Nothing Was Delivered

Is fast food really cheaper than cooking real food at home? If you do the math, it turns out… not so much.

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)

Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)

So why do we continue to eat so much of it? Mark Bittman argues “The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch”. I have trouble with that because, well, cooking is work. As someone who enjoys cooking, I can tell you it’s still work. It’s active and it’s time consuming. This is not a knock on cooking, but hey, lets be honest here. Cooking, and the clean up involved, is more of an effort that stopping at the drive through on your way home from work. This is true for all but the simplest of meals.

The important thing is to emphasize the rewards involved. Health is first and foremost. But cooking can also be a creative outlet. If you have a family, then it can be a shared effort to bring people together. And with just a little bit of practice, the food you can make at home can taste light years ahead of what you get from your local take out joint.

Fast food shouldn’t be illegal. Hardee’s don’t need to be picketed. Instead we should be investing in American food culture. We teach kids about art and music, but not about food, which to me is crazy. Cooking is just as much an art as painting and clarinet playing, and arguably more important. People should take pride in what they eat, and for the most part that means cooking yourself. Eating only fast food is like listening to only top 40 radio, but worse. At least radio doesn’t hurt your liver.