And tbh, it really does take time to prepare a good meal, including washing dishes and all that. For those of us living alone it takes a good chunk of our free time after work.
Not to sound harsh, this is just how I frame these sorts of things for my own benefit: If you have free time and are getting takeout or eating hot pockets, you're just borrowing that time from the end of your lifespan to use between work and sleep. It's like borrowing from a 401k on a fixed income.
Speaking of, the same goes for finances. We feel like certain essentials are disproportionately expensive because we can otherwise afford previously unheard of luxuries on average incomes, but we are actually just much less wealthy than consumerism makes us feel.
So if we live wisely and with discipline, it is quickly obvious that time and money are in much shorter supply than most realize. That isn't necessarily grim, but this framing is much more useful in good habit forming in my experience.
The value culture in the West has so quickly changed in only a generation or two depending on the specific region, that I'm more suspicious over time of the perceived unobtainability of certain ways of living that we frequently romanticize.
I just throw in Chicken Thighs, Rice, Frozen Vegetables. Add water. Set for 7 minutes. Come back to several servings of perfectly cooked food. Add things like peanut sauce and seasoning to taste before or after pressurization.
Total human involvement time to prep, monitor, and serve: about 5 minutes, ingredients are available at any Walmart. Electric pressure cookers are regularly on sale for $40 at Best Buy.
Cooking the same meal using pots and pans would take 60 minutes of human time and require many more pieces of equipment to buy, use and wash.
Give every poor household in the USA an electric pressure cooker, and the instructions on how to use them. Poor households wouldn't even need cooktops or ovens anymore.
I spend 1 hour every two weeks getting groceries for ~$120. I spend 1.5 hours every two weeks (5 minutes a day + 20 minutes to prep 14 “containers”) preparing breakfast and rinsing dishes from the previous day for the dishwasher). My breakfast is cooked oat bran with walnuts, flax seed, wheat germ, Ceylon cinnamon, cacao, blueberries, raisins, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, 4oz orange juice, fish oil, vitamins d3, k2.
I spend 2.5 hours a week (5 to 15 minutes a day) preparing lunch, typically steamed vegetables + 150 grams chicken + 1 cup dry instant brown rice cooked OR salmon + simple salad + sweet potatoes OR 8oz unsalted black beans with fresh guacamole OR lentils OR potato and egg tacos with homemade salsa OR “fried” rice, etc.
I spend the same preparing dinner with same / similar dishes as lunch.
I also snack on fresh fruit / vegetables between meals sometimes.
Roughly $240 and 15 hours a month (30 minutes a day) for all food prep + cleanup, and yes, the numbers are accurate as I have timed myself over a two week period in the past, if anything I’m probably faster now. I’m sure there are other factors that can add extra time, but for me, a single guy in the US, I spend less time and money cooking healthy delicious meals at home than I did going out to eat, and only slightly more time than heating up frozen dinners, which I think is more than compensated for by the resulting health benefits.
If you're making a single serving (e.g. single dinner for yourself), then the overhead of cleaning dishes and pans makes it uneconomical to do so.
Also, certain things in cooking don't need supervision and you can perform other chores during that time (e.g. making beef/chicken stock in a pot, baking a roast, etc.)
There are plenty of less complicated, one pot meal recipes littering the internet. Have you tried an Instapot or a nice air fryer?
find a recipe
get the ingredients
make the meal
So most of the time I just substitute on pasta with a tomato/cucumber/whatelseIgrabbedintheshop salad.
~20 mins to shop for a two-three days worth of food, ~20 mins to make, even less if I'm lazy and bouggt frozen dumplings.
It takes even more time for people preparing food for a family. Throw in kids who are picky eaters, and it is even harder.
Yep. I never understood the whole "my kids won't eat $x" thing.
When I was a kid, i ate what was given to me (which was the same as everyone else got) or I didn't eat.
And not because we were poor and couldn't afford to indulge me either. We were a family and ate the same food together. There was never any discussion or expectation of anything different.
Maybe they would have broken after a few more days of starvation, but I didn't have it in me to do it.
We have gotten to a better place now. She still will rarely eat what we eat (unless it is on one of her 3-4 meals that she will eat), but there are some healthy (enough) staples that she will eat when we eat our meal... strangely, she likes plain, uncooked, beans from a can with plain rice. She eats berries, and likes to eat plain, uncooked, spinach. She is also more open to trying new foods now, although she almost always dislikes them; our only ask of her is that she at least tries something before refusing it. If it was up to her, she would eat nothing but pizza or chicken nuggets for dinner.
She is 6, and it is an ongoing process to get her to eat more things. She complains that most food is too 'spicy', even if it isn't spicy at all. I don't think there is some magic cure that would make her eat a wider variety of foods. Her grandfather is similar, he only eats the most bland food possible.
But yeah, it's absolutely not as simple or easy as, "Well, if ya don't eat you'll be hungry" - because congratulations, now they will carry that hatred towards that food with them and it'll come out the next time you serve it to them. And even then, if they're not picky, cooking still takes time because there's a kid running around who often doesn't give a shit about the fact that you have to tend to whatever's cooking at the moment, or they're too little so you need to modify your food prep in order to eliminate/reduce choking hazards.
The crux of my point was to highlight that parenting is never as simplistic as the previous comment ("All ya have to do is tell them to eat or go hungry!") may have made it sound, not to suggest that you can mold your children exactly as you would like.
Edit: And your point about some kids being pickier than others is actually exactly my point. That's why I said it's not easy - it has taken a lot of time and patience for us to get our children to this point. I've heard stories of parents struggling for over a year or more to get a kid to break certain eating habits. It's not just picky eating, though - correcting various aspects of a child's personality requires a LOT of time and attention, often over the course of years. That's why I took an issue with OP brushing it off so casually.
Works. 100% guaranteed. They will eat everything with a smile
In my case, I use the Tio de Nadal, which makes for a fun time when he visits (Kids have to hit the Tio with a stick and sing songs, then he shits sweets and toys)