To get annoyed when people parrot that it's always cheaper to cook from scratch?

[Katypp]

Caveats: Home made food is usually:
A. Nicer
B. More nutritious
C: Made with proper ingredients that you can control
D: More filling
E: Not made with fillers, starch etc

But it's not always cheaper!

Time after time, when people post about food costs, the trope is always make it yourself, you'll save money. This post is in frustration after yet again, someone tripped it out on a budgeting forum. Someone commented that Tesco budget hummous is quite nice, to be told, as always, you can make it cheaper yourself.
You can't. Eastman's hummous 69p

Tesco chickpeas 60p + lemon 30p = 90p and that's before you add olive oil and tahini.

Yes I know you can soak your own chickpeas and buy in bulk at an Asian grocer etc, but that level of organisation for most people is beyond the effort of just picking up a tub on the weekly shop.

For the record, I am a very keen home cook and have also run a food business and written about food in the past. I enjoy cooking, but I am sick of people trotting out this line without thinking about it, especially on budgeting and money-saving forums.

YABU
Cooking MEALS from scratch is 99% of the time cheaper. That’s what people are talking about. Meals, not condiments, jams, or milking a cow and churning your own butter etc.

Making hummus isn’t cooking, so it’s a shit example.

I've been pondering this lately, like millions of others. Part of the bigger picture is far we've removed ourselves from the provenance of our staple ingredients.

I buy flour by the sack from a mill. I make bread, pasta, cakes, biscuits, everything really, from sack flour. We grow a fair bit of our own food.

Both of these things now are sneered at as being middle class indulgences, but it's how I was brought up. It's how my grandmother and great mother fed their families. It's how people without much money fed their families.

In the war, people grew vegetables in their small background plots. People in apartments in other countries grow salad, tomatoes, herbs etc. on a windowsill or balcony. Anyone with a patch of dirt keeps chickens.

This food crisis is here for the long haul. It's NOT okay to sacrifice food quality for millions of people - long term, that's awful for health. But yes, the cost is cheaper.

More public land should be used for community growing projects - there are three near us, but in wealthy areas and everyone has bloody gardens. There should be land freed up to grow community crops so that people can eat FREE food, that's healthy and supports growing kids, in exchange for a couple of hours a month weeding, watering etc.

Food crops can grow quickly - it's not all an annual potato harvest. It can help people NOW and going into winter.

There's seed sharing projects as well, for people who literally can't afford to buy seeds. We need to move ourselves closer to how food is produced, locally and community by community, so that people DON'T have to choose between eating cheaply OR healthily.

Batch cooking and freezing relies on having the space for a decent sized freezer and the money to run it. Which many people don't have. Old freezers can be bought cheaply second hand but they are really greedy on power compared to newer models. Can cost around 25% of your household electricity bill.

@Celyn22

and yes ofc not every child has additional needs so this doesn’t apply everywhere BUT I’ve been really shocked at the increase in ASD toddlers since lockdown. It seems to be becoming much more common tbh. I suspect more and more parents are having to deal with it. Not something in a million years I thought I’d have to deal with and before anyone rolls their eyes and thinks it’s just me being ‘on of those parents’ (a disgustingly common response) I also have a neurotypical child of a similar age who I can and do frequently battle over food and win. They’re not fussy at all now really.

Fantastic for you. I dont have a greengrocers closer than a couple of miles. The pound shop or equivalent is another couple of miles.
So if it were me, I'd walk to the poundshop equivalent, then backtrack to the greengrocers, then as my nearest shop actually is Iceland just under a mile away I'd go there then home. I'd have walked around 8 miles carrying stuff for 4 miles of that and by the time I got home I'd have to go to work, more walking.

This is what I would have to do if i was skint, it's what i did when i was skint.
I can actually cook, am pretty decent at it. Even now I'm not that skint, I still only have a small under counter freezer and fridge. How much can you store in a little freezer which is also used to store bread and stuff?
What if I don't have the money to replace the fridge or freezer or the contents when it breaks? I've just 3 months ago had to buy a new fridge, the last one was only 6 years old. I can imagine the utter horror of someone ramming their freezer full of lovely homecooked batch cooked meals and the freezer fucks up.
What do you do then?

Just as an aside to that though, which would leave you feeling more full?

If you don't feel full and then go and eat something else in addition to the ready made bolognaise, it defeats the point of the exercise.

And thats my problem if I do have a ready meal bolognaise. I never feel satisfied after having one. The food science that supermarkets use, is about trying to get you to eat/buy more. Its very clever.

Thats were it does make it more cost effective to cook from scratch, but its often a hidden effect.

I think somecfoodsa are relatively cheap to make up and cheaper than buying premade and clearly some arent

I agree with this. Generally, we cook from scratch but some things are just not worth the faff unless there is no easy/cheap option. I’d put bread in this category.

Yours works out at less per portion if your portion size is the same.

