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Comment by bmj | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money.

[0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.

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I cook on a regular basis, and have for years. Try as I may, there's no way I can match the cost of McDonald's for dinner every night, calorie for calorie. The closest I can come is by buying heavily processed foods.

There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.

In fairness, what you do is buy the raw ingredients to make 5 ro 10 times the amount of beef stew you want and either freeze the rest or eat stew for 2 or 3 days in a row. That sounds dull if you're single and like variety in your diet, but if you have a family it's quite practical.

Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most.

That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.

I do what exactly what you're talking about, and there's still no way I can match the prices of a canned stew with stuff I buy in a grocery store. It's not like the cost of beef goes down per pound when I buy it from the grocery store -- I pay a fixed cost, regardless of my quantity.

And this isn't surprising: $5 is remarkably cheap for a beef-based product. They do it by using remnant beef, which you can't really get in stores. Grocery store stew meat is probably 2-3x more expensive than the stuff they're using. Mine will taste better and be higher quality, but it won't be cheaper.

It's not like the cost of beef goes down per pound when I buy it from the grocery store -- I pay a fixed cost, regardless of my quantity.

I can't understand how you come to this conclusion. I definitely save money by buying larger cuts or bulk packs. Maybe you should come over for dinner :-)

I'm not saying that you can't save at all -- you can save 10% or so if you buy certain kinds of meat, in bulk. But it still doesn't make you cost-competitive with Hormel.

it surprised me when I realized most people don't do this.that's what my parents to growing up in that's what my wife and I do now. I only recently realized that most people don't put so much planning into their menus.

You can have a McDouble burger for $1 on the Dollar Menu. It contains 390 kcal and you need ~2300 kcal/day or about 6 burgers or $6. Can you go below that by cooking yourself? Unless you buy food in huge quantities, only eat pasta, or reduce your intake of meat, I think it's pretty hard.

Why not Google for research instead of speculating? It took me 5 seconds to find this:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

"Healthy eating really does cost more.

That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups."

Comparing calorie to calorie almost seems silly. The definition of a junk food is something that has a high concentration of calories, particularly relative to its overall nutritional content.

How else will you compare a 2300 calorie diet of healthy foods with a 2300 calorie diet of unhealthy foods?

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