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.

I tend to buy in bulk so cooking from scratch for us is cheaper more often than not. That said, I do get carried away and add this and that and a little bit more here and there to spruce up recipes quite a bit and it does end up costing a lot.
.....But it taste bloody amazing. A home made from scratch bolognese for example is a thousand times nicer than your best Dolmio or Ragu jar.

A yummy brown meal like nuggets, waffles and beans does have a place on our menu but I'm also a homemade food kinda cook the other nights.

We don't pass judgement on ready meals we just choose not to buy them and we don't care how other people feed their families it's not our problem

68p pepperoni ones in tesco. not bad size either. feed 2?
lucky people staying ask for pepperoni!

It depends what. The vast majority of meals are cheaper cooked from scratch certain things aren't though. I would say homemade Bolognese is gorgeous but sacla and seeds of change are nice jar sauces.

Definitely this. My cupboards are bursting. I have tonnes of dried pastas, lentils, beans etc in one cupboard, a cardboard box on a table filled with cans and a bucket (test, a bucket!) of honey shoved under the table.

I have food issues. I need to make sure we have enough in that we could survive the apocalypse. I never want my kids to be hungry because I remember my teen years as always wishing we had some food in for dinner. If mum wasn't hungry we didn't eat. And if it was food or her cigs, the cigs won.

Often it can be, but not always. Pizzas as others have said can be very cheap, and wouldn’t be as cheap to make.

Your caveats are of course also correct OP.

I cook mostly from scratch but not everything.

The other caveat is “once you have all the store cupboard basics like herbs and spices”, which are quite an outlay in the first place, or if bought all at the same time.

Thanks dorrit. Yep that's pretty much it. I have no issue with people who cook from scratch. If they have plenty of spare time and surplus cash, then good for them (coz a lot of it DOES cost more than ready made.)

The 'cook from scratch SNOBS' @mathanxiety are those who I loathe. The ones look down their nose at people who DON'T cook from scratch, and act like they're superior, more intelligent, better educated, and a higher social class. This forum (and this thread) is littered with these type of people. It's THEM I despise, not people who cook from scratch.

I know it's not kind of really 'official,' but... the urban dictionary entry sums them up.

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cook-from-scratch%20snob

Anyway, I have made my point and have wittered on enough on this thread, so I'm off out for a walk by the river now! Toodles!

You have to compare like for like. It is fine saying you can buy a 70p pizza and would never be able to make one for the same cost but it isn't the same quality. The pizza we cook at home would cost £6+ in a shop.

PP are right - people who love cooking/have a cupboard with herbs and spices in/are happy to spend time on it, will have a different sense of what is possible.

Also, people from other countries/cultures might
have different basic ingredients to someone from somewhere else.

Hopefully, we can all listen to each other - pick up ideas, discount some things that won't work (but without yelling NO ONE'S GOT ANY FUCKING PAPRIKA FFS!!!), understand why some things won't work for other people and take away what we all need.

I totally agree not having much growing up has made me really savvy when running my own home

@Katypp you’re right. And a lot of the people disagreeing are coming across hugely ignorant.

People forget that for the very poorest it often simply isn’t cheaper. When I had my first child I was only a teen myself and went to live in a of ‘supported housing’ type thing. I had a small bed sit, so like a living room/bedroom and a little kitchen in it. A small three shelf fridge, one hob cooker, kettle and microwave. Once a week o used to go to Iceland and I would budget my benefit money. Back then a micro meal was a pound. Seven of those for my tea. A loaf of bread and some cheese for my breakfasts and lunches. How could I have batch cooked? How could home cooking have been cheaper? People just don’t take into account that everyone lives different lives.

When it comes to cost in terms of money there are loads of variables, so it's a really difficult statement to way up.
Is it cheaper in the long or short term, how much monetary value do you put on good health, on gaining skills?
Whether it is a good investment to have a person that can cook from scratch for an average family for say 20+ years is different to whether an elderly person on their own who doesn't have the skills or equipment to do so, would benefit from cooking from scratch.

I totally agree. Cooking from scratch if you have the time, money for ingredients and costs of cooking time.
I live alone, with a disability and it's just not worth the effort anymore
I tend to buy the " Nicer branded" Ready meals and balance with Vegetables these days

But a packet will, even a small packet!

