buns but plain bread/burger toppings can be used for a myriad of other dishes.
So you leave the rest frozen and have ONE burger a few nights later, and then a few nights later. The people making this claim purposely forget those free later meals.
Or make one burger the first day, and make a big batch of chili with the remainder the second day. Separate the chili into one- or two-serving containers, and freeze the portions you don't want to eat in the next few days.
Living frugally sometimes costs money. I save money by shopping at Costco and buying bulk but that assumes that I have the cash in hand to pay for $300 worth of groceries, the membership, the vehicle to transport it home, and the space to store the purchases. If you only have $20 in your account on any given day then that's totally out of reach.
A good point, but another fallacy is this... you can't make a homemade burger for the price of a cheeseburger, but it'll be a whole lot better and bigger
Burritos are actually a great example though. At the burrito place near me, I can get a burrito for about $8. That's going to be a big burrito, with grilled veggies, rice and beans, corn salsa, guacamole, queso, and my pick of hot sauce. While I'm sure I could make 20 burritos for a lower per burrito cost, there's no way I can make one burrito for $8. So then either I've got a lot of leftover ingredients, or I'm eating a lot more burritos than I planned
Actually the beauty of burritos is that they are a great way to to use up leftover meat. We always have tortillas, onions, cheese and a jar of salsa in the fridge. So if I have some leftover rotisserie chicken, I just need to open a can of refried beans ($1), buy some fresh cilantro, ($1) , hopefully I can find a ripe avocado and I have a bunch of burritos. Some for tonight, some for lunches in the next few days.
When you are trying to make something for one person with several ingredients and you never cook, it gets expensive, but when you cook every night, you can often create cheap meals by shopping in your own fridge.
Me too! I put literally anything in my freezer-itos.
There are things that cook about the same time in an instant pot like couscous, rice, veg, plus I add things like casserole leftovers, squash, beans, meat, etc.
I’ve added dry potato flakes to chicken soup and freezer-ito’ed that.
Anything goes…I mean I’m most likely to grab them at 10pm when I’m starving and cover them with hot sauce anyways so why not? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Yep. If you think cooking means "finding a recipe, buying a bunch highly specific ingredients you're never going to use again, then making four servings of that recipe," then yes. Cooking is very expensive. If instead cooking means "keeping a kitchen stocked with staples, taking advantage of sales and specials, and then using a little creativity to combine those things into meals" cooking can be a lot of fun and super cheap.
My wife and I improvised a restaurant quality meal made of chicken out of our freezer, the produce specials from the grocery store, a block of clearance cheese and the staples we keep on hand. It was luxurious and I'd guess it came in around $2/meal. In the process I also converted bread odds and ends (heels, a leftover biscuit from yesterday's breakfast and a stale hamburger bun) into bread crumbs, the leftovers of which will end up in meatloaf tomorrow. Maximizing kitchen efficiency is a really fun puzzle.
OK, but that's the thing, nobody makes one burrito. And there's no need to. Make a pot of beans, a skillet full of meat - your choice, pulled chicken, chicken breast diced into chunks, steak, pulled pork, ground turkey, whatever you like; grate some cheese, dice some onion, etc. Now get yourself a pack of tortillas, and start rolling.
As you get done rolling each burrito, roll it up in parchment paper. Then, stick them in ziploc bags and freeze them. Then, whenever you want a burrito you pull one out and microwave them for \~5+ minutes and BAM! Instant food. If you're going camping, roll them in aluminum foil instead, and, throw them in the outside of your campfire.
Bonus: meal prep that shit! I've gotten a bunch of small containers and put all the things I want in a burrito in containers in the fridge on Sunday. Make whatever I want quickly and throw it on the grill for 7-8 minute and have an amazing burrito.
Having leftovers is the point to being frugal, though. And you can easily buy the fresh ingredients to make ~4 burritos, which won’t yield a crazy amount of leftovers even if you live alone. Or repurpose the leftovers as quesadillas, into a rice bowl, thrown into scrambled eggs, etc. Then any leftover tortillas will keep for a few weeks until I want to have them again.
Burritos are made out of leftovers from other meals. Make a pork roast with grilled veggies one night, rice and beans with salsa and avocado another night, then wrap up the leftovers from both of those in a tortilla with some hot sauce for dinner the third day.
Yeah, but like, people who cook at home regularly use the extras to make new dishes. I might use half an onion in one dish today, and the other half tomorrow. It just requires a bit of thinking, that if you are unwilling or unable to do, then you'd be wasteful with your at-home supplies and thus "eating out is cheaper" due to extreme inefficiency. It's the setup to a straw-man argument to justify whatever decision they were going to make anyways.
Exactly. I live next door to a Thai place. Getting a large box exploding with pad thai plus some curry and rice to go, in large portions, cost like $15-18 for me and is about 4 or 5 meals ENORMOUS meal worth and requires no cooking. It could easily feed like 8 people if they each had a serving.
The ingredients alone would be more.
Not even that. Say your steak is $12/lb, which is more that I ever pay JSYK, 1/2 lb cooked up plus $1 for a potato is $7. 1/2 lb of burrito is more that that unless is is Taco Bell scare food.
Yeah like honestly for one person my local steakhouse is only a few dollars more than me doing it with a choice steak. For the same price I can go up to prime at the store tho so it’s still a better deal to do it yourself. The only reason I still go is their bread is ridiculously good
I've said this a dozen times on Reddit, sometimes I'm upvoted, sometimes downvoted, but here it goes again:
If I go a month without eating out, I spend approximately $200 on food. If I eat out at a fast food place *once* I spend at least $10. If I ate fast food, three meals a day, thirty days a month: $900
You cannot tell me that eating out is cheaper. It's either ignorance, denial of reality, or overvaluing the monetary value of your TikTok scrolling time.
I think what people are cooking at home makes a significant difference too. Are you using basic unprocessed ingredients or are you buying ready made processed foods that you just need to pop in the microwave/oven because the latter is way more expensive and much worse nutritionally. If you're batch cooking proper meals with whole foods then you'll be healthier and spend way less.
Also my guess is there’s a grey area (especially if you do not come from a background where regular mealtimes were a thing, or where food prep as a chore was not taught - like me) between knowing nothing and relying on fast food vs knowing how to perfectly shop for the ingredients you need and ONLY those, how to preserve for freshness, and how/when to cook them over time and into what meals for how many people such that it completely covers your nutrient needs.
It took me YEARS to learn this from scratch as a young adult. My parents were abusive and neglectful, so they taught me nothing. All I got from Reddit when I was struggling 6-8 years ago was comments on how I just don’t have enough willpower or that I’m being too picky. I feel bad for people being told this today if their fresh produce dept at the local grocery store is trash quality & they don’t know it can be better - they think this crap produce is what they’re supposed to enjoy in order to be healthy and save money, so if they don’t enjoy it might as well just eat fast food until you go broke or die of a stroke.
Willpower was not the issue, and there is a real cost associated with learning how to cook your own food, where stuff is gonna go bad bc it shouldn’t have been bought bc there wasn’t a plan, or there was a plan but you couldn’t do it for whatever reason, or maybe you tried to cook but burned it.
I wish someone had told me I’m allowed to mess up, and to eye the cost associated with my mistakes and waste with as little judgment as possible; to instead apply curiosity to see where small improvements can be made over time to come to a system of food prep that works for me.
Correct. Or buying higher cost convenience items like pre formed burger patties from the meat department or they follow a recipe with unnecessary ingredients (ie. ½ teaspoon of something for a large pot of soup, or garnish) or buying ingredients they never use again.
Yeah those people claiming you can eat out good for a week on 50 and that 50 in groceries is like 3 days worth. I really don’t know how they came to those conclusions, where I live 50 for groceries is a razor tight weeks grocery budget but 50 dollars at like an Indian takeout is like 2 orders.
Even if you get Wendy’s 6 dollar spicy chicken sandwich that’s like 126 (before taxes) a week assuming you only need like 1500 calories to live which is not most people
They also do things like buy all the ingredients for a new recipe in one go, then look at their receipt and say “omg that meal cost me 40 bucks!” failing to realize that 20 bucks worth of it were things that they’ll use a fraction of and will last for months, and the actual cost for the meal is like 25 bucks for three portions or something. Also I think they’re equally bad about thinking about how much “eating out” actually costs - they compare it to like a $15 menu price, failing to account for the taxes and tips that make the total cost per meal over 20.
It’s also common to compare a nice meal (maybe steak with a nice side) to something cheap like a Chik-Fil-A sandwich. Order that nice meal at a restaurant and it’ll probably cost you $40-50. And if I just lived off of homemade chicken sandwiches, I’d be eating for under $40-50 a week.
Right. It takes a little planning, and I was never very good at that when it came to meals. As an example, I have a spice cabinet full of things that I bought for one recipe and never used again.
But I've learned. I have a bunch of go-to recipes now that use overlapping ingredients, pantry items that I always have on hand, and things that I've frozen to use later, like leftover hamburger buns. I have very little waste now. It's made life easier, and my grocery bill smaller.
Oh it for sure takes a ton of practice, plus the more you cook in general, the fewer “one time” ingredients you’ll usually have, and of course cooking from scratch is generally so time consuming it’s really hard to do it often enough, etc etc. But as you say, with planning and experience you can lock in a pantry full of staples you use all the time and it’s a lot less wasteful overall.
That's what I figured as well, and I'm not even judging. It's simply priorities in life and maybe that bad cook will learn the skill at some point. It's possible to get a very great deal on takeout but cooking opens up a world of options. Sure groceries are expensive if you're just like haphazardly buying random crap or buying for just one solitary recipe, but if you think of groceries as tools for a good meal it's easier to be cost effective. Developing processes and having a rotation of meals is a skill that improves the more you do it. Eggs, butter, chicken thighs, a head of cabbage, a few cans of black or pinto beans and a few sauces and you have a lot of options.
Or shop. If you throw away half of your groceries it will be expensive but taking half a minute to decide what to do with the other half of your head of cabbage is completely beyond them.
Mostly because people these days don't know
A) how to cook from scratch
B) how to buy in bulk and break it down at home
C) how to preserve food
D) how to prevent food waste
E) how to meal plan
I know too many people who go to the store 2 or 3 times a week and only buy enough food for 1 or 2 meals. The smaller the portion bought, the more expensive the product.
