Comment by jerkstate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerkstate | Hacker News Reader

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$10 per serving is essentially fast food prices in the bay area - you can't really get a healthy meal with meat and vegetables.

My family used Blue Apron for a while when we first had kids, and it was great for our lifestyle. We did move on to a service that optimizes grocery shopping so we can buy ingredients for a week's worth of meals in one shopping trip.

Edit: for those who asked, I am using thefresh20 now. It's pretty low-tech (just a weekly pdf). Besides being straightforward to shop for, it tells you how to prep stuff ahead of time. For example, bake 8 potatoes the first day and use half in a recipe today, half in a few days. Cook some pork chops today and save some for fried rice in a few days. Cook a pot of quinoa today and use it throughout the week.

There are a number of other services out there that allow you to customize things like servings/calories per meal and diet types but I am dubious about how well they could possibly optimize shopping and prep to use up a whole quanta of an ingredient over multiple recipes in the course of a week to be near the manually curated efficiency of fresh 20. If anyone has experience with those please let me know!

And that makes sense for those living there, but not everyone lives in the Bay Area or pays anything near what people pay there for things. I would think for a service like this to succeed, it needs to be applicable to places where you can go to a real restaurant for ~$10-15 a person. Which is most of the US where the other 315million Americans live.

Eh what? I can eat out at a restaurant for like $15 with tax and tip, and the packed food usually lasts me an additional meal. I avoid pricey restaurants though.

Implying that $10 and $15 are approximately the same is telling. I'm talking about 6 to 40 person-meals per week for a family. (FWIW $10 per person-meal from blue apron is at the high end of home cooking, unless you are cooking high end ingredients like fancy fish or steak or including wine)

Especially when you start really planning meals around whatever is on sale that week and carrying ingredients from one meal to another, $10 per person per meal is definitely a lot. Also, pantry items where that $10 can get you a 5# bag of rice that lasts for many meals.

One of my favorite personal discoveries is to buy the whole broccoli, use the florets as a vegetable side, and the stems in a soup. The sturdier stems hold up better with the same flavor.

You said $10 per serving. I average $7.50 per serving from eating out ($15 per eat-out which lasts me two meals, since I go for restaurants which provide generously sized dishes).

What do you eat at a restaurant that costs that much?

Huh? Go to a random Asian restaurant in SF and get a stir fry whatever and you're going to be in the $10-$15 range with tax and tip pretty easily.

I'm unaware of any common restaurant (i.e. not fast food) where you can get a full meal for much below $10. Factor in the additional cost of a non-water beverage (soda or beer, for instance) as well as a tip, and it's likely you're spending $15 or more.

This article from BusinessInsider (2015) indicates that the average cost per meal at common "chain restaurants" starts at $12.17. Over half of the restaurants on the list have average meal prices in excess of $15. [1]

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-it-costs-to-eat-at-...

Dishes are usually $10-$12. Slightly less for some restaurants, but usually at those restaurants I need to order something else as well (e.g. $2 naan at an Indian restaurant or fries at a burger place). Add in tax and 20% tip and it comes out to ~$15.

I cook meals in SF most nights for way less than $20 for 2 people without trying, meat or seafood and veggies.

What service did you move on to? I'd be interested a better curated grocery delivery system than Amazon Fresh (which is already saving us a ton of time as a busy family).

$10 per serving is egregious. Take a blue apron recipe with you to a grocery store, and I bet you can buy all the ingredients for $2.5 a meal.

Not in the same quantities you can't. If something calls for, say, eggs, you aren't going to buy a single egg, you're buying six at a minimum. If something calls for fresh cilantro, you're buying a whole bunch.

If you're cooking for a family, fine, but cooking for one or two? The food waste problem sucks, and you can't really get around it unless you like eating the same thing for days in a row.

Eggs last for quite some time. Yeah, herbs are an issue if you don't grow them. But not all recipes that call for them really need them. And you can also freeze leftovers that are useful for some purposes. I cook for one during the week. I do eat leftovers but I also repurpose ingredients, freeze things, and definitely don't eat the same thing for days in a row.

Please, you do what we have been doing for the last 100 years. Freeze the extra. So you get 1 meal that is fresh and two that are frozen you can eat in a couple weeks. Do you honestly think that when you go to applebee's (or similar) the food didn't come out of a freezer?

But maybe the real problem here is lack of "cooking" knowledge. Grinding that cilantro up and mixing it with some garlic and olive oil will extend its life in the fridge for weeks. Or just freeze it, or dry it. Yes, food waste sucks, but that is because a lot of traditional skills have been lost. My wife thinks I'm weird for taking chicken/turkey bones/necks/etc and making stock, but it turns a pile of bones meat scraps into a nice soup.

This is also how to (apparently) run a profitable restaurant. Food rolls down from the fresh vegetables/meat, through the casserole stages until it ends up in a soup somewhere.

Really it doesn't take much effort, but really after a day of work + driving/etc I'm lucky if I have the motivation to tear open a frozen bag of stir fry.

>My wife thinks I'm weird for taking chicken/turkey bones/necks/etc and making stock, but it turns a pile of bones meat scraps into a nice soup.

I was at my dad's over Thanksgiving and we had a pretty good-size turkey. Saved some leftover meat for sandwiches. And then I made turkey soup and stock out of the carcass and some more of the leftover meat. Maybe this is considered weird by SV standards but I'm by no means a pioneer homesteader and this seems absolutely normal to me.

> Take a blue apron recipe with you to a grocery store, and I bet you can buy all the ingredients for $2.5 a meal

Where the hell are you shopping that you can self-construct a blue apron meal for $2.50?

$2.50 will get you the basil to use in the recipe and that is about it. Then you need the chicken ($7 minimum) and produce ($5-$7). The starches ($2-$5). Any one-off spices (could be $1 or $15 depending).

Sorry, but people who brag about eating for $2.50/meal either live in places with a dirt cheap cost of living or don't know how to add.

To me, your prices seem unrealistic. You can get chicken for like $2 a pound, and you're not using a pound of chicken for a single serving of any meal, so it's something like a dollar or less per person. Starches are dirt cheap, $5 buys you enough pasta or rice or potatoes for at least a dozen servings. E.g. a five pound bag of rice is $3 in Walmart, and if it's a side to some chicken&produce dish, then that comes out to something like $0.20 for starches per person - an order of magnitude difference.

What service is that?

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