How much do you spend weekly?
I'm slightly puzzled that ordering out is more expensive than cooking for ones self. Shouldn't centralized preparation be more efficient?
Breakfast is typically cereal, or toast and marmalade, but on weekends I might do scrambled eggs, or pancakes and if my girlfriend's around, we might do something like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poha_%28rice%29>Poha</a...; or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upma>Upma</a>; or something else fancy, but it's always at home.
Dinner is where the trade-off happens. I'll cook at home one or two days and eat out three days. So what happens with the remaining two days of the week? Leftovers from the two days that I do cook.
When I eat out, I end up spending not less than $10 on a meal. If I cook at home, I spend maybe $10 for two and a half meals. Why the difference? From what I can tell, there are several reasons...
At home, I cook once and cover several meals. I have no wastage because I refrigerate leftovers and eat them the next day. I decide what I'm gonna cook before I buy the ingredients. Each dish a restaurant makes has to serve one person. They buy the ingredients in advance and hope to break even on what they use. More often than not, then end up with wastage that they must throw away. This is factored into the menu.
The restaurant also needs to pay rent for their premises, pay salaries and follow health guidelines. You could factor your house rent into your meals, in which case it should shoot each day's meal up by $30 or more. You could also choose to pay yourself whenever you cook, pushing it up another few dollars, and as far as the health code goes... you decide.
even with rent and salary overhead, it still surprises me that some buffet-oriented system (which eliminates the one-dish:one-person problem you described, and reduces staffing) hasn't made eating out vastly cheaper.
the only thing cooking at home seems to have going for it is that most people are not otherwise productive with their time in the evening anyway.
that and the "homemade" connotation - which i suppose translates to something real if you have a family, in terms of time spent together.
I eat a lot too, because I like good food. I might eat out every second or third day and spend $100 a meal, including drinks.
I could save money by cutting down on going out, sure, but it's a small price to spend for the enjoyment of the food and the company and the environment.