The Five Costs of Cooking | The Gospel of Cooking for One
This is an excerpt from a larger piece I am working on. I’m still working through these ideas but want to share where I’m at as I work through some big ideas.
Everything you buy has a cost.
Duh. Thank you, Sherlock. You exchange money for goods and services.
When you go to the store things have price tags on them. Every item in that store must be exchanged for a predetermined amount of money if you want to go home with it. The price of things is complicated. It’s influenced by a whole lot of macro-level calculations about labor and farms and marketing and packaging and markups and customer data trends and inflation and politics and expectations.
However, the exchange of money is not the only cost you have to consider when you’re cooking for one, especially if you’re on a budget.
I see all ingredients you buy as having a combination of 1-5 costs that often affect each other and must be carefully weighed when making the grocery list. The weight of these costs is up to you and your circumstances. There are times in your life when some costs become more important while others become less important. Your willingness to sacrifice one cost to save in another is a cocktail of life experiences that varies from person to person.
Here are the five costs:
1. Price
This is the amount you have to pay to get the thing. There are ranges of prices for different versions of different ingredients. Importantly the price also changes based on what form you buy something in and sometimes in the amount you buy something in.
2. Time
Some ingredients are shortcuts and some ingredients lead to marathons. Some ingredients require careful precision to work with while others do not require anything more careful than not denting the spoon you put into a jar.
3. Health/Nutrition
I don’t like to police what people eat and you should, generally, eat whatever you want. But if you’re trying to eat a balanced diet that gives you the energy you need to do the things you want, it is important to consider what you’re putting into your body.
4. Flavor
This one is more in the eye of the beholder but some ingredients carry more flavor with them than others. When you’re on a budget but want to eat things that taste good you need to consider which ingredients can help you get there while keeping costs down in other areas.
5. Personal Preference
What you like to eat is important and anyone who tells you otherwise is a cop. Yes, it is healthy and cost-effective to eat poached chicken breast, rice, and broccoli every meal. But it will be increasingly hard to do if this isn’t what you like to eat.
Balancing these five things is how you can come to a more holistic idea of what ingredients cost and can help you form a smarter budget that might feel more authentic to you and your situation. The balance of these costs takes into consideration the reality that your life isn’t perfect. A different person would tell you that you can always balance these things in everything you cook all week but that’s just not realistic outside a vacuum.
Is it possible to eat fast, delicious, easy, and healthy for most (or all) of your meals? Yes. But I think holding yourself to that standard is silly and impractical.
What we’re striving for with these five costs is not efficiency but balance. Knowing yourself and your own values to make a budget that might not be fully optimized but does make sense for you.
Let’s go into detail about these costs and how they affect each other.
Price
Prices are more subjective than you think they are. In theory, cost is a simple equation:
How much something costs to produce + store markup = what you pay.
Something is grown on a farm or produced in a factory, grocery stores buy it in bulk, they give it a new price that is higher than what they paid for it, and then you, the shopper, pay that price.
Price gets confusing because it’s affected by a lot of factors and the same ingredients cost different amounts for a mixture of reasons. Some of these reasons are very significant and some are entirely arbitrary and it can be really hard to tell the difference.
Some of the eggs at the store cost $2.50 for a dozen while others cost $8 for a dozen. That is a huge discrepancy. There is lots of marketing involved in both of these products to try and justify their price and it can be hard to know in what instance will spending more money get you a product that’s meaningfully “better”.
The truth is what price you’re willing to pay is largely down to your personal preference. You could go down a rabbit hole about the cost of the eggs you buy. You could do your research and track the journey from chicken to egg to plate to fork and probably still not fully grasp why the costs are what they are.
When it comes to price, I think a good rule to live by is to buy the best quality that you can afford with some accounting for your personal preferences. For example, my budget is more in the range of $3-4 eggs than $5.50 eggs (the eggs I actually buy). But, I like the eggs I buy and I cut the cost elsewhere where it matters less to me. For example, I never spend more than I have to on frozen vegetables because, for me, the extra cost isn’t worth it there.
Time
For me, I think time influences what people buy at the store more than anything. We live in a world that asks a lot from us and some of us don’t have a lot left to give when it comes to feeding ourselves. This is how processed foods won our grocery stores. Because our world takes so much time from us and demands more of it from us every day. In the end, there’s almost no choice but to turn to things that save us time instead of taking it. No matter how many YouTubers and cookbook authors insist their recipes are quick, nothing is quicker than something that is already done. You need only consult the cult of the Trader Joe’s frozen aisle for proof of this in action1.
Time is also the cost that is most intertwined with other costs. It is the thing that often gets saved or sacrificed to reduce the cost somewhere else. When it comes to creating recipes that feel the least intrusive the common thing you want to save is time without sacrificing any of the other things. There are more “easy, fast, and healthy” recipes on the internet than I would ever dare try to count. There are hundreds of services designed to save you trips to the store, or the burden of ideating recipes.