It can be cheaper to make your own I for instance name my own bread all you need is to pick up some corn ears from a field on a country walk, bring them home, plant them on a couple of acres..waitq few decades...find a large round stone for milling...

Make not name lol*

I have lived in what most people would agree is abject poverty by UK standards. I had no gas or electricity. It was January. The meters had gone off and there was no money to top them up. This meant the cooker was useless, I couldn't even boil a kettle. There was no hot water either. I only had a fridge with a little freezer box but with no electricity it was useless anyway. Food was the basic minimum needed to stay alive, there was absolutely no budget for herbs, oils etc. No puddings, biscuits, cereal or milk for tea. I had to hope that kwik save hadn't run out of value beans and bread as we couldn't afford the posh ones. If anyone had smugly suggested boiling pulses, batch cooking, freezing vast quantities of food etc I'd probably have laughed at them. Even when the meter was on it was only short term till the next outage so no point in filling the fridge if you have a few quid. You get a bag of chips because it's hot and filling and delicious and can really put you on for a few days if you're used to having nothing. That kind of hand to mouth existence (because that's what it is not a life) is something that people just cannot understand until they have experienced it. Food poverty is not being unable to have a weekly takeaway or needing to spend a bit less, and it is not solvable without having more money to spend on food or the means to store and prepare food. We are going to see a huge increase in people living like this sadly. As for your AIBU, YANBU. Cooking from scratch is a luxury for some people and not always cheaper in terms of the money they have access to even if it may actually be cheaper if you can resource it better.

Honestly, I don’t know. I just sometimes think when I’m making something like a casserole or lasagne that if lots of people were doing the same thing centrally at the same time it would save money on ingredients and fuel. If people wanted to learn how to cook they could come along and join in. And while they were cooking they’d be somewhere warm, so saving on their home heating. But how you’d organise it, I don’t know.

I cook almost everything from scratch, but it absolutely isn’t cheaper to do so.

And it’s not about quality, we all know that home made is better quality, tastes nicer etc. But when you can’t afford the ingredients then quality loses out to cost.

A home made spaghbol by the time you buy mince, onions, tomatoes, other veg, pasta, parmesan and you’ve paid the cost of gas/electricity you’ve probably spent about 7/£8 on making a meal for 4 people.

The same ready meal would cost you around £3 for the cheapest version. Is it as good? Absolutely not. But if you can’t afford the ingredients for the better version then lesser quality wins.

Similarly baking, it would cost me twice as much as a packet of shortbread just to buy the butter to make the same amount. In fact it is not possible to bake more cheaply. Ever.

I cook from scratch way more now than I did when I was skint! Back then, and with young children, it was lots of cheap nuggets / fish fingers / oven chips / frozen pizzas / pasta with a jar of tomato sauce. Now I have a cupboard full of herbs and spices and can afford to bulk buy meat when it’s on sale (2kg of chicken breast in Lidl this week for under £12).

Similarly baking, it would cost me twice as much as a packet of shortbread just to buy the butter to make the same amount. In fact it is not possible to bake more cheaply. Ever

Absolutely. Biscuits are so cheap to buy...even the posher varieties. Even a plain shortbread or basic sugar cookie recipe is vastly more expensive...even if you used marg instead of butter.

I disagree when it comes to bread, at least. I make all our bread from scratch. Even without bulk buying of ingredients (which I do as it makes sense for us), you can make a good loaf for less than the cost of a good supermarket loaf. You have to compare like for like.

Yes, I know you can get a loaf for around 40 pence at Tescos (the one that used to be value bread). But look at the list of ingredients.

Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin], Water, Yeast, Salt, Preservative (Calcium Propionate), Emulsifiers (Mono- and Di-Acetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids), Spirit Vinegar, Rapeseed Oil, Flour Treatment Agent (Ascorbic Acid).

When I make bread I’m not making the equivalent of a “value loaf”. Even my basic sandwich/toast bread is just 500 g flour, 12 g yeast, 15 g butter, a teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. Plus water from the tap. That “value bread” is barely worthy of being called bread.,

Peoplecslways compare the cheapest, nastiest, preservative-laden item with a homemade one and say “it’s not cheaper”. But they are comparing apples and oranges.

Have you factored in the cost of new clothing when you go up three sizes eating rubbish?

Well yes it might be cheaper to make your own bread than buying an artisan sour dough loaf from a fancy bakery..but if someone's first concern is price than a value loaf from the supermarket is the cheapest option.