alt Hacker NewsGreat. So stop saying it's cheaper. It's more convenient, sure. Takes effort, yep.
I was obese most of my adult life. It absolutely cost me more to eat cheap (as in nutrition) shitty fast foods than prepare things from base ingredients. It was more convenient and it was the easy path for sure, but absolutely in no way a means to save money. It costs vastly more. I could only afford to get fat once I started making money. Growing up we were too poor to eat that horribly.
Your story is your story and nobody can say it isn't, but it reads strange to me to comment about cost when the crux of my statement was about the relative time and effort to cook rather than cost.
But since you'd like to speak about price it seems, I'd posit that for a good long while there, dollar menu items were genuinely about as cheap as you could get for food - $4 on the way home from work and get an hour of time back to unwind? It was worth it to me - heck, a lot of the time I used that time to be in the gym.
I'll grant you that pretty much any restaurant you'd sit down in where you don't pay at the counter is utterly more expensive - 3x the ingredient cost at least.
But we're not comparing steaks and chicken entrees here, we're comparing rice & beans and chicken breast vs a McDouble or $5 footlong. Weeknight roasts that you have to plan ahead for, Sunday meal prep days. Its all time - I recognize this because I choose to take that time on, and its time that I don't get to spend on other stuff.