Time also worms its way around in ways you don’t expect. Time pervades every step of cooking at home. In the end, the act of cooking itself might be the least intrusive time suck when all the hours are added up. Time is spent writing a grocery list, making a budget, deciding what to make, going to the store, unpacking from the store, realizing you have leftovers that need a home at the end of the week, washing dishes, cleaning the stove. I am exhausted simply thinking about it.
Your time is important, it’s valuable, it’s the only currency on this planet that really matters. How you want to spend your time is a big decision and one you shouldn’t take lightly. Don’t feel bad about making concessions to save time no matter what anybody says.
Health/Nutrition
If you’re a regular person who is not a performance athlete, nutrition is not super complicated. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, get some protein in your diet, try to move every day, and have cake every once in a while cause cake is delicious.
There’s a big economic sector dedicated to selling you the idea that you’re missing something here. That there are secrets that doctors are scrupulously hiding from you. Michael Pollan has a Masterclass about “intentional eating” where you have to pay several hundred dollars to be told that eating a lot of overly processed food is (wait for it) bad for you.
Those of us who exist on the actual planet Earth know that healthy eating is not hard but it is complicated. Millions of people live in food deserts where they can’t access fresh food. Millions of people have to work two jobs to make ends meet and can’t spend time cooking healthy meals for themselves at home. Millions of people suffer chronic pain and fatigue and don’t have the energy to go grocery shopping. Every American is dealing with a higher-than-usual cost of living that makes it hard to justify the ballooning cost of fresh vegetables.
As I see it, if eating healthy is important to you, you’re probably already doing everything you can to do so. And if it’s not a concern for you… I don’t know I’m not your mom.
The point here is that health and nutrition are good things to consider and, like price, you should always try to do as much as you can but don’t feel the need to police yourself too harshly. Do what you can, not what you can’t.
Flavor
Flavor is cultural, it’s historic, it changes from place to place and person to person. It’s complicated, which makes it the most complicated of our costs.
The reason flavor is a hard cost to calculate is because it involves some trial and error. You can’t really know if an ingredient you’re buying carries more “flavor” unless you try it. And trying it is going to cost you time and money since most grocery stores don’t let you sample, say, the oranges for free.
No one wants to believe it but sometimes when you spend more money you get more flavor. It’s not always true but when it’s true it’s true. Steak is a good example of this. Beef that comes from a nice farm where the cow was happy and roamed and grazed almost always results in a superior product. Coffee is a good example of the opposite: plenty of brands weaponize the language of premium coffee to sell you cheap coffee in a nice bag and overcharge you for it. Some premium coffees are way better than the cheap version but the odds of you getting scammed by good branding are higher than with beef.
There’s a sneaky second way that flavor becomes a cost and that’s in stocking your fridge and pantry with “shortcuts” to get you more flavor in less time. Being well stocked (and knowing how to use) things like fried garlic, anchovy paste, chili oils, flavor pastes, and smoked salts is not a non-zero cost.
When it comes to flavor, doing your research is important and so is knowing what you’re paying for. Consult friends, consult sources your trust on the internet, consult your friend who is on the internet (me).
Personal Preference
When it comes to eating a healthy, balanced diet on a budget there is nothing more important than liking the food you eat. On the internet, we’re surrounded by recipes and recipe ideas from people who speak with authority and know more than us and have nice shots of their meals in the thumbnail. But, if you cook one of those recipes and you don’t like it, what’s the point?
This is not to say you shouldn’t try new things, that you should never leave your comfort zone, that you should never go out of the box. But it does mean to trust yourself. You’re an adult and can make decisions on your own. If you don’t like soups and then make a soup because soups are “good for you” or something and then don’t eat the soup and then have to make something else because you’re still hungry you’ve now wasted your money and your time and the soup.
You’re on a budget and life is hard and maybe a Tuesday night when you’ve just gotten back from work is not the night to cook up a recipe that has an ingredient you really don’t like in it.
For example, I spent years trying to enjoy red bell peppers and trying any recipe I could that incorporated them. And I just couldn’t do it because I just don’t like them. Rather than keep banging my head against the pepper I decided there were too many other ingredients to let bell peppers be my downfall.
A better way to look at this is to play to your strengths when cooking at home. Are you really good at poaching eggs? Use poached eggs in things. Do you like chicken but are scared of undercooking it? Try some more forgiving methods of cooking chicken. Is it easier for you to eat vegetables when they’re in a pasta dish or blended into a sauce? Do that.
With these five costs in mind, I hope you can find a way to make a grocery budget that feels good for you. I can write as many lists about ingredients I like or shortcuts that I take but that’s never really the point of this blog. I want to empower you to do it yourself, to find joy in cooking in a way you may not have before.
Good luck out there and try your best — your best is enough.
No shade, Trader Joe’s makes some of the best tasting, most affordable frozen options out there. I highly recommend.