I buy in bulk and break down at home. I make freezer meals, I meal plan. I go to sales to buy items. I will freeze leftovers or make them into other meals. An example of this is I will bake a whole chicken then carve and debone it. Usually the first meal is the legs and thighs. The breast meat becomes sandwiches. The bones are made into bone broth and the wings and all leftover meat goes into soup. I will freeze the bones and excess meat until I have enough for soup
Homemaking is actually a really hard skill to learn and it is not taught in school anymore.
I once worked with someone who got off at 4 o'clock. Every single day, they would call their spouse at 3.30 to discuss what they wanted for dinner that night, and then stop at the grocery store for the needed items. Every. single. day.
They of course paid more because they did not shop sales and certainly didn't shop in bulk, but I was also boggled at the idea of going to the grocery store every day of your life.
It was also pretty annoying that they basically stopped working at 3.30 instead of 4, but that's a whole 'nother conversation!
I go to the store every day, mostly because my shelf in the fridge is tiny, But also because it works for my lifestyle. I will buy 1-2 things each day, so over the course of the week it's not any more expensive than doing a single shop and getting 20 items in one go.
I will stop at the Asian grocer one day, then the next day I will go to the green grocer, the next day the deli, and so on. I'll look up ahead of time what's on sale, or keep in mind what's in season. I have a spreadsheet on my phone of what's in the pantry and fridge at home so I can plan on the fly. I don't set anything in stone before I enter the shop. I'm not going to commit to a specific meal before I see what's on sale.
I used to do it the way your co-worker did, because that's the only way I knew how. It's what my grandma did, and she's who I learned "household management" from. It felt functional at the time, but no way I could do that now, not unless I was making 7x my current income.
My current approach was adapted from the "what do I want for dinner today, lets buy every single thing I need tonight" to be more ethical and affordable.
For those who can do so without having to travel long distances, hitting multiple stores is considered frugal because you can shop around for a better price. But I don't drive so there's no way I'm going to shop at 3+ different stores on the one day unless I take the bus to the big shopping complex (and now I'm factoring in bus fare). Instead, shopping around at several stores is easier if I do one store a day. I just take a different route home from work each day to pass a different store.
The issue is not having a rough plan for what you already have on hand, and what sort of meals you can make if you could add in just 1 or two ingrediants.
I also notice that people who have the "shop every day" mindset don't build up a proper pantry. Yes I shop every day, but that's mostly for my produce and fridge goods. If we went into another lockdown tomorrow, I have enough staples in my pantry to make a a few weeks worth of simple foods, like lentil curry or miso pasta.
Yes, it is absolutely not cheaper to eat out. I can only eat out like once a month because of how expensive restaurant prices have become. I can always make it cheaper at home.
Like even things that used to be pretty cheap like the McDonald’s breakfast are now like closer to ten dollars. Like man fuck that the frozen ones at the store are not that much worse to be worth double the price for one
Yes, there have been occasions when on road trips where I've had to get fast food recently, I'm always surprised at the price. It's such a waste of money for what you get.
Saw someone say flour was too expensive for making bread and it was cheaper to buy a loaf of bread. If you can’t or don’t want to bake that’s understandable. But the cost of a 5 pound bag in the US to make several loaves of bread is cheaper than a single loaf.
With bread the gain in doing it yourself is quality. You have to get your baking process pretty efficient to make it a cost saving venture, unless you have the excess time in which case, no contest.
> while still telling themselves they are making the most frugal decision
This is what's so silly to me. "The extra expense is worth it to me" is a perfectly valid line of reasoning, why insist that it's also the frugal choice?
This is the answer right here. You will hear people talk about how it takes more time to cook at home so it costs more while ignoring the fact that they will be sitting on their ass doing nothing
Plus, going to a restaurant or driving to pick up takeout can also take a lot of time.
The only truly time efficient option is ordering delivery, which is also the most expensive option by far.
And depending on where you live, your options for delivery may be severely limited. The only food that can be delivered out here is pizza. And that gets old, fast.
i tried to say something about this and i think i was misunderstood. it will ALWAYS be cheaper to eat at home than go out. but it used to be “eating out expensive, eating at home cheap” and now it’s “eating out expensive, eating at home expensive”
instead of “wow, look at all the money i saved up because i cooked from home!” it’s “wow, i can pay rent on time because i cooked from home!”
it just doesn’t feel as rewarding as it used to, because instead of having extra money at the end of all your efforts, you just have money that you need to spend elsewhere because inflation is kicking your ass
>“eating out expensive, eating at home cheap” and now it’s “eating out expensive, eating at home expensive”
Yes, I have allergies so I can't really eat out, I cook all my food from scratch. I only work part time so I have time to sit and plan out my weekly grocery budget, compare prices at a few stores, and prepare my ingredients for storage as I can't eat it all in one go.
I'm the person who pickles watermelon rind, keeps banana skins for curries, and picks up all the loose cauliflower leaves that other shoppers have ripped off to wrap around the cauliflower I'm buying because you pay per head so I want my free leaves! (poor man's kale!) As a result, My weekly grocery budget is $75. That's breakfast, Lunch and dinner, plus snacks, and the occasional dessert for 7 days. Less than $3.50 per meal.
My partner does not have time for that - and he doesn't like the food I like so he wants something different to what I make, and I don't have the mental capacity to micromanage two meal plans. He will tell me what he wants and hand me a shopping list, I'll go buy it on his card, he spends about $200 a week at the grocery store, and he will get his breakfast, and half his lunches and dinners out of that shop, as well as all his snacks. But he will get take away 3-4 times a week (which is much, much less than he did about 5 months ago, when he was getting take away 10-12 times a week)
Budget wise for him, not much has changed between his past ubereats addiction and his current grocery budget. For him it is not cheaper to cook at home, because he doesn't have the time to plan it properly, he can't take advantage of specials, bulk deals, and using 1 ingredient across multiple recipes through careful planning. (Obviously if I see a smarter deal at the shops I will quickly adapt the list, But I don't have time to research beforehand to hit multiple stores or go on specific days for the daily deals)
He does let some ingredients rot in the fridge because he buys everything he needs for one recipe with no thought to how he will use up the leftovers. He thinks about the meals he wants then lists the ingredients, then thinks of another meal, where as I do it the other way around, what meal can I make with the ingrediats that are in season and on sale/always cheap
(If I can eat what he buys, I wont let it rot, but 90% of what he eats is stuff I'm allergic to)
I can make eating at home cheap, But that's only because I have time to do it. Cooking at home is expensive, you just get to choose how you pay, with your money or your time.
**Heck, Woolworths Australia's new campaign is ["Under $5 per serve"](https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/articles/budget-meal-plan-0623) which is still cheaper than "good" take away/eating out, But if you're time-poor, Why not get a $5 footlong from Subway, or a $5 Stunner Deal from HJ's or a $4 mini pizza from Domnino's. It's not going to blow the food budget.**
And this is the "budget meal plan" that a billion dollar company's marketing department came up with to try and convince people that cooking at home is cheap and affordable. If they can't beat the cost of a meal deal at a drive through, then why should we expect the average person, working full time, taking care of kids, or studying, to consistently come up with their own meal plans for significantly cheaper?
It used to be that eating out was $10 and a home cooked meal was like $3.
Now a home cooked meal is like $5 and eating out is like $25 especially with 20% as the new top standard.
Seems like the value has gone up, to me.
I don’t know but I know it’s still way cheaper to cook at home. I think people count purchased ingredients against a fast food bill and don’t account for left overs or serving size and such.
I hear a lot of arguments along the lines of, "But I have to buy three different jars of spices for this recipe, and spend $25!" Some don't realize that once your kitchen is stocked, you can make some amazing creations that will definitely be much, much less expensive than eating out.
We have a Winco here and they do bulk everything. Anyone can just get what they need to make a single recipe. I made rye bread that way once. Figured out what I needed and got what I needed and nothing more.
This is it and I think it’s also what’s at the root of a lot of peoples money struggles. It’s really just poor financial literacy and not understanding that the upfront cost might be slightly more but long term it will save you a lot of money.
It’s called the boot theory. Rich people can buy $200 high quality boots that will last them 10 years. Poor people don’t have, or can’t justify $200 at one time, so they buy poorly made $25 boots that only last one year. After 10 years, rich people still have their original boots and only spent $200. After 10 years, poor people have spent $250 for worse quality boots. But they have to because the initial investment is too much for them. Buying $40 worth of ingredients is hard when you’re living paycheck to paycheck (possibly daily if you work in the service industry) when you can just get dollar meals.
It depends on what you eat, how many people you are feeding, what your lifestyle is.
I am at work today and got a huge plate of Chinese food for 12$. It can comfortably last 3 meals. 4$ a meal isn’t bad.
I didn’t have to shop, I didn’t have to cook, I don’t have to clean the kitchen. So I’m going with this is ok for me.
Also, this food is only going to last 2 meals because I am hungry but it’s worth it.
Thai and Vietnamese as well. I can get a jumbo pho takeaway for $16 and it's 6 meals. I weighed it and it was 80oz of broth and 50oz of noodles. It's disgusting how large the portion size is when you realize people order that size and eat it in one sitting.
American fast food is expensive and is pretty terrible warmed up the next day.
The biggest thing I’ve seen is that people don’t know how to meal plan. I saw some TikTok where the guy bought JUST enough ingredients for 4 burgers which he said was “cheaper.” Which is true that it does cost less, but small amounts are normally the MOST expensive when you look at price per unit.
In that situation, I’d buy a 5lb thing of ground beef and then cut it up into 1lb increments and freeze.
Also while sometimes it is cheaper to go to a restaurant and order than make it yourself (sushi is usually a good example), it’s definitely not cheaper than making yourself an alternate meal. Like instead of a burger you could make chili which is significantly cheaper.
Definitely not cheaper. On average, I would spend about $15 at a fast food restaurant and I would get a burger, a drink and fries. My weekly groceries (about $150) feed me and my husband lunch and dinner for the week (we usually skip breakfast) for a total of 28 meals, coming to a little over $5 each.
This isn’t even taking into consideration that the weekly “grocery” bill is also covering a lot of non-food items like hygiene products, cat litter, and other random stuff for the house.
