You need to learn to cook and cook well (time), buy the raw ingredients (time), cook them (time), clean the kitchen utensils and the kitchen itself (time).

Every person that cooks often that I've talked to grossly underestimates how much time their cooking takes them.

The ones that are more efficient either have a ton of cooking experience and talent or just a great kitchen setup, which is a rare luxury and generally a large investment.

Unless you have been taught at a young age that cooking is something valuable, I've found out that a lot of adults run from it like hell. When covid hit, I expected people to start being reasonable with their budget (and health) and reckoned that food delivery services would have a rough time surviving.

Turns out, people started ordering food for home a lot more, even though they now had the time as well as the incentive to save money due to the uncertainty.

And yet people don't. Are they so stupid and inept that they're physically incapable of this? Well, they can tie their shoelaces and go to work and carry out tasks at that job, so certainly not so stupid that they can't do this as well.

So I guess there must be something else going on here. I guess the situation must somehow be less simple and obvious than you assume. Reality, it appears, just doesn't match your simplistic view of how the world should work.

My partner and I cook almost 100% of our meals at home. I shop for groceries 1x a week, and it takes about 1 hour. Meal prep / cooking and cleaning varies a bit. We generally cook 1 roast chicken a week, and a pot roast in a slow cooker. Having pre-cooked proteins helps with meal prep time. We use a rice cooker often, and will usually toss some veggies in there with the rice to simplify things. That said, overall we probably spend 30-40 min a day on food prep, and another 10 min a day cleaning. When we cooked different meals every night, it was generally closer to 90 minutes a day on food prep / cleaning. Learning to cook takes time, learning to cook well takes more time, learning to cook efficiently and how to minimize time involved takes time.