During covid lockdowns we started the habit of getting take away once per week. And we’ve continued that habit. In part because of how expensive it is to eat out. But also, my wife and i both eat vegetarian and try to limit ultra-processed foods as much as possible, so in that regard we are willing to pay a little more for certain things.
This is my wife and I. And lately we’ve been eating out quite a bit. But there is good reason for that, we are in the middle of moving from one house to another, so things are hectic. Also, there are lots more eating out options where we now live.
And like @solost we don’t spend much on things we don’t need. We may buy electric bikes though.
That’s weird. I find eating out about 3-4x more expensive on average (which is about right, as that’s usually the material costs markup for restaurants). True, groceries have gotten more expensive, but eating out has gotten a LOT more expensive. I can make two eggs, toast, and hash browns for breakfast at home for about $1-$1.50. My local diner charges $10.45 for “Two Eggs cooked any style served next to our delicate and delicious Hash Browns or Fried Diced Potatoes or many other options with a Side choice of Toast, Pancakes or French Toast.” So that’s well over my 4x ingredients cost pricing. Or, for dinner, a full rack of baby backs is $30 at restaurants around here. I can buy one for just under $10 at the grocery. And cook it with side dishes like coleslaw and beans for another $5 max.
I’m already a vegetarian who buys in bulk, and generic, and cooks from scratch most of the time.
It’s hard to go lower on the shopping list, so eating habits haven’t changed-- but shopping and cooking habits have.
I make my own bread spread from generic butter and the cheapest olive oil available, and then, a little ultra-cheap cooking oil, and some seasoning; if I want clarified butter for a recipe, I make it myself instead of buying it; I substitute things in recipes sometimes, rather than buy an ingredient I might not use up, and let go to waste. I have a stew that calls for capers, for example. I use peas instead, because there is nothing else I use capers for.
I bought a juicer at Goodwill, and I now NEVER throw away old fruit and veggies that are dry or wilted, or otherwise not so appealing. Unless they are actually moldy, they go in the juicer. And nothing is allowed to get moldy. When I want fruit, instead of grabbing what I want most, I grab what is going bad soonest.
Something that happened during the pandemic, that I’ve revived, because I realized it saves money for a weird reason, is having groceries delivered.
It facilitates buying in bulk, for one thing-- buying 5 5lbs bags of bread flour at once is cheaper than buying them separately, and the bulk order comes from Amazon, where I have Prime (paid for by my dear brother).
Getting weekly groceries delivered I have discovered, even with the tip and the membership fee at Walmart, saves money, because it eliminates impulse buying, which I have discovered I do way more than I ever realized.
When parents at the school give me Target gift certificates (probably $3-400/year), which I used to use for clothes and electronics, I now use for food.
So I’m back to having nearly everything delivered.
I’ve cut my food budget by about 20%, and I don’t think I can do better, unless I just eat less.
Another thing I have noticed is that friends and coworkers who are meat-eaters, are asking me for vegetarian recipes, because they are trying to work a couple of non-meat meals into their week to save money.
That’s my experience, too. My guilty pleasures are maximizing the convenience of good quality prepared foods and occasional takeout. The only stuff I bother making from scratch any more are simple things like burgers or steaks on the grill.
Burgers is a good one. Quarter pounder with cheese is $5.49 at McD’s here, according to the app. I like making it at home, and I prefer burgers I make in general. 80-20 ground beef = $5/lb, so $1.25 quarter pounder. Sesame brioche bun from Aldi is about $3.50 for 6. Sixty cents each. A slice of cheese? Maybe a quarter. Condiments? Negligible. So we have $2.10, plus the cost of heating up the pan, for getting a burger with a better bun (and better sear) on it. And I can get it lower than that if meat is on sale or if I get lucky and find 50% off patties at Aldi, or if I use the $1 pack-of-eight buns. Of course, there is how you value your time in cooking it. I like cooking, so that time is free for me. Even the many years I was single, I cooked 90% of the time. For others, it may be worth the extra $3. I get that. But concrete cost-wise, it’s still significantly cheaper from an ingredient and fuel cost perspective to cook at home, in my experience. If it wasn’t, restaurants would be losing money hand over fist. I’ve helped out buying supplies for restaurants and bars around town, so I’ve been to Restaurant Depot and other wholesalers and the like where they get their ingredients. It’s not really cheaper than what I can find at Costco, Aldi, or local supermarkets having sales. Or, when it is cheaper, it’s not by a lot. They still have to price at around 3-4x ingredient cost. (Which also annoys me when people complain that they can make the same dishes at home for a third or quarter of the price. Well, no shit, you don’t have employees, overhead, and the need to make a profit to deal with. That’s always going to be about how much less expensive it is to make at home.)
JFC! 
With the added “convenience food tax” and expressed in CAD$, a quarter pounder combo with fries and Coke at McD’s here in Ontario is around $15!
Meanwhile I can get 4 thick high-quality lean burger patties at an upscale supermarket for around $8. Adding up all the costs, I can make a far, far superior burger at home for less than a fifth of the cost of the crap from McD’s. And it’s bigger, tastier, and healthier!
This is where liking cheaper cuts also works for me. I hate lean ground beef with a passion, so 80-20 or 73-27 is what I prefer.
I actually don’t know what the fat proportion is. I said “lean” to distinguish it from the fat-infested crap of cheaper cuts. But I like burgers that have enough fat to flame and smoke on the barbecue, and these do, and it immensely adds to the flavour!