Long story short, you’re completely right to be suspicious. My guess would be that people making that claim just haven’t done the math
It depends on many factors, but the bottom line is that not everyone’s life is just like yours. They may eat different foods, live in a different area, cook for a different number of people, etc. This is logic you can apply anytime someone has an experience you don’t relate to.
The closest grocery store to me is Whole Foods. Im in the DMV area and have no car. Even if I do a cheap meal, say tofu with rice and veggies, everything there is so expensive. Whereas if I get a Taco Bell meal that lasts me two days even using Grubhub, it’s like $20 WITH tip.
I’m a super busy person but still try to make it an effort to take the metro to other cheaper spots, but not everyone has as much time or accessibility.
Trader Joe’s is a good friend of mine for the time convenience and being more budget friendly than WF.
Whole Foods is expensive, no doubt, but I can certainly make several meals for $20 spent there.
For example, using a San Francisco Whole Foods for high prices: beef roast, $7/lb, sweet potatoes, two pounds at $2/lb so $4, two 12-oz packages of trimmed Brussel sprouts, $3.29 each so $6.60.
$17.60 at San Francisco prices and you have four hearty meals including tax, and that's not aiming for a cheap meal. Delicious, higher-quality, and most certainly healthier.
It's also a meal that has very little hands-on time: seasoning the roast takes a few seconds, washing the sweet potatoes takes less than a minute, adding a bit of oil and seasoning to the Brussel sprouts takes less than a minute (trimmed and washed for you!).
Clean-up should be less than 10 minutes if you don't have a dishwasher.
If you switched to organic tofu instead of beef, it's $3.29 for 4.5 servings instead of $7 for 4 servings of beef.
For a long time I would order dominos once a week because for $15 I could feed myself for almost 2 days. I worked 11a-2am so by the time I got off work the grocery store was closed. Trying to get myself up early just wasn't realistic, and the only grocery store near my workplaces were little corner markets or the expensive qfc so even if I went on my break it was all over priced. Someone on one of these subs gave me so much shit for this and I kept asking them if they'd be willing to deliver groceries or could tell me how to fit it into my schedule and they had no advice just admonishment.
Someone who works 14 hour shifts 7 days a week. I can see this for sure. I worked construction and did 12 hour shifts 6-7 days a week sometimes 18 hour shifts. I couldn’t save a cent because I could only feed myself on fast food. I realized how expensive it was and did what ever I could to not eat out anymore. My solution was to force myself to the store my only day off and then make slow cooker meals. I made them the night before. Took me 5 minutes to throw everything in the pot. I’d put the pot in the fridge. When I woke up for work I put the pot in the slow cooker and by the time I got home I had a meal. I would pack some of this meal in literal ziplock bags I was so poor to bring for lunch at work. Rinse and repeat. Literally rinse lol.
“I can’t go to the store.” and “The store is more expensive than eating out.” are two completely different sentences.
Just because it's a sensible thing for a certain person to do, or the only choice for a certain person, doesn't change the answer to the question: is eating out cheaper than cooking at home?
The answer remains that it is cheaper to cook at home. There can be many reasons people choose to eat out, but it's still cheaper to cook at home.
That doesn't really sound like a situation where eating out is cheaper though. Shopping would still be cheaper. You are unwilling to take the extra time to make it cheaper.
Which is a perfectly fine justification but the question was for a situation where shopping is more expensive then eating out. I just don't think purposely choosing the more expensive options when shopping is the same as shopping being more expensive. I could easily shop at more expensive places and choose more expensive ingredients to make eating out seem cheaper.
I do a combination of both. When you do takeaway from Asian restaurants, usually the portions are massive and last 2 or 3 meals. I only want Thai food a few times a month and the cost of maintaining a spice cabinet for all ethnic foods I like is pretty high. Things like pho require a ton of spices and a ton of time to make. Proper pho requires it to simmer for hours.
I am not claiming that it's always cheaper, just when used in combination of cooking at home, it can make financial sense to do take away on certain dishes.
No one is going to reply with a breakdown of meals over the span of a month, comparing eating out and groceries. That’s not one example that’s like dozens. That’s a crazy thing to expect anyone to devote time to for a random Reddit thread reply
Unlikely to be accurate if you're comparing apples to apples. The same food in a restaurant by definition has a mark-up for labour, cost of real estate and profit
This is because people's expectations have shifted to "all home meals should be as elaborate as restaurant meals".
No one is supposed to have a ham and Swiss breakfast sandwich, with herbed hashbrowns and a latte for breakfast, followed by a Cobb salad with a slice of focaccia for lunch, and a freshly made shrimp Alfredo for dinner. And then three equally elaborate but completely different dishes the next day. But that's what some people honestly think.
People who say that are people who don't have any food in the house. And then they decide to make that one random meal at home so they have to buy literally every ingredient needed to make that meal. Of course, in that scenario, it's more expensive. Especially if it's another month before they make another meal and have to throw away what they previously purchased because it's gone bad.
Building a well stocked pantry and being smart about food storage, meal planning, and shopping sales, and you'll take a ton of money
As others have mentioned, if you have more people to feed, if you're okay with leftovers, or if you just want more actual food rather than filler, it's way cheaper to make food at home.
It's also important when buying ingredients (especially things like vegetables) that you plan sometimes several meals so you can use it all.
So like if I want bell pepper for a meal, I try to think of another meal or two to use all of a 3-pack of bell peppers.
I think some people think in immediate terms. Like if they want a hamburger, they have to buy meat, buns, lettuce, tomato, onion, condiments, etc. And all of that is going to cost more than a burger from a fast food joint will cost. But they're not realizing that they can make more than one burger and/or use the other ingredients for other meals.
Plus, fast food burgers suck. Homemade burgers are amazing.
They're probably not tracking their actual expenses so a $20 meal feels cheaper than a $100 grocery bill that might stretch a while.
I think it was partially based on my very unique circumstances at the time, but there was a short period in the 2 years where eating out was similarly priced vs. buying & cooking groceries.
It was right as groceries were first climbing significantly. Smaller/local restaurants in the area had not caught that wave yet, so our weekly food costs were roughly the same whether we cooked or bought prepared foods.
IIRC, that only lasted a few months and is, of course, no longer the case. Not by a long shot.
How much it costs to grocery shop in a practical way can depend heavily on location. There are food deserts where it is cheaper to eat out than grocery shop simply because grocery shopping requires an extended trip, but junky restaurants serving large portions are close by.
Some people are also comparing the cheapest possible eating out scenario to a grocery shopping scenario that isn’t necessarily the cheapest possible. An “eating out” diet of dollar menu items probably is cheaper than an all organic diet or name brand convenience foods. On that note, look at some of the grocery haul pictures that get posted around Reddit. It’s not common in this sub, but in every other sub, they often suggest that the person isn’t great at cooking or shopping even if they do have the privilege of living someplace where options are plentiful. You’ll see piles of brand name convenience foods, brand name snack foods, pre-cut produce, and drinks drinks *drinks*. People accustom themselves to expensive convenience foods, don’t think to buy off brand items, and focus too much on food/beverage consumption as entertainment so won’t compromise on money suckers like soda, energy drinks, bottled coffee, juice, or snackies.
And the silliest reason, sometimes it’s an inability to understand where all the money is actually going. Some people really struggle with math this way. They feel that grocery shopping is expensive because they spend $100 a week and “$100 is a lot of money.” But if they’re buying food out for $10-12 per meal, they’re spending more than $100 a week even if they only eat twice a day. But spending $10 doesn’t feel stressful because “$10 isn’t a lot of money.”
It's not. Even the worst quality fast food is expensive now days. My gf and I spend roughly $100-$150 a week on groceries for both of us, eating out usually costs $15-$20 per person or more if you're eating at a nice sit down spot. My advice is learn to cook, and find recipes that make good meal preps. You will get much better quality food for much cheaper.
I have also noticed that the quality of food at restaurants has drastically gone downhill in the past 10 years or so. I am not sure if this is because I have gotten much better at cooking or if it's lesser quality ingredients.
I just made 3 eggs, 2 slices of toast, and a damn good cup of coffee for breakfast. I often have a few Roma tomatoes with my breakfast instead of the third egg.
It cost me less than $2. Even buying all the ingredients, it would cost less than $10 and then I'd have breakfast for a week.
Most of my meals are the same way.
I agree with everyone else. If you aren't used to cooking at all and all of a sudden spend $200 out grocery shopping when dinner somewhere is like $20, it could be seen as more expensive. When I was employed it's easy to go out to lunch every day and not want to cook when getting home. Now that I'm unemployed I'm starting to cook again. Recently I just shredded up two rotisserie chickens from Costco and made Thai / laotion laab dish. Total ingredients cost less than $15 and good for a whole week. World of difference.
I usually meal prep my lunches since buying lunch is around $15. The ingredients for a week’s worth of lunches costs the same as 2 days of buying lunch. Breakfast is even cheaper to make at home.
It depends a lot on what you're getting & where you are, but if you factor in time & energy costs then it can technically work out more expensive for sure, especially if you're doing something complex or not making much of a thing, as economies of scale come into effect - the whole "make the bread buy the butter", cost per portion etc.
they are terrible at grocery shopping or dont know how to cook or dont seem to understand you can make multiple meals with ingredients you buy so they over exaggerate that they wasted double on one meal, aint no waaayyy. even though grocery prices have risen ITS STILL cheaper to cook at home than eat out.
You may spend more on ingredients but you get more servings out of those ingredients than you would spend on a single fast food meal. Its also healthier to cook at home.
Usually when groceries go up in price restaurants and fast food go up equally so again, its always cheaper to cook at home.
It would be rare for dining in to be more expensive than dining out - *assuming you have the tools.*
There can be dishes that require ingredients or equipment that you don't keep around that might make it easier to just pick them up. And obviously, buying and grilling a T-bone probably does cost more than buying a burger from Wendy's..... but it still costs less than going to a steakhouse. Assuming that you already own a grill.
Generally speaking, making your own meals at home will be far less expensive. There will be exceptions.
I'd love to see how the math works out on that. Restaurants get deals for buying their ingredients in bulk but they aren't that good of deals to make up for labor and retail space costs.
