doseofbuckley
patreon
Bonus #289 - Cooking at Home Costs More Than Takeout? (Extra Dose)
🕑 Added 2025-08-12 16:00:11 +0000 UTCVIDEO LINK: https://youtu.be/eM6AkXTv1lg
Hey everyone, it's Bonus Dose Day, and today's video is one that I think everyone will find very relatable, since it's about something we all do every day... no not THAT, put the kleenex away... I'm talking about EATING! Enjoy this video about people who don't know how to shop for or prepare meals for themselves. Hope Doordash survives the apocalypse!
Various studies show that people are spending less and less time cooking, opting for delivery, take-out, and dine-in options far more than their parents or grandparents did... which means when these people DO cook, they end up spending way too much money! A look at a viral social media post that set off a massive discussion around the cost (money AND time) of cooking for yourself when you never learned how to feed yourself.
Comments
Skyler Kerr
oh no...you're an idiot
Serena
Hearing you say girl dinner like that was so fucking funny
Snooder87
Sorry Buckley, gotta disagree with you on this one. There are a couple things you are missing here: 1) Food waste. I meal prep, like everyone else. I buy groceries once a week for a planned out set of meals that are all the same. Usually chicken fried rice, but sometimes i do porkchops and broccoli or chicken pasta. And that's great, but it gets boring sometimes and then I want to vary things up. Maybe i want to try eating a hamburger once in a blue moon. The problem is that you can't just buy the ingredients for a single hamburger. You can't just buy a single hamburger bun, a single patty, a single slice of cheese, a single leaf of iceberg lettuce, and a single tomato slice. Instead you have to buy at least a 4 pack of buns, a 6 pack of patties (sometimes a 2 pack if you buy the expensive ones), a 15 pack of cheese slices, a full tomato and a full head of lettuce. And then, if you don't actually eat all of that in time, it rots. The buns go stale in a couple weeks, the veggies rot in less than a week. At best you might be able to freeze the patties (but they don't quite have that same never frozen taste) and keep the cheese for a few months. And sure, the solution there is just to plan ahead and work your meal schedule around the ingredients so that if you have an extra tomato or extra lettuce, you work that into the rest of your meals. But that's not always possible, so it really is cheaper to just buy an $8 burger than to spend $16 dollars buying burger ingredients that you end up throwing away most of because you only need 1 burger and not 4. 2) Buying certain foods from restaurants is surprisingly cheap. My weekly grocery bill every week is generally about $120. The core of that is usually ingredients for fried rice that works out to about $12 for chicken thighs, $1 rice, $2 eggs, $5 frozen veggies, $10 fresh veggies. So usually about $30 for about a week's worth of fried rice (not including spices, oil etc that i don't buy each week). Meanwhile, I can order 3 orders of fried rice from my local chinese place at $9.99 each for just under $30, split each order into two and have a week's worth of fried rice. It's not always that way, eventually the local chinese joints tend to raise their prices just above the grocery store price. When I first started noticing this trend, it was actually because I looking at the price of pre-made meals at the grocery store and comparing it to Hello Fresh or meal prepping with raw ingredients. That was several years ago, and back then chinese fried rice was closer to $6.99. But anyway, my point is that I can usually replace a $120 grocery bill with a $30 chinese takeout + $90 grocery bill.