I prefer 85-15 for stuff like a meat sauce (if I want fattier I use ground pork), 80-20 for burgers. I like fat, usually - I think lean pork is a modern abomination and tend to buy very pricey, fancy butcher shop heritage-breed pork chops when I have the urge for chops. More cheaply I just did a smaller (under 4 lbs) pork butt roast last night, which lately I’ve been preferring to pulled-pork for texture reasons. But I’m not sure I’ve ever had 73-27 beef.
I might go 85-15 for a meat sauce, but that’s usually ground round around here, and it doesn’t have a very beefy taste, so I’ll just pour off some of the 80-20’s fat if I feel like it.
73-27 is the cheapest beef I see at my grocer’s. I don’t think they used to have it around some years ago. I only remember seeing it in those big chubs before, and I’ve never bought those. My local meat packer will sometimes have beef at $0.99/lb (though it’s been about two or three years since that price – it’s more like $1.99/lb at the low end now when they have sales–ground pork and chicken they still have at $0.99/lb), and that is unmarked as to fat percentage. Just looking at it, I assume it’s about 60-40 (which is what the folks at Serious Eats guess In n Out’s meat to be. Remember, a lot of it cooks out.) I did once buy the extra fatty meat, and it was delicious as a burger, but, holy crap did it shrink!
Yeah, my preference to pork shoulder, whether roasting it or smoking it, is to take it a little bit below pulled pork territy, into what I’d call “chopped pork” territory, but a bit higher than “sliced pork” territory. I estimate around 195F instead of 205 (pulled) or 185 (sliced.) It’s soft and juicy, but not quite fall apart like pulled pork. However, for parties I make pulled, since that’s what people tend to expect/like.
I was aiming for 185, ended up ~190+ due to inattention at the critical moment. Still juicy and not disintegrating, so I can’t complain. Going to make some sort of fresh corn/angel hair-cut cabbage coleslaw and have sandwiches today 
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Yeah, those are ballpark numbers – the ideal finishing temp seems to vary by as much as 5 degrees from shoulder to shoulder. I’ve had pork pull at 195; I’ve had other shoulders need to go to 203 or so.
Whatever the final doneness is, you still have lovely, edible pork!
You’re comparing one burger to a combo with drink and fries. No shit that’s expensive, most of the markup is in the fries and drink.
Just for reference, my $5.49 1/4 pounder is $9.19 as a (medium) meal, for a $3.70 markup. You’re right – that’s a hefty markup for something as cheap as potatoes and soda. (But, as standalone items, it’s even worse.)
ETA: As an aside, on watching prices, I was with my 9-year-old yesterday and we were buying fruit. Hey, sale! Driscoll strawberries, $4.99/32 oz. Right next to it: Driscoll strawberries, on sale! One pound for $1.99. I swear to fucking God, every other trip to this grocery I see a math test like this to profit off the suckers who can’t do per unit pricing.
Last time it was fresh-squeezed lemonade. 32 oz for $6.99 or 16 oz for $1.99. What in the heck? At least it was a nice little real-world example for me to teach my kid, but she picked up on what was wrong right away.
We’ve been watching what we eat for some time now, as spousal unit was/is prediabetic, so fewer meals out. Also smaller servings at home, so what we do buy goes farther. We haven’t had to make any big changes yet, but I do watch for sales and I do what I can to stretch what we buy.
I worry about my daughter and SIL - they buy takeout a lot, eat out a lot, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t pay attention to sales. I know when they’re at our house, they load up the grandkids plates, and end up tossing a lot of uneaten food. I do my best to handle serving the kids when they’re here - I do hate waste. And I bite my tongue about their habits, but it’s a struggle…
There are a couple of factors that make a difference for me; I mean, I could easily eat very cheaply if that was my goal (rice and beans and not much else!) but generally I like to have a decent variety, AND I don’t generally have a lot of free time (I work two jobs) AND I’m single…. So while buying an eight-pack of buns and some burger and something for sides and getting it all prepped would be cheaper in a dollars-per-item sense, I now have to ensure I have the time to cook (some days I literally don’t) and hope I have enough ideas to use all that extra stuff up in a timely fashion, if I don’t want to eat the same thing every night (something I can do, but I really don’t need to).
So if I want tacos, I can spend $40-50 on all of the accoutrements I need to make them + other things to use up all the stuff (salsa/tomatoes/cilantro/lettuce/cheese) for the next 4-5 nights… or spend $12-15 at the little Mexican joint down the road for fresh-made tacos, rice, beans, and chips and salsa and no leftover stuff for me to worry about.
When I know I have a few days of little work coming, that’s when I usually do my cooking, but in general, it feels cheaper to me just getting takeout (or, more often these days, delivery). I can’t seem to walk out of the store these days without having spent $40+ with what feels like very little to show for it.
There are three in my household, and we usually can’t eat all the buns in the package. They don’t cost 60¢ a piece, they cost $3.50 for the package of 6, and either we eat them in the meal or we don’t. Even if we freeze the extra, they don’t keep very well and are unappealing to use later. If it’s just one person, that’s probably $3.50 for the one bun they want.
Yeah, i totally get a single person who wants variety finding it cheaper to get that by ordering out.
If anything, rising prices have been encouraging us to eat more healthily. Namely, much more fresh fruits and veggies, which seem to have been impressively immune to rising prices - so long as you buy what is on sale and in season.
We recently changed our coffee brand as my wife’s fave had just gotten too pricey.
We generally eat quite simply - very limited prepared foods. I drink coffee in the morning and water. And we rarely eat out. My wife uses the obnoxious app/specials for our local grocery. If something is really cheap, she stocks up. If too pricey, we go without for a while. But we keep our food bills low enough that we don’t really need to do anything major to economize. If we feel like something special, we get it. But for the most part, we are just providing ourselves tasty fuel.
I can see why delivery would be less expensive for many people, because it makes impulse purchases more difficult to do.