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drethelin comments on Soylent Orange - Whole food open source soylent - Less Wrong
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I mentioned to Critch (Academician on LW) awhile back that I was considering learning how to cook, and he responded that it's not worth my time. I blinked, remembered approximately how much I valued my time, and more or less had to agree. This is a time/money tradeoff that many people whose time is valuable may not be navigating sensibly. There are lots of ways to pay other people to prepare food for you - restaurants, hiring a personal chef, meal delivery programs, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a social network of some kind where people offered to cook for other people, and if there isn't someone should make it.
(I currently obtain food partially through restaurants and partially through a combination of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein.)
hiring a personal chef is pretty fucking expensive. How much is your time worth?
In general, eating out is at least as if not more time consuming than eating at home, and costs way more. Cooking is easy. Anyone who can reasonably think their time is worth so much they can't cook should be able to learn to cook well within a few hours.
Some random Google hits suggest that you can hire a personal chef for something like $13 a meal if you shop around. That's certainly in the right ballpark for someone to reevaluate how they're navigating this particular time/money tradeoff.
I currently live a few blocks away from various restaurants. It takes me at most half an hour to eat out (from the time I head out to the time I come back), and I pay an average of $8 per meal I eat this way. How long does it take you to prepare a meal, how much money do the ingredients cost per meal, and how long do you spend eating it?
What kind of food do you get at restaurants?
I've found huge pot types of food like curry/chili/soup get pretty cheap. The ingredients are usually $30 or under and they take 2-3 hours to make and last you most of the week. Although there's a weird balance between the comfort of having food and the tendency to get sick of food after eating it for a week. But I think you can freeze them also. And you'd need to figure out how much you hate chopping things, but you can listen to music or podcasts while you do it.
I'm pretty surprised by the hostility of some of the comments on this thread. This works for me only because I grew up chopping veggies and eating these types of food my whole life. There's a ton of restaurant food I wouldn't try to make.
While might they take 2-3 hours in total to make, IME for most of that time they can be left in the oven/on the hob, and you can do other things.
In the UK at least you can buy already chopped vegetables quite cheaply. I don't mind chopping veg these days, but when I used to hate it they were brilliant!
Home cooking includes shopping and clean-up. It would be hard to figure out the exact average time costs per meal, but it isn't nothing. When you're waiting at a restaurant, you can read.
At least some of these costs can be reddemed by listening to podcasts. I often find myself going on hour long walks while listening to podcasts for the sole reason that walking around listening to podcasts is more enjoyable than sitting down while listening to podcasts; more productive uses of my time (for example cooking) might be able to increase value.
Not needing to do the cleaning up is pretty much the only reason for going out other than variety, for me.
The meal I make most often (pasta, bacon, frozen veg, pasta sauce): about half an hour to cook and clean, maybe £2, and variable time (probably 10-20 minutes) eating at my desk (which time is less valuable than time spent not eating at my desk, but not that much less valuable). I make two meals at a time, or sometimes three when I estimate quantities poorly.
it generally takes me about half an hour to 45 minutes to make and eat food, and the cost is usually something like 5-8 dollars.
Almost any place I go to for food would take half an hour to get and eat food before you count travel time, so I guess your choices are a lot faster and closer than anything to me, as well as being cheaper (I generally pay 13 or so dollars when eating out). Are you counting places like mcdonalds?
I guess I don't view it as having a personal chef if they make meals and then freeze them, but that's still cheaper than I would've assumed.
I live in Berkeley and there are various relatively cheap and fast restaurants (not chains) catering to the university crowd here, so I might be in a relatively good situation in that regard.