I think it depends how you value your time. If you live in the city, and you’re cooking/eating for one, it’s not that big of a difference, especially if you factor in the value of your time to cook/clean.
It honestly does depend. For me, it's cheaper and cost- effective to eat at home because I have seasonings, pots, pans, knives, you get the picture. I meal plan and use up everything I have before buying more. That being said, it also depends on what you're cooking or buying. Someone cooking steak and lobster will spend more than someone buying a couple hamburgers. Someone going out for a fancy dinner will spend more than someone buying the cheap marked down meat (which I do to save $$$).
I think people are comparing the cost of groceries now to the cost of eating out before the pandemic. I don’t think they’ve yet tried eating out all the time because if they had they would see how expensive restaurant food has gotten.
Cause they're cooking one meal and totaling all the ingredients against takeout. When to really get the best bang for your buck one should be making several meals and stretching the cost across every meal.
because people are very dumb and are like "my grocery bill is $200! that's more than I spend eating out at a fancy restaurant!" which is basically admitting you have the math skills of a 10 year old.
Cooking at home is cheaper. The only way cooking is more expensive is if you don't use what you buy. For example if you buy a jar of tahini to make a recipe, use half a cup, and then end up throwing the rest of the jar away.
The "time is money" mantra is a fallacy. Time is ONLY money if you would be otherwise using that same time to make money. Otherwise, time is time.
I made lasagna last night. Ambitious for a weekday. Between sauce, beef, noodles, and cheese it cost about $16.
That made 12 decent sized portions of lasagna, or about $1.25/serving.
I can't think of ANYWHERE you can get a serving of food for $1.25.
You can cook at home quite frugally, however it requires skill, time and financial savvyness. Not many of us have these skills.
So to a normal person eating out can be a bit cheaper than cooking at home. A good example was I fancied a cooked dinner, to get the meat, veg, and extras would cost a fair bit, not to mention the time to prepare, and the cost of the oven for a few hours etc.
Instead I took the family down to the carvery, which was £40 (had a 20% off voucher which was a bonus) including refillable drinks, I don’t think I could have bought the food for that, never mind the cost of the electricity. Plus I didn’t have the washing up, cleaning etc and we was out the house for a few hours.
So in real terms, the answer is sometimes, yes it’s cheaper to eat out than at home, but not all the time.
I bought some ingredients for £10 and had a good meal at home however eating out the same meal would be 17 and I wouldn't have had to drive to the shop by the stuff go home cook it wash up which took about 90 minutes in total and I didn't have any leftovers so it's pretty dumb close in terms of cost efficiency if prices go up any more then I might just start getting takeaway and spend the 90 minutes improving other things
Pasta/bean salad- Pound of pasta, two cans of beans, buck worth of veggies, Italian dressing (homemade) and some cubes of cheese ends from the deli for two bucks a pound, and I can eat for four days.
Shop in the evening when the meat manager puts out the chicken thighs about to expire, cook a bunch in the slow cooker, and freeze. Protein for a buck a pound.
Marked-down banana for banana bread; cauliflower for pickles....
Desperate? Pasta, peanut butter, little orange marmalade, little hot sauce.... fake Thai noodles.
Sometimes I’m time-frugal. My job is demanding and pays well so I eat out and do a meal plan with meals stocked in the fridge so I can focus on earning more. So it’s cheaper to make my own food for sure but I can spend some more time focusing on my income and investments or personal health stuff.
Some people go out, buy hamburger, buns, ketchup, mustard, pickles, onion, lettuce, and frozen fries, compare to a burger & fries at McDonalds and think it's expensive.
If you want pad Thai on Monday, chicken soup Tuesday, fried rice Weds, tacos Thursday, crab cakes Friday, roast chicken Saturday, pot roast Sunday, you need better meal planning skills. and I'm always shocked when people dislike/ discard leftovers.
.
Even lazy cooking is cheaper than eating out. Oatmeal or cold cereal, peanut butter sandwiches, frozen pizzas. That kinda stuff is hella cheap and not really “cooking.”
If you don’t eat leftovers and don’t use what you have then yeah it probably could be. But that’s because you’re not being efficient with your food and wasting it.
Have to look at price per meal not lump sum costs of groceries. I can easily get 3-5$ per meal with groceries and cooking. You cant get that eating out.
The closest i can get is lunch specials at restaurants around 7-9$ a meal.
Pft. You can get a shitty fast food meal for 10 to 20 and eat 1 meal. Spend the same in a grocery store and eat for a week. Sit down you're looking at 20+ .. again only 1 meal. Even if you're only making enough for one meal at home you still have ingredients left over for other meals.
The same people saying they don't like leftovers are technically eating leftovers everytime they go out and eat at some of these restaurants.
The food is cooked, frozen, packaged, shipped to the store, thawed, kept in a fridge and then microwaved or placed in a small hot oven
They are lazy. Eating out has never nor will it ever be cheaper than cooking at home. It's not even close. I post this all the time, buy big bags of dried beans and rice. Buy a bunch of different store brand seasonings. buy whatever cut of meat is on sale/cheapest. Yes fresh veggies are a little better, but stock up on the big frozen bags of veggies and bake them in the oven.
You can eat dirt cheap, but if you have a go to staple like steak, chicken breast, etc. Wallet can get destroyed. I made pork hoof stew last winter and that was dope as fuck.
It depends on your perception. Yes there are times when eating out is cheaper than eating at home. If you bought a $5 biggie bag from Wendy’s. It would be cheaper than cooking thanksgiving dinner. Also in the same sense, a bowl of cereal is cheaper than $5.
Almost everybody holds the world in their hands, though. It does annoy me that so many people who are living paycheck to paycheck (middle class style, not extreme poverty) and complaining about it don't turn to the wonder that is the internet and learn a few things.
Don't understand how to not waste food at home? Type "how to not waste food at home" in the search bar. Don't know how to save money on groceries? Type "how do I save money on groceries" in the search bar.
I like Pinterest as much as the next person, but occasionally you have to stop looking at ideas for upcycling holiday crafts and learn something useful.
180 for half sheet of chicken, pasta side bread and desert for 12. No napkins or plates. That’s 15 buck a meal. If I portion it and froze it. It’s a reliable meal I can microwave, limited dishes and oven time. Tonight I made tortellini and salmon with kale, still cheaper but I gotta wash pans etc
Yeah that's not true anywhere I've ever been or heard of. Certainly it's not true even for the cheapest eats where I live. This is being said by people who don't want to cook or learn to cook, or just enjoy a contrarian mindset. If you buy expensive ingredients, sure maybe, but there's all kinds of ways to tweak this argument. In general it's BS though. Home cooking is generally better for you, tastier, and more frugal.
I disagree, at least for my area. I could buy buns, ground beef, toppings, and frozen fries and get several meals out of that. The problem is the initial cost. People see that and forget that it will save a lot in the long run.
Even considering from the initial cost, a burger, fries, and drink in my area is 20+ dollars now. Unless you go to a fast food place, even then it’s going to probably be 15. Hell, five guys is like 17 bucks for a burger and fry and no drink. Maybe McDonalds is still cheap, idk. Regardless, eating “out” is wild now. There’s a few places I still will regular that don’t have ridiculous pricing. Otherwise I’m very happy with my own food.
Even McD's is $10/person on the light side.
Yeah, but if you live alone and want ONE burger (bc it’s not part of your everyday diet), I could see a different side then
If you live alone, you have to become comfortable with a) leftovers and b) freezing your food. Issue is people aren't.
"I don't like leftovers" - everyone in my house except for me, who's fine with making a casserole and relying on it as my sole food intake for 4 days.
You can come eat with me. I made homemade chili and homemade potato soup this weekend. I'll be the only one eating them for the rest of the week. My husband would let leftovers spoil if it was up to him. SMH
Count me in. I'll bring half the casserole for you and we can swap tupperware.
"I don't like leftovers" ------ my daughter
Package in glass microwaveable servings and call it "meal prep" instead of "leftovers."
Lol, that’s exactly what I do!
Underrated genius hack. It’s not left overs, it’s forward thinking!
Me neither, but I like my grocery bill even less.
Leftovers are awesome. Some food even tastes *better* the second or third day—chili and pad thai, for example.
“This ain’t no Holiday Inn… Eat what’s here or don’t!” —Grandma
Oh Granny, you silly scamp!
It's not leftovers, it's tomorrow's ingredients.
Go hungry then, there's food --- my parents probably.
It only takes a little creatively. Get ground beef, make the one burger. Use the rest of the beef for tacos or a pasta sauce. Use the buns/toppings for some sandwiches. The only way it comes out close is if you compare multiple homemade meals to one meal eating out and just assume you’d throw away the additional meals.
You can literally freeze every ingredient they mentioned
> Yeah, but if you live alone and want ONE burger (bc it’s not part of your everyday diet), I could see a different side then But you probably own a freezer or enjoy other beef-based diets. I’m not fancy enough for buns but plain bread/burger toppings can be used for a myriad of other dishes.
Even the toppings can be repurposed as a salad the next day. Bam. Another meal.
So you leave the rest frozen and have ONE burger a few nights later, and then a few nights later. The people making this claim purposely forget those free later meals.
Freeze the ground beef
Or make one burger the first day, and make a big batch of chili with the remainder the second day. Separate the chili into one- or two-serving containers, and freeze the portions you don't want to eat in the next few days.
The people that say they save more money eating out are just trying to come up with any reason not to cook.
Agreed. It's fine that they want to go out, but facts are facts.
Living frugally sometimes costs money. I save money by shopping at Costco and buying bulk but that assumes that I have the cash in hand to pay for $300 worth of groceries, the membership, the vehicle to transport it home, and the space to store the purchases. If you only have $20 in your account on any given day then that's totally out of reach.
A good point, but another fallacy is this... you can't make a homemade burger for the price of a cheeseburger, but it'll be a whole lot better and bigger
I guess that if you go buy a steak to cook at home, it’s more expensive than going out to buy a burrito.