Initial outlay is expensive but in the long run it can be cheaper. I make hummus and freeze it in small pots. When defrosted, and tastes the same as made fresh, there is no waste and no one use plastic is used either.

It's not always cheaper it can be bloody expensive. I'm too poor to have morals I'm afraid!

I make about 5 types of dahl, channa masala ( chickpea curry) or kidney beans. Keeps for 3 days in fridge or freezes in ziplocks. V cheap and nutritious.

I don't make my own hummus or bread.

Totally agree with @Skethylita have cooked from scratch since I was a child and brought up 3 boys, it is always cheaper even pizza, (as well as being a lot healthier than the cheap frozen ones that often aren't even real cheese, I used to work in the food industry and sold it!) pizza can be used as a vehicle to use up any little bits of leftovers thereby reducing waste too, nothing much has ever got wasted in my house. I make a big batch of dough (with my hands, bread machine really not needed) from half a bag of asda bread flour 50p, the left over dough from the first meal gets floured, put inside a bag and put in the fridge where it will happily live all week until you want another, break off a handful of dough (whether for pizza or some fresh bread rolls) and return rest to fridge. I've always been short of money until the last few years (over 60 and no mortgage now) but I still can't bring myself to waste anything.
I think the problem is more lack of skill or the interest in cooking, shopping and budgetting. People that aren't interested in that are not going to be motivated to do it and that is fair enough, their choice, but not right to use the argument that it is cheaper to feed their kids rubbish food, it's not! Even chips can be made cheaper and healthier by using real potatoes with a little spray of oil plus seasonings if required all shaken up in a bag to coat and cooked on a tray in the oven.

🦜 cheaper to cook.
🦜 cheaper to cook,
🦜 cheaper to cook.

Who's a pretty boy then?

With fuel prices going up it often isn't cost effective to cook from scratch, something that needs an hour in the oven or on the hob is going to cost more than a couple of minutes In the microwave.

I think you get more cooking from scratch so it is more expensive than say 1 ready meal but it will last longer.

if eating beige freezer shite then that’s really cheap and it would be impossible to match the cost.

I mostly cook from scratch but whilst I think it's cheaper in the long run, it's not always cheap to start doing it. I make a lot of Chinese/Japanese/Korean dishes but to start doing that, I had to buy all of the oils, spices, sauces etc. I also have a huge spice rack, so knocking up cheap meals is easy but again - there's an initial outlay to buy all the spices and cooking equipment. I wouldn't even consider making something like hummus but I do make tzatziki myself.

I do think many people would do better if they learnt how to cook though. I've met so many people (of all levels of wealth) who wear not being able to cook as a badge of honour. They just survive on ready meals, takeaways or snacks.
I'm in a bargains group on Facebook where people have recently been posting their budget meal ideas. Firstly, most of it is processed shit from Iceland (which is overpriced anyway) and secondly, every single meal I've seen doesn't look fit to feed a dog. I often think those people would do better financially if they learnt how to cook a few basic meals with budget ingredients.

A major consideration should also be the time it costs to cook from scratch compared to buying something readymade.

The National minimum wage is just under £10. If someone spends an extra hour shopping for particular ingredients and cooking that in theory is a ‘cost’ of £10 if they could work an extra hour and earn £10.

If like me you can't get out to the shops you have to factor in the cost of online shopping & I imagine that the delivery charges will be increasing as fuel prices go up.

Hummus is not even cooked so why is it used as an example throughout this thread?!

And then you'd have to keep making humous to make having the tahini worth while, as it does go off.

I used to cheat when I was trying to save money and just add a spoonful of sesame oil and some natural yoghurt. A fraction of the price.

I worked at a food bank which asked for quick cook noodles and pasta, tinned pulses and veg because many of our clients couldn't afford to heat wter to cook chickpeas for an hour or brown rice for half an hour. And that was before the hike in energy prices.

Soup
kilo wonky carrots 50p.
Kilo onion 60p
1kg lentils £1.9
£3
that Will make approximately 10 + bowls . 30p a serving and freeze’s well

You need decent utensils too, try prepping with cheap knives etc. Food processor to save hours. If you are on the bones of your arse, your either working all the hours you can or your unable to work and probably don’t have the stamina then to stand for hours preparing meals, chopping etc. I make all our meals because I’m lucky I can cook and I’m healthy but yes it is exactly ‘cheaper’ to purchase processed shite.

You can make a version of hummus with a spoonful of peanut butter instead of tahini - my kids tend to prefer it.

Your initial outlay for ingredients like tahini and olive oil will be high.

But you won't use the entire jar and bottle in one batch of hummus, so you'll be able to make hummus again if you go out and buy another tin of chick peas.

Cooking from scratch works out cheaper if you take the long term approach to cooking, which entails stocking a kitchen bit by bit with versatile ingredients and using items like dried herbs instead of fresh. Buying a trolleyfull of new ingredients for each meal won't be kind to your budget.