My local Indian restaurant offers tiffin service for CAD 250/month. That's enough food for my wife and I for lunch on the 5 out of 7 days of the week included in the price (and we usually have leftover Naan each day that we can snack on in the evenings). I would be hard pressed to walk out of a grocery store in Ontario buying fresh ingredients for that level of variety for 20 days out of the month. We can easily spend more on groceries each month for the 10 days that we do actually cook for ourselves.

Granted, this setup does require that you do like Indian food and don't mind having the bulk of what you eat each month generally be of that cuisine. But in our case the restaurant has enough variety that with both of us having a different dish for each meal there are enough dishes to choose from that we don't have to eat the same thing more than once all week.

With all that said, we haven't even talked about how there is no cooking or cleanup involved either, so there are massive time and convenience benefits as well.

But I can appreciate that not everyone would be satisfied with this.

Priced out tacos on Amazon they add up to ~$1.25 per taco. You can go to a taco tuesday deal and get the same price or cheaper, plus free chips and salsa, as just one example.

I don't know if it's true but a friend from Kaohshing told me almost no one cooks at home anymore as the food outside is cheap, convenient, and abundant.

You also have to consider what you're eating. You can buy caviar for home ($$$) and have hot dogs out ($)

And, you have to take into account your time. If it takes you an hour to prepare food vs 10 minutes to get food made for you then there is some value to getting those 50 mins back. Some people enjoy cooking. I do. But if my choices was to hang out with a friend for ~2hrs or say nah I can only meet for ~1hr because I gotta make dinner, I'd value that extra time with my friend more than zero.

Sure, any kind of non-veg protein adds up quickly, especially if you're doing 3 meals a day.

Most local Indian places will do you a solid 1500 calorie meal for £10 if you know what to look for.

Versus, go to supermarket... get stuck in a routine every day of "buying stuff", wanting snacks, meat, and so on adds up quickly to the point where sticking below £10 a day becomes a constant battle. It's the routine and constant food noise that really got to me, and when even a chocolate bar can be 10% of your budget for a day the decision fatigue is real.

So by breaking the routine, sticking to OMAD, I lost weight, had much less decision fatigue, and no constant food noise - that was the major change that saved me a load of money, time & effort.

For example yesterday I found a tiny cantonese place, got wonton soup and some duck, vegetables and watermelon for about £8

Others have given specific examples, but in general it seems like a weird thing that eating out is almost always more expensive than cooking in. You’ve got a place run by professionals, and they can prepare the meals in bulk, overall it should be possible to run it cheaper than an individual. But that would be more like a cafeteria type situation than the super-customized experience we usually get…