Comment by WalterBright
3 hours ago
Throwing a steak in a frying pan is about the same effort as a microwave frozen dinner, and is objectively cheaper.
There's no universe where processed food is cheaper.
3 hours ago
Throwing a steak in a frying pan is about the same effort as a microwave frozen dinner, and is objectively cheaper.
There's no universe where processed food is cheaper.
You can microwave a meal by tossing it into the microwave and walking away, you need to actually participate in cooking a steak and then clean up several surfaces. The stake is conservatively 10x as much effort and time is money, plus microwaves use far less energy.
Processed food isn’t a single unified thing, the prices definitely overlap but the minimum and maximum prices for processed foods are lower. That’s why our food supply ended up looking like it does, economies of scale beat home cooking. That’s true even going back thousands of years where communal cooking drastically reduced the fuel needs in warm climates.