alt Hacker NewsI mean, I figured the concept of buying ingredients to make a single meal for one person and then just throwing whatever's left away is so ridiculous on the face of it that I wouldn't need to qualify it, but apparently I was wrong.
I currently live by myself and I bought a pork loin to barbecue for Independence Day as a treat. I bought one of the smallest ones I could find, then ate about a third of it that night. Then I put the rest in the fridge and ate it over subsequent days - one night I had it on its own with some veggies on the side, and another I sliced it up thin and topped some ramen with it. The loin cost me about $5, but to say that the meat for that one meal on Independence Day cost me $5 is baffling logic.
Maybe we can simplify this. Do you eat breakfast cereal? If you buy a box of breakfast cereal for $4 and a gallon of milk for $4, then have a bowl of cereal with milk the next day, do you think that means that one bowl of cereal cost you $8?
You're talking about meals that take 2 prepped ingredients (pork/veggies, pork/ramen, cereal/milk) versus something that takes on the order of 10 (tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce), many of them individually seasoned. That's exactly where the economies of scale come in!
Point out that prepping meals at home is a great way to save money, sure. It just falls flat when pushed in the context of burritos. I would posit that the majority of people who set out to save money by trying to make burritos at home do end up wasting a significant portion of the ingredients, and end up considering the experiment a failure. So I'd say if you're trying to encourage financial savvy, focusing on burritos actually hurts that goal.