Yea your first two points are very important, what if someone doesn’t have a good market or doesn’t want to bother, I kinda wish it was like in The Matrix and I could ask Mouse to upload years of cooking practice to my brain but nope
We probably have, hell I might have posted in it or been the OP! I get tired of some posters here claiming eating out even dollar menu items proves people are unfrugal money wasters(anyone who doesn’t make my choices is wrong). It can make sense to eat out, depends on individual circumstances.
10 kg of rice would last me, uh… a couple of years, and that’s eating in every day. I often have to eat lunch out because of the logistics at work, or of social requirements; I’ve had many jobs where it was logistically possible to bring food, but if you did so you missed the most important meeting of the day, the one known as “lunch”.
Some of the advice being given assumes families; often, the people who can’t be arsed cook in are singles, or couples. The OP himself said that he is convinced that eating in is cheaper for families, and that from his point of view part of the reason it can sometimes be cheaper to eat out is that those of us who aren’t a family can’t take advantage of the good prices obtained by buying a 10kg bag of rice. I’m very happy that my current job provides fruit for the workers, among other things because the local supermarket only sells oranges in 2kg bags and buying one would mean tossing several oranges every time.
For me, single and often on the move, it is cheaper to eat pasta or chicken at home than to eat Thai from the takeout - but eating Thai at home is absurd, because Thai is something I feel like eating once every 6-9 months and the next time I want to do it I won’t even be using the same kitchen I use now. I don’t know where will I be, but probably thousands of miles away. It makes a lot more sense to buy only a few basic spices than to have a whole rack: do I throw almost-full pots every time, or move them?
I think the bigger problem is that the inexpensive restaurant dishes have an excessive amount of sugar, fat, and salt and frequent ingestion is detrimental to your health. Anecdotally speaking, I know that when I take my lunch to work I end up spending less money on food during the week. I can spend $15-20 for soup and salad over the week or $6-10 per day if I go out for lunch. But I’m not trying to be thrifty when I go out so I’m sure you could spend $2-3 at a fast food place and fill yourself up. A bean burrito from Taco Bell has 1050 mg of salt, a McDonald’s cheeseburger has 680 mg, and a roast beef sandwich from Arby’s has 972 mg of sodium.
I have to admit I’m with Nava when it comes to exotic dishes. Exotic being defined as anything I don’t normally cook at home. Every time I’ve cooked Chinese food I’ve ended up spending a lot of money on ingredients that I only use a limited number of times. I can get a large pizza for $12 with a bunch of toppings and I don’t think I could buy the ingredients for the same price or less at the grocery store.
Again, different things for different people. When I was single I walked past something like 100 restaurants on my commute home. But the closest grocery store was an overpriced Whole Foods more than a mile away (and I didn’t have a car). A regular grocery store was more like a mile and a half.
It really pays to use quality meat. Pork and chicken I don’t care so much about, because it’s either cooked or seasoned to make up for any shortcomings. Beef and fish though, need to be high quality. If the way you’re cooking the meat is an issue, there are many threads that offer advice. I’ve been cooking a long time, and I still ask for advice.
I agree about the veg.
Sorry for the lecture.
What’s ‘a bunch of toppings’? We went to Round Table recently, and a pizza with everything (except anchovies, dammit! :mad: ) and two small beers was over $30. Two medium pan pizzas from Domino’s cost about $20.
I make pizza at home half the time (or more). Two 14-inch (i.e., ‘large’) pepperoni pizzas using dough, sauce, cheese, and meat from Trader Joe’s cost about $13.
I agree with you. Buying fresh vegetables because one day I felt like eating them means the stress of eating them again in time before they go bad. Same with fresh fruit.
I haven’t kept track of my purchases for years, and I travel so much now that it wouldn’t tell us much of use for this conversation. But I still have my old tables. I averaged <$35/week in grocery bills in 2007. That includes household stuff like cleaning products and toilet paper, although that all was split with a roommate. I also think I was out of town three weeks that year and didn’t buy groceries. I also ate out once a week, usually for lunch.
I was cooking for myself. I don’t see an obvious way I could have spent less money by eating at restaurants.
Yes, we can probably find isolated meals that I couldn’t have prepared at home for cheap. I didn’t eat those. These days, if I want to cook from a cuisine with a very different ingredient profile (e.g. spices) from my normal cooking, I can buy just what I need of the spices from bulk bins.
As for time, this is back when I was working an irregular 70+ hours per week, with only Sundays off, and making <$8/h. The mind boggles when people say they don’t have time to cook.
I wasn’t all that efficient with my food. Stuff went bad. I learned the hard way that some things don’t freeze well, that some containers aren’t good for storage, and that no, that stew wasn’t “probably still good, yeah, smells mostly fine.” But I suppose refusing to eat leftovers could make things even more expensive. Even I don’t like eating the same thing every day, but that’s what the freezer is for.
