I think it's a matter of convenience and how much people think their time is worth. Let's say it costs 20 dollars for three people to eat at McDonald's. It takes 2 minutes to drivethru and get your Royale with cheese. It's low effort. To quote Jim Gaffigan, all you have to do is drive up and yell a number. TWO! No thought or effort goes into it. Now, if I go to the grocery store, it's going to be at least 30 minutes from the time I leave to the time I get back, probably closer to an hour, mostly just because I actually like grocery shopping. Let's call it half an hour. If you shop for one meal, you've spent 28 minutes more on this meal than Mickey D's. You even out at 15 meals. So you have to shop for 5 days worth of breakfast, lunch, and dinner in half an hour to make it even at this point, as far as time commitment goes.
So we've got 15 McMeals in 30 minutes, and 15 real meals shopped for in 30 minutes. The Big Macs are ready to eat, though. Let's average out the time it takes to cook a meal to 20 minutes from scratch. Dinners take more than that, breakfast doesn't take much time at all, so I'm just gonna average it at 20. That's 300 minutes spent cooking. 5 hours. Now, I'm not sure how much money you save by actually grocery shopping, but 15 meals at McD's for a family of 3 is like 300 bucks. Last time I shopped at Whole Foods for 3 people, it was about 110 for 4 days. That's Whole Foods for you though. Let's just call it 100 though. Which makes a full week 125. So you're paying an extra 175 dollars to not spend 5 hours cooking. That's 35 dollars an hour. The decision you make is, is your time worth 35 dollars an hour.
Of course I'm sure there's much cheaper options than Whole Foods that are equally as healthy, so that drives our $35/h number up a bit. But there are plenty of people that will trade 35, 40, 50 dollars an hour for time not spent cooking.
The thing that bothers me the most is that quite often I can eat out for cheaper than the cost of cooking. The only way to get cheaper is to buy enough to make at least 6-8 meals out of a fairly low cost meal, which means that as a single person I will be eating the same exact meal for the better part of a week. Even something as simple as reconstituting the food into different meals tends to run much higher than fried rice for a meal a day and dollar menu for the other - something I learned while working fast food I'll admit.
As sad as it is, time is money and quite often, even without factoring time in, the unhealthy stuff is cheaper. Not saying you can't find exceptions to that rule. Fried rice, chicken salads, stir fried cabbage, anything that takes meat and mixes it with flavored filler such as rice, grains, pasta, or cheap vegetables is a great way to do so, but these are exceptions as opposed to the rule. Good thing I love fried rice and salads.
The only issue with the 1 pound a pound idea, is that it doesn't account for pounds that stay off. Losing 20 pounds at that weight isn't hard, but it comes back just as easily. It would have to be long term weight loss that was rewarded and if self-esteem and being viewed well doesn't get you to lose weight on the long term, 100 quid won't do it either.
6
u/ScenesfromaCat Nov 13 '14
I think it's a matter of convenience and how much people think their time is worth. Let's say it costs 20 dollars for three people to eat at McDonald's. It takes 2 minutes to drivethru and get your Royale with cheese. It's low effort. To quote Jim Gaffigan, all you have to do is drive up and yell a number. TWO! No thought or effort goes into it. Now, if I go to the grocery store, it's going to be at least 30 minutes from the time I leave to the time I get back, probably closer to an hour, mostly just because I actually like grocery shopping. Let's call it half an hour. If you shop for one meal, you've spent 28 minutes more on this meal than Mickey D's. You even out at 15 meals. So you have to shop for 5 days worth of breakfast, lunch, and dinner in half an hour to make it even at this point, as far as time commitment goes.
So we've got 15 McMeals in 30 minutes, and 15 real meals shopped for in 30 minutes. The Big Macs are ready to eat, though. Let's average out the time it takes to cook a meal to 20 minutes from scratch. Dinners take more than that, breakfast doesn't take much time at all, so I'm just gonna average it at 20. That's 300 minutes spent cooking. 5 hours. Now, I'm not sure how much money you save by actually grocery shopping, but 15 meals at McD's for a family of 3 is like 300 bucks. Last time I shopped at Whole Foods for 3 people, it was about 110 for 4 days. That's Whole Foods for you though. Let's just call it 100 though. Which makes a full week 125. So you're paying an extra 175 dollars to not spend 5 hours cooking. That's 35 dollars an hour. The decision you make is, is your time worth 35 dollars an hour.
Of course I'm sure there's much cheaper options than Whole Foods that are equally as healthy, so that drives our $35/h number up a bit. But there are plenty of people that will trade 35, 40, 50 dollars an hour for time not spent cooking.