One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.
Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.
[1] - https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&...
I am an accomplished cook and I have a lot of recipes passed down a century or more first-hand. Many have the property I described. I know many other people with similar family recipes.
Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Beyond that, what do you think is more representative of recipes of the past? A selection of hundreds of recipe books with thousands of recipes, or the family recipes of yourself and some acquaintances?
I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper.
Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices.
The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.
It's certainly very easy to do better than chain fast food. And my opinion of a certain local cafe was diminished once I got a Costco card and recognized the muffins.