I have spent a lot of time looking into this and number crunching and for me, it was cheaper to order food so that is what I do (mostly). And that was without factoring in the time I save. Again, that is for me and my circumstances.
Yeah, I probably could eat out more cheaply if I wanted to eat Taco Bell, etc., every day. But not only is it not healthy, it just tastes like crap. At one time I could do that, but not anymore.
Subway is good for that. A 6" healthy sub like black forest ham or turkey breast is only $3 - $4 if you don’t get a drink or chips. Get it loaded with lots of toppings and one of their healthy dressings and it makes a good, inexpensive and convenient meal. I can’t make a comparable sandwich for less than that as a one-off and yet they are willing to make me one on demand in just a few minutes at countless locations almost anywhere in the U.S. That is my usual go-to lunch. I cook my own dinner but usually spend a lot more than $3 - $4 for ingredients alone. I would save a lot of money overall if I went full Jarod and just got all my meals from Subway but that would probably get pretty old.
Subway is pretty darn cheap compared to a one-off sandwich. Especially if you don’t eat them frequently and end up throwing out bread. I decided coldcuts/lunchmeat was beyond my budget back when I had to watch it.
I value my time, for tasks where I could easily do something or pay someone to do it for me, at about $45/hour (I know, privileged of of the first world math). So no, cooking for myself is not less expensive than letting someone else do it for me. Even with a regular diet of takeout from decent local restaurants (not fancy, just good). If I consider my time as having no value, then yes, cooking for myself is generally cheaper.
Plus, I place a value on eating different stuff all the time and when I do go through a cooking phase basic staples generally go bad before I use them, especially produce, unless I am in the grocery story every other damn day. Plus, I have a small kitchen so don’t have a lot of room for the other wide of variety of long-lasting things that I might use once a month.
Yes, in terms of just dollars out of the bank account, I could make my own saba shioyaki for less than the $16 it costs me at the Japanese place on the corner. Or $6 for two fish tacos from taqueria next door. Or 6.95 for biscuits and gravy at the family diner the next block down. But in total economic impact to me, must cheaper to just let those people do it.
When I was last unemployed and my time was less valuable the result of the math changed. But the first thing I sacrificed was variety.
You kind of have to look at each situation separately, but eating out is rarely cheaper unless you’re factoring in time or waste.
The last time my wife and I had surf and turf, we did it at home. It was $30 of meat between the thick-cut rib eye and lobster, but at most restaurants, we’d have paid that (or even double that) per plate. And, honestly, I think we did it better than any restaurant I’ve been to.
For me, at least, the investment of time shouldn’t be counted as a cost. I really do enjoy cooking. As long as I can get my wife to do the dishes, we’re all good.
Unless we’re both starving, we almost always bring home doggie bags from restaurant meals. There’s usually enough to constitute another meal for each of us. In some cases there may be enough for another meal on top of that. I’ve never done a cost analysis of such, but I’d say we certainly get our money’s worth and then some
But yeah, it’s almost always cheaper to cook at home than go out to eat. I say “almost” because it depends on what you cook. The price of beef, for instance, is sky high now, so I’m more apt to order steak when going out to eat than I am to buy it and broil it at home. OTOH I can get at least two meals plus stock from poaching a whole chicken in the crock pot.
I would say a bunch is three or more toppings. Right now I can get a large Papa John’s pizza with three toppings for $10 plus tax. Last week I ordered one of their large specialty pizza and it was $12 with five toppings. Two medium two topping pizzas from Domino’s comes out to $12 (deep dish $18) and M-Th I can get a large three topping carryout pizza for $8. At Pizza Hutt you can get a large two topping carry out for $8.
There’s nothing wrong with making pizza at home and I occasional prepare them on the grill. But if I want a pizza with all the toppings I like -sausage, pepperoni, ham, and bacon- then the costs go up because I can’t just buy the amount of ingredients I need for that one pizza.
It really depends on the volume and the price of the ingredients. For example, my wife and I fed our family (2 adults, 1 child), her sister’s family (2 adults, 2 kids), and her 2 cousins roast beef, roast potatoes and green beans the other day. I think the total cost of the meal was something like $30, half of which was the roast.
You couldn’t go get 7-8 dinners like this for $30 if you were to eat out, but at the same time, cooking up a 4 lb roast, 2-3 lbs of potatoes and a shitload of green beans for one person would be a lot of trouble and time, and would also mean that after the initial one, you’d have 6-7 servings of leftovers to eat within the 4-5 day leftover window. Most people aren’t that relentless about eating leftovers, so ultimately you might be better off financially just paying $8-9 bucks at Boston Market for something similar.
And with respect to pizza; again, it’s kind of dependent on your tolerance for cooking, I think. You can definitely produce sauce and crusts for just about nothing, but it takes some effort.