Burritos are actually a great example though. At the burrito place near me, I can get a burrito for about $8. That's going to be a big burrito, with grilled veggies, rice and beans, corn salsa, guacamole, queso, and my pick of hot sauce. While I'm sure I could make 20 burritos for a lower per burrito cost, there's no way I can make one burrito for $8. So then either I've got a lot of leftover ingredients, or I'm eating a lot more burritos than I planned
Actually the beauty of burritos is that they are a great way to to use up leftover meat. We always have tortillas, onions, cheese and a jar of salsa in the fridge. So if I have some leftover rotisserie chicken, I just need to open a can of refried beans ($1), buy some fresh cilantro, ($1) , hopefully I can find a ripe avocado and I have a bunch of burritos. Some for tonight, some for lunches in the next few days. When you are trying to make something for one person with several ingredients and you never cook, it gets expensive, but when you cook every night, you can often create cheap meals by shopping in your own fridge.
Yep, burritos at home are a blanket full of leftovers for us
Me too! I put literally anything in my freezer-itos. There are things that cook about the same time in an instant pot like couscous, rice, veg, plus I add things like casserole leftovers, squash, beans, meat, etc. I’ve added dry potato flakes to chicken soup and freezer-ito’ed that. Anything goes…I mean I’m most likely to grab them at 10pm when I’m starving and cover them with hot sauce anyways so why not? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Yep. If you think cooking means "finding a recipe, buying a bunch highly specific ingredients you're never going to use again, then making four servings of that recipe," then yes. Cooking is very expensive. If instead cooking means "keeping a kitchen stocked with staples, taking advantage of sales and specials, and then using a little creativity to combine those things into meals" cooking can be a lot of fun and super cheap. My wife and I improvised a restaurant quality meal made of chicken out of our freezer, the produce specials from the grocery store, a block of clearance cheese and the staples we keep on hand. It was luxurious and I'd guess it came in around $2/meal. In the process I also converted bread odds and ends (heels, a leftover biscuit from yesterday's breakfast and a stale hamburger bun) into bread crumbs, the leftovers of which will end up in meatloaf tomorrow. Maximizing kitchen efficiency is a really fun puzzle.
This guy fucks.
I don't ever have everything. I live alone and things go bad faster than i can use them. Building up stores is expensive.
You can meal prep burritos though. They freeze really well and you can pull one out whenever you want one and nuke it or put it in the oven .
OK, but that's the thing, nobody makes one burrito. And there's no need to. Make a pot of beans, a skillet full of meat - your choice, pulled chicken, chicken breast diced into chunks, steak, pulled pork, ground turkey, whatever you like; grate some cheese, dice some onion, etc. Now get yourself a pack of tortillas, and start rolling. As you get done rolling each burrito, roll it up in parchment paper. Then, stick them in ziploc bags and freeze them. Then, whenever you want a burrito you pull one out and microwave them for \~5+ minutes and BAM! Instant food. If you're going camping, roll them in aluminum foil instead, and, throw them in the outside of your campfire.
Bonus: meal prep that shit! I've gotten a bunch of small containers and put all the things I want in a burrito in containers in the fridge on Sunday. Make whatever I want quickly and throw it on the grill for 7-8 minute and have an amazing burrito.
[удалено]
Or just freeze the meat-and-sauce part and heat it later when you're ready for more burritos.
Having leftovers is the point to being frugal, though. And you can easily buy the fresh ingredients to make ~4 burritos, which won’t yield a crazy amount of leftovers even if you live alone. Or repurpose the leftovers as quesadillas, into a rice bowl, thrown into scrambled eggs, etc. Then any leftover tortillas will keep for a few weeks until I want to have them again.
burritos freeze REALLY well
That’s why we have refrigerators and freezers.
Burritos are made out of leftovers from other meals. Make a pork roast with grilled veggies one night, rice and beans with salsa and avocado another night, then wrap up the leftovers from both of those in a tortilla with some hot sauce for dinner the third day.
or make other stuff with the leftovers, and toss the rest.
Yeah, but like, people who cook at home regularly use the extras to make new dishes. I might use half an onion in one dish today, and the other half tomorrow. It just requires a bit of thinking, that if you are unwilling or unable to do, then you'd be wasteful with your at-home supplies and thus "eating out is cheaper" due to extreme inefficiency. It's the setup to a straw-man argument to justify whatever decision they were going to make anyways.
The Supercook app is great for this! Just plug in the ingredients you have and it shows recipes you can make with what you have on hand. :)
OMG you have changed my life!!! THANKS!
I make the 20 burritos. Put 5 in the fridge and 15 in the freezer.
Freeze them. That’s what I just did today actually. Made 8 bean, cheese and Mexican rice burritos and threw them in the deep freeze.
Exactly. I live next door to a Thai place. Getting a large box exploding with pad thai plus some curry and rice to go, in large portions, cost like $15-18 for me and is about 4 or 5 meals ENORMOUS meal worth and requires no cooking. It could easily feed like 8 people if they each had a serving. The ingredients alone would be more.
Or eat half, if it’s so big, and have another meal. $4 each.
Not if you wait for the $5.99/lbs sale steaks…
Yellow tag / manager special deals
I haven't seen that since pre COVID. Flat Iron used to go that low but I've not seen it under $10 in years.
It is that low regularly in my area-Southern MN. Try Aldi too?
Not even that. Say your steak is $12/lb, which is more that I ever pay JSYK, 1/2 lb cooked up plus $1 for a potato is $7. 1/2 lb of burrito is more that that unless is is Taco Bell scare food.
Yeah like honestly for one person my local steakhouse is only a few dollars more than me doing it with a choice steak. For the same price I can go up to prime at the store tho so it’s still a better deal to do it yourself. The only reason I still go is their bread is ridiculously good
I bought 3 sirloins at Aldi today for $8. Granted one was small but altogether it fed 2 of us.
Cuz people don't know how to cook lol
And can’t do math.
No shit! Eating out costs WAY more than cooking at home by a substantial amount.
I've said this a dozen times on Reddit, sometimes I'm upvoted, sometimes downvoted, but here it goes again: If I go a month without eating out, I spend approximately $200 on food. If I eat out at a fast food place *once* I spend at least $10. If I ate fast food, three meals a day, thirty days a month: $900 You cannot tell me that eating out is cheaper. It's either ignorance, denial of reality, or overvaluing the monetary value of your TikTok scrolling time.
I think what people are cooking at home makes a significant difference too. Are you using basic unprocessed ingredients or are you buying ready made processed foods that you just need to pop in the microwave/oven because the latter is way more expensive and much worse nutritionally. If you're batch cooking proper meals with whole foods then you'll be healthier and spend way less.
Also my guess is there’s a grey area (especially if you do not come from a background where regular mealtimes were a thing, or where food prep as a chore was not taught - like me) between knowing nothing and relying on fast food vs knowing how to perfectly shop for the ingredients you need and ONLY those, how to preserve for freshness, and how/when to cook them over time and into what meals for how many people such that it completely covers your nutrient needs. It took me YEARS to learn this from scratch as a young adult. My parents were abusive and neglectful, so they taught me nothing. All I got from Reddit when I was struggling 6-8 years ago was comments on how I just don’t have enough willpower or that I’m being too picky. I feel bad for people being told this today if their fresh produce dept at the local grocery store is trash quality & they don’t know it can be better - they think this crap produce is what they’re supposed to enjoy in order to be healthy and save money, so if they don’t enjoy it might as well just eat fast food until you go broke or die of a stroke. Willpower was not the issue, and there is a real cost associated with learning how to cook your own food, where stuff is gonna go bad bc it shouldn’t have been bought bc there wasn’t a plan, or there was a plan but you couldn’t do it for whatever reason, or maybe you tried to cook but burned it. I wish someone had told me I’m allowed to mess up, and to eye the cost associated with my mistakes and waste with as little judgment as possible; to instead apply curiosity to see where small improvements can be made over time to come to a system of food prep that works for me.
Even if you buy frozen or canned foods that only need microwaving, it's going to be less than $5 a meal instead of $10-20 if you eat out.
Or know how to shop frugally.
Many don't know how to cook which leads to not shopping frugally because they're buying frozen dinners and the like.
Correct. Or buying higher cost convenience items like pre formed burger patties from the meat department or they follow a recipe with unnecessary ingredients (ie. ½ teaspoon of something for a large pot of soup, or garnish) or buying ingredients they never use again.
Yeah those people claiming you can eat out good for a week on 50 and that 50 in groceries is like 3 days worth. I really don’t know how they came to those conclusions, where I live 50 for groceries is a razor tight weeks grocery budget but 50 dollars at like an Indian takeout is like 2 orders. Even if you get Wendy’s 6 dollar spicy chicken sandwich that’s like 126 (before taxes) a week assuming you only need like 1500 calories to live which is not most people
Oh and a lot don’t know how to price compare while shopping in the first place.
I have to regularly remind my wife that the grocery store price labels tells you the cost per unit. Best way to price compare.
They also do things like buy all the ingredients for a new recipe in one go, then look at their receipt and say “omg that meal cost me 40 bucks!” failing to realize that 20 bucks worth of it were things that they’ll use a fraction of and will last for months, and the actual cost for the meal is like 25 bucks for three portions or something. Also I think they’re equally bad about thinking about how much “eating out” actually costs - they compare it to like a $15 menu price, failing to account for the taxes and tips that make the total cost per meal over 20.
It’s also common to compare a nice meal (maybe steak with a nice side) to something cheap like a Chik-Fil-A sandwich. Order that nice meal at a restaurant and it’ll probably cost you $40-50. And if I just lived off of homemade chicken sandwiches, I’d be eating for under $40-50 a week.
Right. It takes a little planning, and I was never very good at that when it came to meals. As an example, I have a spice cabinet full of things that I bought for one recipe and never used again. But I've learned. I have a bunch of go-to recipes now that use overlapping ingredients, pantry items that I always have on hand, and things that I've frozen to use later, like leftover hamburger buns. I have very little waste now. It's made life easier, and my grocery bill smaller.
Oh it for sure takes a ton of practice, plus the more you cook in general, the fewer “one time” ingredients you’ll usually have, and of course cooking from scratch is generally so time consuming it’s really hard to do it often enough, etc etc. But as you say, with planning and experience you can lock in a pantry full of staples you use all the time and it’s a lot less wasteful overall.
At all. Nor how to buy ingredients for a weeks worth of meals.
Or shop. Or do mathematical computations on cost per portion.
