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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Knowing how to cook has done nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for going out or ordering in. In fact, sometimes I order the very things I cook to see how a pro makes them.

The trend propelling eating out is atomization. It simply isn't time/cost effective to cook for one person, probably not even two. Shopping, prep, cooking, and cleaning take so much time that even gourmet restaurants have completely reasonable prices.

Unless people start having big families and living in the exurbs, restaurants should be fine.

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Cooking at home is dramatically more time/cost effective for two people compared to eating out. Anyone this isn't true for just has very inefficient shopping, prep, cooking and cleaning habits. They probably also don't understand how inefficient they are in these areas, or know what the food budget of someone who knows what they are doing actually looks like. This is always abundantly clear when this gets discussed on HN.

I don't think that's the right way to conceptualize this. Efficient shopping, prep, cooking and cleaning habits are complex and practiced skills, which not everyone has the time or energy to learn. I've cooked ever since I was old enough to be trusted with a kitchen knife, and I still regularly find myself throwing out half-eaten packs of meat or whole cabbage heads unless I sit down and literally write out a meal plan.

I agree with all this, but a lot of the meals eaten by people who formerly couldn't cook weren't eaten in restaurants; they were picked up from a fast/casual place nearby or ordered in. I used to eat all my meals at work, which roughly approximates ordering delivery, and it took less time than I'm spending now cooking food for most meals.

The cheapest I've ever eaten was after I made conscious effort to only buy and eat healthy things.

Since then, the only time I've ever seen something that's sold in a box be cheaper than produce is when whatever's in that box is made out of mostly sugar or flour.

I'm under the impression that many people choose to shop at places like Whole Foods and pay a premium for it when they can get much cheaper, but same quality or better, food elsewhere. The markup on produce (besides bananas) at Whole Foods is typically 2x-4x more than the price of organic produce from a farmer's market, or other grocery stores.

That, or they're under the impression that what they pay for meal-kits is how much food costs at the store. You're paying restaurant prices for food when you buy meal-kits.

I dunno about you, but it takes me about 30 minutes to cook a decent meal, and about 10 for cleanup. My partner often helps with one part or the other, so it's around 20 minutes a day. Add an hour a week for grocery getting. Round trip to a restaurant, waiting for my food, for the wait staff, etc., takes upwards of an hour a day. When I cook, I usually have leftovers for the next day's lunch, which is rarely the case when I eat (ate) out. I don't agree with your statements on saving time or money, unless you're doing fast food, which has its own hidden costs to your health.

> It simply isn't time/cost effective to cook for one person, probably not even two.

Paying someone else to source and make your food is a luxury. It saves you time, but you're definitely not saving money. Far from it.

Rarely is a financial advisor going to say: "Get your food from restaurants instead of a grocery store"

That's only true if the person making your food charges similar rates as you do. Usually not the case on HN.

Buying fresh ingredients isn't cheap - especially if you have to keep rebuying them to have them onhand.

If you're cooking for a family, you can buy things and consume them quickly, but many things are sold in quantities that are way too much for one or two people, and even leftovers only go so far.

Yes, you can probably make a pot of pasta with a minimal amount of prep time (though "a watched pot never boils" is a saying for a reason), but unless you want to eat pasta for a week that doesn't scale indefinitely. If you want to eat healthy and have a mix of vegetables in your diet, you'll be buying more of them all the time.

Time is a finite resource - for many of us in the tech industry, one of the scarcest. In the best case, I'm working 8-9 hours a day and sleeping 8-9 hours a day, which leaves 6-8 hours of living. If I spend 1-2 hours of those cooking and cleaning dishes, that's a significant chunk of my life.

I can't disagree that your time may be better spent doing other things.

But you can definitely cook with fresh, healthy ingredients and still be way cheaper than eating out. It takes some planning, but it is minimal planning.

Especially if you make common sense alterations to recipes. Many times, online and cookbook recipes are created for the visual wow factor. There are usually expensive ingredients that are not necessary for the dish.

For example, if the dish calls for a teaspoon of capers or fresh parsley or whatever and you don't already have some, you can generally skip it.

And you can also make larger quantities like what you might make for a family and refrigerate or freeze leftovers. Things last a lot longer in the fridge and freezer than many people think.

As do ingredients like milk and eggs. If you keep your fridge adjusted cold enough, milk generally lasts me more than a month. Yogurt and sour cream more than 2 months, usually. Dryer cheeses basically indefinitely if you cut off any mold before eating.

Lettuce and leafy greens are the shortest shelf life for me, but they can be bought in rather small quantities so I just buy as needed.

I supplement that with flash frozen vegetables like frozen vegetable medley mixes or bags of frozen brussel sprouts that will last about as long as you like if they stay frozen.

I also buy large quantities of high quality meats at Costco and simply portion it up and freeze it. I use a vacuum sealer for best results, but ziploc bags are fine. I recently found a steak that had fallen to the back of the freezer. It had to have been there for at least 18 months. I cooked it up and it was delicious.

Totally on a tangent but my experience with restaurant cooking compared to my newfound cooking expertise is that the restaurant food is drenched in oil and salt and is cooked at much too high a temperature

No, cooking single meals for one person isn't time or cost effective. Make something like a big batch of beef stroganoff, refrigerate some, freeze some, and it will last a long time.

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