Is cooking at home in the West more expensive than eating out or ordering
take-away or heating a pre-packaged meal, for the same type of meal.

How often do American families cook at home? Is it a regular thing, does it
mostly involve heating pre-packaged meals. How varied is it? Are there
special days of the week wrt food?

Is there a correlation between income brackets and cooking at home? Do poor 
people cook more at home or is it the other way around?

How much money would you save approximately, if you cooked at home? Don't
factor in cost of time.

21 responses total.

I'd like respondents to also state how much time they spend in the
kitchen/day.

I believe it is cheaper to cook at home than go out to eat.

I also only speak for myself....I think I probably save a lot of money 
by cooking at home - I know I save a lot for my husband because I take 
leftovers and freeze them so he has stuff to warm up for lunch.

I tend not to use pre-packaged anything in terms of cooking.  It's 
just as easy to chop up my own stuff and tends to be fresher.

I'd say I probably spend on average about 30-45 minutes a day in the 
kitchen.  This does not include time I bake, and it's an average per 
week.  I might spend an hour and a half in the kitchen on Saturday or 
Sunday, but will just reheat leftovers during the week, or keep things 
simple.

As a single person, I have found that it costs about 50% more to eat out
than it does to cook at home. I am counting it as "eating out" when I
pick up a roasted chicken from the grocery store or when I order pizza
or get some other kind of carry out food. 

I cook at home four evenings a week or so and eat out the other times. I
often have pre-packaged meals. I eat lunch at work so I get my biggest
meal of the day there. Often I have cereal with milk or cheese and
crackers or celery and peanut butter type things for dinner. I dont know
if one could call that "cooking" though. I eat my breakfast at work too.


I dont know if other people have special foods for particular days of
the week other than fish on fridays because of the church. I have
special foods for some days of the week. I used to always have pizza on
fridays after work. But now that I work later, I tend to not do that so
much. I always have pancakes for breakfast on Mondays. 


I dont know if there is a correlation between income brackets and eating
out. But I know that poor people often live in places where there are no
grocery stores and just small little stores that have very high prices
and generally unhealthy foods. Those places usually have a lot of fast
food restaurants. So it wouldnt surprise me if poor people did eat out
more. 

We cook 95% of what we eat if not more, and spend about $100/month on food
for two of us.  Eating in restaurants would probably cost at least five times
as much.  I don't remember the last time I ate in a restaurant but sometimes
we eat food at receptions after lectures (cookies last night).  The last
restaurant might have been on Thanksgiving Day when we went for a walk and
got cold and were near a Chinese takeout place and I paid $4 plus tip for
vegetables and rice to warm up.  We also make our own bread and noodles, and
try to buy most of our food either from the farmer's market or a food buying
club.

I found making a meal from scratch cost the same as a pre-packaged meal.
Depending on where you get your take-out, sometimes it's cheaper just to eat
out, and especially so if you factor in the time it takes to shop and cook.

I imagine that it is a lot cheaper to cook at home if you have a family larger
than one or even 2. 

What do you cook that costs as much as prepared food?  We would typically cook
a large pot of grain (rice, millet, barley) or potatoes or a loaf of bread,
and another pot of beans, and stir fry some vegetables.  

I find that when frozen dinners are on sale, they are, as STeve says, "cheaper
than food."  That said, we cook more than we eat out or do pre-packed foods
even without a fully working kitchen.  We have more control over what we eat
when we cook it ourselves and Damon is food additive sensitive which means
cooking from scratch and as close to organic as we can reasonably get.

"Cheaper than food" has been the slogan of Crazy Jim's Blimpy Burgers,
Division at Packard, since the mid 50s.  

If you buy frozen prepared food at a large chain grocery, you can usually get
a meal for about the same cost as preparing it at home.  However, you
sacrifice control over volume of fat, type of fat, amount of sugar, amount
of salt, and spicing.  

Most people also buy a higher quality of food for home consumption than the
stuff that goes in prepackaged food.  The saving comes from quanty purchasing
and low labor-cost of factory prepared vats of food, which is somewhat offset
by packaging costs.

Buying this allows you to trade personal time spent cooking for personal time
working, out with your friends, or driving small children from activity to
activity.

