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Comment by jdgiese | Hacker News Reader

I love cooking sometimes, but then again, other-times I would rather spend my time working on a client project. When you add up the time spent:

1. planning meals (may be minimal if you can ad-hoc quickly)

2. walking/driving to the grocery store

3. cooking

4. cleaning

It can easily be more expensive for an individual person (or even a couple) to cook than it is to eat out. (I think this makes intuitive sense too, since there are economies of scale and efficiencies with how restaurants are run.) If you love cooking, then you are doing it for fun---thats great! But I think for people who don't like cooking, it can be rational to eat out for most meals.

Many people are not paid at an hourly rate, so this analysis may not make sense for them.

(Also, where I live, there are plenty of healthy and cheap places to eat out at.)

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If you care about it, it's easy to save money by cooking yourself with this one crazy trick: leftovers. It takes very little extra effort to make a much larger batch of whatever you're cooking. It's pretty simple to cook ~10 servings of a solid meal that costs ~$0.25 (e.g., Chana Masala w/ brown rice) each with about ~2 hours of time all in with grocery shopping + cooking + cleaning. Sure, if you're making $200+/hour and would do none of these things, it might be slightly cheaper to get delivery. But... I suspect that scenario is very uncommon.

Sure, but now you're eating the same thing for a week. I lived that way in college, it was great for saving money. Now i can afford to do a combination of delivery and blueapron style box'o'ingredients and enjoy the increased variety with less mental overhead (buying, prepping, and storing multiple servings for one has its own issues).

The trade off here is that now you're eating the same meal for 10 meals straight. Most people would rather not do that if they could afford not to.

It doesn't particularly bother me to eat the same thing everyday, but some people absolutely hate it. I am good friends with someone who absolutely refuses to eat leftovers, ever.

I think this is why the usual advice is usually 'learn a few dishes you like', not 'cook something new every day'. Once you have a few recipes nailed, you don't need to spend time planning etc, and you can work out a pattern whereby you know exactly what to buy each time you go to the store (which you'd be doing anyway) without needing to think. And for washing/cleaning up, there are dishwashers.

You need your daily excercise, going to the shop, cooking, cleaning all count towards 10k steps per day on your Fitbit.

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