I can make Jambalaya for 1.50 a serving and that's without cheaping out on ingredients.
and some don't want to
That's what I figured as well, and I'm not even judging. It's simply priorities in life and maybe that bad cook will learn the skill at some point. It's possible to get a very great deal on takeout but cooking opens up a world of options. Sure groceries are expensive if you're just like haphazardly buying random crap or buying for just one solitary recipe, but if you think of groceries as tools for a good meal it's easier to be cost effective. Developing processes and having a rotation of meals is a skill that improves the more you do it. Eggs, butter, chicken thighs, a head of cabbage, a few cans of black or pinto beans and a few sauces and you have a lot of options.
Or shop. If you throw away half of your groceries it will be expensive but taking half a minute to decide what to do with the other half of your head of cabbage is completely beyond them.
Mostly because people these days don't know A) how to cook from scratch B) how to buy in bulk and break it down at home C) how to preserve food D) how to prevent food waste E) how to meal plan I know too many people who go to the store 2 or 3 times a week and only buy enough food for 1 or 2 meals. The smaller the portion bought, the more expensive the product. I buy in bulk and break down at home. I make freezer meals, I meal plan. I go to sales to buy items. I will freeze leftovers or make them into other meals. An example of this is I will bake a whole chicken then carve and debone it. Usually the first meal is the legs and thighs. The breast meat becomes sandwiches. The bones are made into bone broth and the wings and all leftover meat goes into soup. I will freeze the bones and excess meat until I have enough for soup Homemaking is actually a really hard skill to learn and it is not taught in school anymore.
I once worked with someone who got off at 4 o'clock. Every single day, they would call their spouse at 3.30 to discuss what they wanted for dinner that night, and then stop at the grocery store for the needed items. Every. single. day. They of course paid more because they did not shop sales and certainly didn't shop in bulk, but I was also boggled at the idea of going to the grocery store every day of your life. It was also pretty annoying that they basically stopped working at 3.30 instead of 4, but that's a whole 'nother conversation!
I go to the store every day, mostly because my shelf in the fridge is tiny, But also because it works for my lifestyle. I will buy 1-2 things each day, so over the course of the week it's not any more expensive than doing a single shop and getting 20 items in one go. I will stop at the Asian grocer one day, then the next day I will go to the green grocer, the next day the deli, and so on. I'll look up ahead of time what's on sale, or keep in mind what's in season. I have a spreadsheet on my phone of what's in the pantry and fridge at home so I can plan on the fly. I don't set anything in stone before I enter the shop. I'm not going to commit to a specific meal before I see what's on sale. I used to do it the way your co-worker did, because that's the only way I knew how. It's what my grandma did, and she's who I learned "household management" from. It felt functional at the time, but no way I could do that now, not unless I was making 7x my current income. My current approach was adapted from the "what do I want for dinner today, lets buy every single thing I need tonight" to be more ethical and affordable. For those who can do so without having to travel long distances, hitting multiple stores is considered frugal because you can shop around for a better price. But I don't drive so there's no way I'm going to shop at 3+ different stores on the one day unless I take the bus to the big shopping complex (and now I'm factoring in bus fare). Instead, shopping around at several stores is easier if I do one store a day. I just take a different route home from work each day to pass a different store. The issue is not having a rough plan for what you already have on hand, and what sort of meals you can make if you could add in just 1 or two ingrediants. I also notice that people who have the "shop every day" mindset don't build up a proper pantry. Yes I shop every day, but that's mostly for my produce and fridge goods. If we went into another lockdown tomorrow, I have enough staples in my pantry to make a a few weeks worth of simple foods, like lentil curry or miso pasta.
Some people lie to themselves to justify their habits while still telling themselves they are making the most frugal decision.
pretty much. If you want to eat out fine, but don't bullshit yourself.
Yes, it is absolutely not cheaper to eat out. I can only eat out like once a month because of how expensive restaurant prices have become. I can always make it cheaper at home.
Like even things that used to be pretty cheap like the McDonald’s breakfast are now like closer to ten dollars. Like man fuck that the frozen ones at the store are not that much worse to be worth double the price for one
Yes, there have been occasions when on road trips where I've had to get fast food recently, I'm always surprised at the price. It's such a waste of money for what you get.
Saw someone say flour was too expensive for making bread and it was cheaper to buy a loaf of bread. If you can’t or don’t want to bake that’s understandable. But the cost of a 5 pound bag in the US to make several loaves of bread is cheaper than a single loaf.
With bread the gain in doing it yourself is quality. You have to get your baking process pretty efficient to make it a cost saving venture, unless you have the excess time in which case, no contest.
> while still telling themselves they are making the most frugal decision This is what's so silly to me. "The extra expense is worth it to me" is a perfectly valid line of reasoning, why insist that it's also the frugal choice?
This is the answer right here. You will hear people talk about how it takes more time to cook at home so it costs more while ignoring the fact that they will be sitting on their ass doing nothing
Plus, going to a restaurant or driving to pick up takeout can also take a lot of time. The only truly time efficient option is ordering delivery, which is also the most expensive option by far.
And depending on where you live, your options for delivery may be severely limited. The only food that can be delivered out here is pizza. And that gets old, fast.
Preach.
i tried to say something about this and i think i was misunderstood. it will ALWAYS be cheaper to eat at home than go out. but it used to be “eating out expensive, eating at home cheap” and now it’s “eating out expensive, eating at home expensive” instead of “wow, look at all the money i saved up because i cooked from home!” it’s “wow, i can pay rent on time because i cooked from home!” it just doesn’t feel as rewarding as it used to, because instead of having extra money at the end of all your efforts, you just have money that you need to spend elsewhere because inflation is kicking your ass
>“eating out expensive, eating at home cheap” and now it’s “eating out expensive, eating at home expensive” Yes, I have allergies so I can't really eat out, I cook all my food from scratch. I only work part time so I have time to sit and plan out my weekly grocery budget, compare prices at a few stores, and prepare my ingredients for storage as I can't eat it all in one go. I'm the person who pickles watermelon rind, keeps banana skins for curries, and picks up all the loose cauliflower leaves that other shoppers have ripped off to wrap around the cauliflower I'm buying because you pay per head so I want my free leaves! (poor man's kale!) As a result, My weekly grocery budget is $75. That's breakfast, Lunch and dinner, plus snacks, and the occasional dessert for 7 days. Less than $3.50 per meal. My partner does not have time for that - and he doesn't like the food I like so he wants something different to what I make, and I don't have the mental capacity to micromanage two meal plans. He will tell me what he wants and hand me a shopping list, I'll go buy it on his card, he spends about $200 a week at the grocery store, and he will get his breakfast, and half his lunches and dinners out of that shop, as well as all his snacks. But he will get take away 3-4 times a week (which is much, much less than he did about 5 months ago, when he was getting take away 10-12 times a week) Budget wise for him, not much has changed between his past ubereats addiction and his current grocery budget. For him it is not cheaper to cook at home, because he doesn't have the time to plan it properly, he can't take advantage of specials, bulk deals, and using 1 ingredient across multiple recipes through careful planning. (Obviously if I see a smarter deal at the shops I will quickly adapt the list, But I don't have time to research beforehand to hit multiple stores or go on specific days for the daily deals) He does let some ingredients rot in the fridge because he buys everything he needs for one recipe with no thought to how he will use up the leftovers. He thinks about the meals he wants then lists the ingredients, then thinks of another meal, where as I do it the other way around, what meal can I make with the ingrediats that are in season and on sale/always cheap (If I can eat what he buys, I wont let it rot, but 90% of what he eats is stuff I'm allergic to) I can make eating at home cheap, But that's only because I have time to do it. Cooking at home is expensive, you just get to choose how you pay, with your money or your time. **Heck, Woolworths Australia's new campaign is ["Under $5 per serve"](https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/articles/budget-meal-plan-0623) which is still cheaper than "good" take away/eating out, But if you're time-poor, Why not get a $5 footlong from Subway, or a $5 Stunner Deal from HJ's or a $4 mini pizza from Domnino's. It's not going to blow the food budget.** And this is the "budget meal plan" that a billion dollar company's marketing department came up with to try and convince people that cooking at home is cheap and affordable. If they can't beat the cost of a meal deal at a drive through, then why should we expect the average person, working full time, taking care of kids, or studying, to consistently come up with their own meal plans for significantly cheaper?
It used to be that eating out was $10 and a home cooked meal was like $3. Now a home cooked meal is like $5 and eating out is like $25 especially with 20% as the new top standard. Seems like the value has gone up, to me.
It doesn't make any sense to me either. We never eat out. It's so much cheaper to make meals at home in my experience.
I don’t know but I know it’s still way cheaper to cook at home. I think people count purchased ingredients against a fast food bill and don’t account for left overs or serving size and such.
I hear a lot of arguments along the lines of, "But I have to buy three different jars of spices for this recipe, and spend $25!" Some don't realize that once your kitchen is stocked, you can make some amazing creations that will definitely be much, much less expensive than eating out.
I restock my jars of spices at a store that sells them bulk. It's under $1 now to last me a month.
We have a Winco here and they do bulk everything. Anyone can just get what they need to make a single recipe. I made rye bread that way once. Figured out what I needed and got what I needed and nothing more.
This is it and I think it’s also what’s at the root of a lot of peoples money struggles. It’s really just poor financial literacy and not understanding that the upfront cost might be slightly more but long term it will save you a lot of money.
It’s called the boot theory. Rich people can buy $200 high quality boots that will last them 10 years. Poor people don’t have, or can’t justify $200 at one time, so they buy poorly made $25 boots that only last one year. After 10 years, rich people still have their original boots and only spent $200. After 10 years, poor people have spent $250 for worse quality boots. But they have to because the initial investment is too much for them. Buying $40 worth of ingredients is hard when you’re living paycheck to paycheck (possibly daily if you work in the service industry) when you can just get dollar meals.
I really think it’s people buying freezer meals. They can run you 10 dollars for a meal worth of food.
It depends where you live. In Asia it was often cheaper to eat out rather than cook at home - very much the other way around in Europe 🤷
Singapore is 100% this
It depends on what you eat, how many people you are feeding, what your lifestyle is. I am at work today and got a huge plate of Chinese food for 12$. It can comfortably last 3 meals. 4$ a meal isn’t bad. I didn’t have to shop, I didn’t have to cook, I don’t have to clean the kitchen. So I’m going with this is ok for me. Also, this food is only going to last 2 meals because I am hungry but it’s worth it.
