... yeah, except if you're half decent at it, it stacks easy vs. something like eating out and isn't really that involved of a time sink. My normal cooking takes <30 min* (usually ~5-10, really, and that can sometimes feed me for the whole day), post meal cleanup generally less (In this case, it's only for myself. Maybe 2-3 minutes, 4-5 on the outside, to clean what I used with soap and sponge. And that's assuming no dishwashing machine, which can make that number per meal go down even further. And that gets smaller if I'm using the same dishware across meals.), and planning and procurement has become so routine you're looking at something like maybe two hours a month, total -- including travel time! Consider it a net 4 minutes per meal. I shop maybe twice a month, sometimes less, and trips tend to take less than an hour. If you know what you're after and where it is, this is not an involved process, and if you shop for a month to half month's worth of food in one go (and I get in very regular arguments with family over this in particular, bleh. Just because you
can swing by the grocery store every few days doesn't mean you
should.), the overall time per meal is very small. I'd say I'm normally looking at around
maybe 20 minutes per meal* in terms of everything-but-eating (and the
average is probably smaller than that, hum), and if I were actually trying to optimize that on a per meal basis, it could get much smaller. In practice, I'm honestly only kind of half-hearted about this stuff, heh.
Which really highlights to me how terrible most of the people I've observed are at this, speaking of the American population in general.Now yeah, something like soylant would almost certainly save some of the time cost, but the saving isn't really that drastic. You'd still be looking at a few minutes preparation and a similar degree of cleanup (hopefully, anyway, as the alternative of pre-mixed stuff would probably be pretty wasteful re: containers and whatnot). I'll give it might, say, halve the total non-eating time investment (maybe a bit more) but, well. If you're doing it with an eye towards minimizing time there's not much of that to begin with.
... so yeah, I do actually consider stuff like time cost when I'm thinking cost of food
(I've had
that argument trying to convince family to stop eating out so much, too.) And I'll still say... a lot of folks in the states have no bleedin' idea how to do this whole food thing. Primary cost is effort more than anything else. Biggest issue with quick, healthy, and cheap, is
initial setup, not sustained difficulty -- figuring out where things are and how to utilize them. Once that's done, things get pretty routine (at least until you have to readjust to market changes or whatnot, but that generally only throws a portion of it out of whack and readjusting isn't that big of a deal.).
*Now, healthier cooking
would expand that a bit if I was still cooking
in the same way I do now, yes, preparing and cooking everything per meal. Switch gears to batch cooking, and you'll be doing stuff like cooking a week's worth of a particular thing in one go, drastically reducing per-meal preparation time (if you can cook everything you eat for the week in <2 hours -- and give me a reason, ha, this is not difficult. Well, reason and the money to do it, hum. -- you're looking at something like 20 minutes or so per meal, including warmup). Cook several things simultaneously and your per meal time cost gets even lower. From what I've seen, stuff only very rarely takes over or up to an hour to cook, even in large batches -- and the stuff that does involves preparation methods you can use while doing other things. Eat the same stuff for a week, bring it down to an hour's prep time on the outside and a couple minutes to reheat (if that... some stuff eats fine cold), you're looking at maybe ten minutes per mix-and-match meal.
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