Making food from scratch is cheap. It also doesn't take much time unless you want it to. Choosing not to cook has become performative learned helplessness.

I was far more likely to cook from scratch when I was poor than when I was not. And honestly, the food was healthier too. Basic life skills.

And here I was stupidly thinking that making meals at home was the default and eating out/getting takeout was the exception.

> Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation).

It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support.

I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.

What? I make things from scratch because I'm broke AF.