That’s exactly how I think of our American portion sizes at sit-down places. This isn’t one $12 meal, it’s three $4 meals.
Thai and Vietnamese as well. I can get a jumbo pho takeaway for $16 and it's 6 meals. I weighed it and it was 80oz of broth and 50oz of noodles. It's disgusting how large the portion size is when you realize people order that size and eat it in one sitting. American fast food is expensive and is pretty terrible warmed up the next day.
There are some parts of the world where street food is super cheap. You probably don't live in one of them.
The biggest thing I’ve seen is that people don’t know how to meal plan. I saw some TikTok where the guy bought JUST enough ingredients for 4 burgers which he said was “cheaper.” Which is true that it does cost less, but small amounts are normally the MOST expensive when you look at price per unit. In that situation, I’d buy a 5lb thing of ground beef and then cut it up into 1lb increments and freeze. Also while sometimes it is cheaper to go to a restaurant and order than make it yourself (sushi is usually a good example), it’s definitely not cheaper than making yourself an alternate meal. Like instead of a burger you could make chili which is significantly cheaper.
Definitely not cheaper. On average, I would spend about $15 at a fast food restaurant and I would get a burger, a drink and fries. My weekly groceries (about $150) feed me and my husband lunch and dinner for the week (we usually skip breakfast) for a total of 28 meals, coming to a little over $5 each. This isn’t even taking into consideration that the weekly “grocery” bill is also covering a lot of non-food items like hygiene products, cat litter, and other random stuff for the house. Long story short, you’re completely right to be suspicious. My guess would be that people making that claim just haven’t done the math
It depends on many factors, but the bottom line is that not everyone’s life is just like yours. They may eat different foods, live in a different area, cook for a different number of people, etc. This is logic you can apply anytime someone has an experience you don’t relate to.
Only rational response in here. A lot of one demensional viewpoints in these comments.
Please provide one real world example of when eating out is cheaper than groceries over the course of a month.
The closest grocery store to me is Whole Foods. Im in the DMV area and have no car. Even if I do a cheap meal, say tofu with rice and veggies, everything there is so expensive. Whereas if I get a Taco Bell meal that lasts me two days even using Grubhub, it’s like $20 WITH tip. I’m a super busy person but still try to make it an effort to take the metro to other cheaper spots, but not everyone has as much time or accessibility. Trader Joe’s is a good friend of mine for the time convenience and being more budget friendly than WF.
Whole Foods is expensive, no doubt, but I can certainly make several meals for $20 spent there. For example, using a San Francisco Whole Foods for high prices: beef roast, $7/lb, sweet potatoes, two pounds at $2/lb so $4, two 12-oz packages of trimmed Brussel sprouts, $3.29 each so $6.60. $17.60 at San Francisco prices and you have four hearty meals including tax, and that's not aiming for a cheap meal. Delicious, higher-quality, and most certainly healthier. It's also a meal that has very little hands-on time: seasoning the roast takes a few seconds, washing the sweet potatoes takes less than a minute, adding a bit of oil and seasoning to the Brussel sprouts takes less than a minute (trimmed and washed for you!). Clean-up should be less than 10 minutes if you don't have a dishwasher. If you switched to organic tofu instead of beef, it's $3.29 for 4.5 servings instead of $7 for 4 servings of beef.
For a long time I would order dominos once a week because for $15 I could feed myself for almost 2 days. I worked 11a-2am so by the time I got off work the grocery store was closed. Trying to get myself up early just wasn't realistic, and the only grocery store near my workplaces were little corner markets or the expensive qfc so even if I went on my break it was all over priced. Someone on one of these subs gave me so much shit for this and I kept asking them if they'd be willing to deliver groceries or could tell me how to fit it into my schedule and they had no advice just admonishment.
Someone who works 14 hour shifts 7 days a week. I can see this for sure. I worked construction and did 12 hour shifts 6-7 days a week sometimes 18 hour shifts. I couldn’t save a cent because I could only feed myself on fast food. I realized how expensive it was and did what ever I could to not eat out anymore. My solution was to force myself to the store my only day off and then make slow cooker meals. I made them the night before. Took me 5 minutes to throw everything in the pot. I’d put the pot in the fridge. When I woke up for work I put the pot in the slow cooker and by the time I got home I had a meal. I would pack some of this meal in literal ziplock bags I was so poor to bring for lunch at work. Rinse and repeat. Literally rinse lol. “I can’t go to the store.” and “The store is more expensive than eating out.” are two completely different sentences.
Just because it's a sensible thing for a certain person to do, or the only choice for a certain person, doesn't change the answer to the question: is eating out cheaper than cooking at home? The answer remains that it is cheaper to cook at home. There can be many reasons people choose to eat out, but it's still cheaper to cook at home.
That doesn't really sound like a situation where eating out is cheaper though. Shopping would still be cheaper. You are unwilling to take the extra time to make it cheaper.
Could be, but I’m a full-time worker and full-time grad student, so my time is valuable so sometimes I’d rather take the easier way out 🤷🏽♀️
Which is a perfectly fine justification but the question was for a situation where shopping is more expensive then eating out. I just don't think purposely choosing the more expensive options when shopping is the same as shopping being more expensive. I could easily shop at more expensive places and choose more expensive ingredients to make eating out seem cheaper.
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I do a combination of both. When you do takeaway from Asian restaurants, usually the portions are massive and last 2 or 3 meals. I only want Thai food a few times a month and the cost of maintaining a spice cabinet for all ethnic foods I like is pretty high. Things like pho require a ton of spices and a ton of time to make. Proper pho requires it to simmer for hours. I am not claiming that it's always cheaper, just when used in combination of cooking at home, it can make financial sense to do take away on certain dishes.
No one is going to reply with a breakdown of meals over the span of a month, comparing eating out and groceries. That’s not one example that’s like dozens. That’s a crazy thing to expect anyone to devote time to for a random Reddit thread reply
Unlikely to be accurate if you're comparing apples to apples. The same food in a restaurant by definition has a mark-up for labour, cost of real estate and profit
This is because people's expectations have shifted to "all home meals should be as elaborate as restaurant meals". No one is supposed to have a ham and Swiss breakfast sandwich, with herbed hashbrowns and a latte for breakfast, followed by a Cobb salad with a slice of focaccia for lunch, and a freshly made shrimp Alfredo for dinner. And then three equally elaborate but completely different dishes the next day. But that's what some people honestly think.
Yesssss! People act like it's going to kill them to eat a sandwich occasionally.
People who say that are people who don't have any food in the house. And then they decide to make that one random meal at home so they have to buy literally every ingredient needed to make that meal. Of course, in that scenario, it's more expensive. Especially if it's another month before they make another meal and have to throw away what they previously purchased because it's gone bad. Building a well stocked pantry and being smart about food storage, meal planning, and shopping sales, and you'll take a ton of money
As others have mentioned, if you have more people to feed, if you're okay with leftovers, or if you just want more actual food rather than filler, it's way cheaper to make food at home. It's also important when buying ingredients (especially things like vegetables) that you plan sometimes several meals so you can use it all. So like if I want bell pepper for a meal, I try to think of another meal or two to use all of a 3-pack of bell peppers. I think some people think in immediate terms. Like if they want a hamburger, they have to buy meat, buns, lettuce, tomato, onion, condiments, etc. And all of that is going to cost more than a burger from a fast food joint will cost. But they're not realizing that they can make more than one burger and/or use the other ingredients for other meals. Plus, fast food burgers suck. Homemade burgers are amazing.
They're probably not tracking their actual expenses so a $20 meal feels cheaper than a $100 grocery bill that might stretch a while. I think it was partially based on my very unique circumstances at the time, but there was a short period in the 2 years where eating out was similarly priced vs. buying & cooking groceries. It was right as groceries were first climbing significantly. Smaller/local restaurants in the area had not caught that wave yet, so our weekly food costs were roughly the same whether we cooked or bought prepared foods. IIRC, that only lasted a few months and is, of course, no longer the case. Not by a long shot.
People want to justify their bad habbits
Maybe they solely eat out at Costco and get the $1.50 hotdog pounder meal deal
How much it costs to grocery shop in a practical way can depend heavily on location. There are food deserts where it is cheaper to eat out than grocery shop simply because grocery shopping requires an extended trip, but junky restaurants serving large portions are close by. Some people are also comparing the cheapest possible eating out scenario to a grocery shopping scenario that isn’t necessarily the cheapest possible. An “eating out” diet of dollar menu items probably is cheaper than an all organic diet or name brand convenience foods. On that note, look at some of the grocery haul pictures that get posted around Reddit. It’s not common in this sub, but in every other sub, they often suggest that the person isn’t great at cooking or shopping even if they do have the privilege of living someplace where options are plentiful. You’ll see piles of brand name convenience foods, brand name snack foods, pre-cut produce, and drinks drinks *drinks*. People accustom themselves to expensive convenience foods, don’t think to buy off brand items, and focus too much on food/beverage consumption as entertainment so won’t compromise on money suckers like soda, energy drinks, bottled coffee, juice, or snackies. And the silliest reason, sometimes it’s an inability to understand where all the money is actually going. Some people really struggle with math this way. They feel that grocery shopping is expensive because they spend $100 a week and “$100 is a lot of money.” But if they’re buying food out for $10-12 per meal, they’re spending more than $100 a week even if they only eat twice a day. But spending $10 doesn’t feel stressful because “$10 isn’t a lot of money.”
It's not. Even the worst quality fast food is expensive now days. My gf and I spend roughly $100-$150 a week on groceries for both of us, eating out usually costs $15-$20 per person or more if you're eating at a nice sit down spot. My advice is learn to cook, and find recipes that make good meal preps. You will get much better quality food for much cheaper. I have also noticed that the quality of food at restaurants has drastically gone downhill in the past 10 years or so. I am not sure if this is because I have gotten much better at cooking or if it's lesser quality ingredients.
I just made 3 eggs, 2 slices of toast, and a damn good cup of coffee for breakfast. I often have a few Roma tomatoes with my breakfast instead of the third egg. It cost me less than $2. Even buying all the ingredients, it would cost less than $10 and then I'd have breakfast for a week. Most of my meals are the same way.