All that said, I get personal creative relaxation from cooking, so I tend to
linger in the kitchen, making food from scratch.  I've always prefered higher
quality fresh vegetables, and obscure or exotic food, which is seriously
cheaper when you prepare it yourself at home.  

I also cook a lot of meat dishes, so I cook those from scratch too, for the
same reasons.  

I cook large volumes at once (rice in 6 - 8 serving quantities) and then
package and freeze the remainder for quick, on the run meals other nights.
I"ve gotten more into this recently, and find I can keep almost a month of
meals in a small apartment sized freezer compartment.  That surprised me.

Now I'm more consciously setting aside one evening a week to make large
amounts of several dishes, and preparing them for easy later consumption.

Its very hard to say how much time I spend.  Some nights its 10 minutes
microwaving; some nights its 2 hours making 3 or 4 main dishes.

I do that too!  I love to make something and be able to eat off of it 
for either a couple of days or a couple of weeks later.

Thanks :) that was neat! I was curious because a friend who had lived in
America for like 10 years during the 80's had told me that it wasn't
absolutely necessary to learn how to cook to survive there (though it's
necessary here). He mostly used pre-packaged meals through out college :)
Anyway so when a recent discussion on another thread brought it up,
i got worried that i might have accumulated yet another skill that wasn't
particularly useful <g>. Glad to know that you can save some money by DIY,
and even happier that we haven't entered a age, as yet, where mass production
has made useless a pretty fundamental skill and interesting skill.

10 years of McDonalds food, yuck

Pre-packaged does not equal McDonalds.

Cooking isn't a useless skill - even if it doesn't end up saving you money,
you're most likely getting a more nutritious meal at home than outside for
the same money.

Oh yeah, plus what if i get displaced and turn into some kind of refugee. I'd
be able to setup some kind of stall. Plus look at K.C.Das or Bhagat Ram. They
started with a humble pavement stall. I mean end of the day and for the next
few centuries humanity is going to have to rely on cooking in some form even
if they do without clothes etc. And it's good fun so long as i don't have to
repeat the same dish - the trouble is getting ingredients in India. Stuff
like Chinese Cabbage or Fettuccine or the various weird cheese's or basil
(apparently tulsi is basil according to mom, but the images on google
look different). Mynx any idea if gas-ovens are available in .in? I'm a 
little worried about electricity bills and microwave and electric ovens
are huge power hogs. Can you use a gas oven even? Are there limitations
to it.

Oo found a super link:
"http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/biz/2002/11/04/stories/2002110400100300.htm"

Looks like google has been busy indexing :) that didn't show up last time i
searched. A nice studly gas oven.

re #13
Gas ovens are a bad idea if they're not your stovetop kind which run on the
natural gas pipes.  Carbon monoxide poisoning and all that...

American gas stoves run on natural gas which is what people have used to kill
themselves.  Just turn on the gas and close all the windows.  It is the gas
itself that is the poison.  Burning it in a room without enough oxygen will
produce carbon monoxide.  You don't need an oven to cook.  One burner will
do it.  I have cooked that way for a year at a time.

One burner is enough to kill you with CO.  We had more than a few of those
types of deaths in the low income housing areas after the last windstorm.

Re #15 #16 #17: Well, we use LPG (Liquified petroleum gas) and it's got 
mercaptan in it so we know if there is a leak. I want to use the oven to bake.
The trouble with baking with a microwave or a electric-range(oven) is the
electricity it consumes. LPG is a lot cheaper and my mum uses it anyway
for cooking (double burner - stove). Also, would it be possible to bake
with a pressure cooker? I know that sounds a little weird but has anyone
tried cakes using a PC? About CO poisoning, that probably happens in winter
out there, when ppl have to close windows. It's summer here all year around
so i don't think we'll have a problem and in any case we have a huge chimney.

Yes, I have seen recipes for cheesecake in pressure cookers.  I'll look around
for some baking stuff

Were people trying to heat with their gas stoves and the windows sealed?  

Vivek - your problem with ingredients I have too (wow - great sentence
construction there ;P) Only it's with Indian ingredients - but after moving
to Toronto, I've never had a problem with Indian ingredients - yay.

About gas ovens in India - no idea. We have table top burners. Here in Canada,
we use electric - came with the building.       

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