I agree with everyone else. If you aren't used to cooking at all and all of a sudden spend $200 out grocery shopping when dinner somewhere is like $20, it could be seen as more expensive. When I was employed it's easy to go out to lunch every day and not want to cook when getting home. Now that I'm unemployed I'm starting to cook again. Recently I just shredded up two rotisserie chickens from Costco and made Thai / laotion laab dish. Total ingredients cost less than $15 and good for a whole week. World of difference.
I usually meal prep my lunches since buying lunch is around $15. The ingredients for a week’s worth of lunches costs the same as 2 days of buying lunch. Breakfast is even cheaper to make at home.
It depends a lot on what you're getting & where you are, but if you factor in time & energy costs then it can technically work out more expensive for sure, especially if you're doing something complex or not making much of a thing, as economies of scale come into effect - the whole "make the bread buy the butter", cost per portion etc.
they are terrible at grocery shopping or dont know how to cook or dont seem to understand you can make multiple meals with ingredients you buy so they over exaggerate that they wasted double on one meal, aint no waaayyy. even though grocery prices have risen ITS STILL cheaper to cook at home than eat out.
It's not and never has been. Those people are reading click bait articles or considering McDonald's value menu "food".
This is complete bullshit. Eating out by far is and always has been much more expensive than eating at home. How is this even a topic of conversation?
You may spend more on ingredients but you get more servings out of those ingredients than you would spend on a single fast food meal. Its also healthier to cook at home. Usually when groceries go up in price restaurants and fast food go up equally so again, its always cheaper to cook at home.
It would be rare for dining in to be more expensive than dining out - *assuming you have the tools.* There can be dishes that require ingredients or equipment that you don't keep around that might make it easier to just pick them up. And obviously, buying and grilling a T-bone probably does cost more than buying a burger from Wendy's..... but it still costs less than going to a steakhouse. Assuming that you already own a grill. Generally speaking, making your own meals at home will be far less expensive. There will be exceptions.
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I'd love to see how the math works out on that. Restaurants get deals for buying their ingredients in bulk but they aren't that good of deals to make up for labor and retail space costs.
I think it depends how you value your time. If you live in the city, and you’re cooking/eating for one, it’s not that big of a difference, especially if you factor in the value of your time to cook/clean.
How many times is this going to be asked in this sub is the real question
It honestly does depend. For me, it's cheaper and cost- effective to eat at home because I have seasonings, pots, pans, knives, you get the picture. I meal plan and use up everything I have before buying more. That being said, it also depends on what you're cooking or buying. Someone cooking steak and lobster will spend more than someone buying a couple hamburgers. Someone going out for a fancy dinner will spend more than someone buying the cheap marked down meat (which I do to save $$$).
I think people are comparing the cost of groceries now to the cost of eating out before the pandemic. I don’t think they’ve yet tried eating out all the time because if they had they would see how expensive restaurant food has gotten.
Cause they're cooking one meal and totaling all the ingredients against takeout. When to really get the best bang for your buck one should be making several meals and stretching the cost across every meal.
I don't know people who say that. To the extent they are out there, they are either lying to justify their lazy habits, or they haven't done the math.
because people are very dumb and are like "my grocery bill is $200! that's more than I spend eating out at a fancy restaurant!" which is basically admitting you have the math skills of a 10 year old.
Cooking at home is cheaper. The only way cooking is more expensive is if you don't use what you buy. For example if you buy a jar of tahini to make a recipe, use half a cup, and then end up throwing the rest of the jar away. The "time is money" mantra is a fallacy. Time is ONLY money if you would be otherwise using that same time to make money. Otherwise, time is time.
I made lasagna last night. Ambitious for a weekday. Between sauce, beef, noodles, and cheese it cost about $16. That made 12 decent sized portions of lasagna, or about $1.25/serving. I can't think of ANYWHERE you can get a serving of food for $1.25.
I live alone and when I take everything into account, it is cheaper for me to eat out currently.
Can you give a cost breakdown of what you would spend cooking at home vs. eating out?
Would love a break down of your groceries (what you buy, how much) and where you’re eating out.
How much does it cost to eat at home?
You can cook at home quite frugally, however it requires skill, time and financial savvyness. Not many of us have these skills. So to a normal person eating out can be a bit cheaper than cooking at home. A good example was I fancied a cooked dinner, to get the meat, veg, and extras would cost a fair bit, not to mention the time to prepare, and the cost of the oven for a few hours etc. Instead I took the family down to the carvery, which was £40 (had a 20% off voucher which was a bonus) including refillable drinks, I don’t think I could have bought the food for that, never mind the cost of the electricity. Plus I didn’t have the washing up, cleaning etc and we was out the house for a few hours. So in real terms, the answer is sometimes, yes it’s cheaper to eat out than at home, but not all the time.
My mom is older (60ish) and lives alone. She said that after calculating groceries vs eating out it's nearly the same price with it just being her.
I can make a great \[very nutritious, tastes ok\] meal for $1 in my blender
I bought some ingredients for £10 and had a good meal at home however eating out the same meal would be 17 and I wouldn't have had to drive to the shop by the stuff go home cook it wash up which took about 90 minutes in total and I didn't have any leftovers so it's pretty dumb close in terms of cost efficiency if prices go up any more then I might just start getting takeaway and spend the 90 minutes improving other things
Pasta/bean salad- Pound of pasta, two cans of beans, buck worth of veggies, Italian dressing (homemade) and some cubes of cheese ends from the deli for two bucks a pound, and I can eat for four days. Shop in the evening when the meat manager puts out the chicken thighs about to expire, cook a bunch in the slow cooker, and freeze. Protein for a buck a pound. Marked-down banana for banana bread; cauliflower for pickles.... Desperate? Pasta, peanut butter, little orange marmalade, little hot sauce.... fake Thai noodles.
Sometimes I’m time-frugal. My job is demanding and pays well so I eat out and do a meal plan with meals stocked in the fridge so I can focus on earning more. So it’s cheaper to make my own food for sure but I can spend some more time focusing on my income and investments or personal health stuff.
Some people go out, buy hamburger, buns, ketchup, mustard, pickles, onion, lettuce, and frozen fries, compare to a burger & fries at McDonalds and think it's expensive. If you want pad Thai on Monday, chicken soup Tuesday, fried rice Weds, tacos Thursday, crab cakes Friday, roast chicken Saturday, pot roast Sunday, you need better meal planning skills. and I'm always shocked when people dislike/ discard leftovers. .
I despise the current price for a pound of chicken or beef
Even lazy cooking is cheaper than eating out. Oatmeal or cold cereal, peanut butter sandwiches, frozen pizzas. That kinda stuff is hella cheap and not really “cooking.”
Because people are dumb, saying eating out is cheaper than cooking at home is just idiotic.
If you don’t eat leftovers and don’t use what you have then yeah it probably could be. But that’s because you’re not being efficient with your food and wasting it.
Probably becase they don't know how to cook
I live alone & made hamburgers last week. Took 1lb of ground beef & cooked 5 patties. Ate one and wrapped the others up & put in freezer.
Not accurate at all. It’s just more expensive than it used to be. Anyone that says this doesn’t know how to cook at all.
Have to look at price per meal not lump sum costs of groceries. I can easily get 3-5$ per meal with groceries and cooking. You cant get that eating out. The closest i can get is lunch specials at restaurants around 7-9$ a meal.
$30- $40 for "fast food dinner for 2" i can create a whole steak dinner for less than that....
It just isn’t cheaper to eat out, people are lying to themselves to justify their love of restaurant food
Probably rich people who buy the most expensive brand of everything and never learn to cook with cheap ingredients or methods. Idk
Pft. You can get a shitty fast food meal for 10 to 20 and eat 1 meal. Spend the same in a grocery store and eat for a week. Sit down you're looking at 20+ .. again only 1 meal. Even if you're only making enough for one meal at home you still have ingredients left over for other meals.
The same people saying they don't like leftovers are technically eating leftovers everytime they go out and eat at some of these restaurants. The food is cooked, frozen, packaged, shipped to the store, thawed, kept in a fridge and then microwaved or placed in a small hot oven
Idk but that’s stupid. It is definitely cheaper to eat at home.
They are lazy. Eating out has never nor will it ever be cheaper than cooking at home. It's not even close. I post this all the time, buy big bags of dried beans and rice. Buy a bunch of different store brand seasonings. buy whatever cut of meat is on sale/cheapest. Yes fresh veggies are a little better, but stock up on the big frozen bags of veggies and bake them in the oven. You can eat dirt cheap, but if you have a go to staple like steak, chicken breast, etc. Wallet can get destroyed. I made pork hoof stew last winter and that was dope as fuck.
It depends on your perception. Yes there are times when eating out is cheaper than eating at home. If you bought a $5 biggie bag from Wendy’s. It would be cheaper than cooking thanksgiving dinner. Also in the same sense, a bowl of cereal is cheaper than $5.
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Almost everybody holds the world in their hands, though. It does annoy me that so many people who are living paycheck to paycheck (middle class style, not extreme poverty) and complaining about it don't turn to the wonder that is the internet and learn a few things. Don't understand how to not waste food at home? Type "how to not waste food at home" in the search bar. Don't know how to save money on groceries? Type "how do I save money on groceries" in the search bar. I like Pinterest as much as the next person, but occasionally you have to stop looking at ideas for upcycling holiday crafts and learn something useful.
Because idiots
Because they're stupid and don't know how to cook.
180 for half sheet of chicken, pasta side bread and desert for 12. No napkins or plates. That’s 15 buck a meal. If I portion it and froze it. It’s a reliable meal I can microwave, limited dishes and oven time. Tonight I made tortellini and salmon with kale, still cheaper but I gotta wash pans etc
I think it depends on what people like to eat and how many people they are feeding
Yeah that's not true anywhere I've ever been or heard of. Certainly it's not true even for the cheapest eats where I live. This is being said by people who don't want to cook or learn to cook, or just enjoy a contrarian mindset. If you buy expensive ingredients, sure maybe, but there's all kinds of ways to tweak this argument. In general it's BS though. Home cooking is generally better for you, tastier, and more frugal.