> Regular people will be forced to cook most days of the week. That doesn’t mean that they will cook healthy food though.

When I was a ramen-level college kid literally budgeting at the penny granularity with a back of house job that started out just a dime above minimum wage, the way I got out of that trap was once-a-week cooking, with as many meal components at once-a-month scale my freezer space allowed, even purchasing at retail (though with an eye towards periodic specials). It saved me a ton of time, I ate far healthier than many contemporaries, and I put the time to use in two ways.

First, it turns out when cooking at volume, there was a lot of repetitive wait periods I didn't get when cooking one meal at a time. I studied more while cooking at even these modest volumes than I did cooking on-demand. Second, with microwave-zapped meals I skipped all the lines and waiting at the food court/cafeteria options everyone else used; more time studying. I was exhausted running on the low-wage treadmill during the weekdays, so I really appreciated time shifting the meal prep effort away from those weekdays I was so tired from studying and working, to the weekends when I could recover better. Because the meal prep was only the most intense on the one weekend a month I had to prep what I could fit for the next month into the freezer, the other weekends' meal preps were not as intense.

The studying paid off in a much better job in less than a year (it was do-or-die for only about 10 months), and it was a ratcheting compounding effect from then onwards. If I didn't have to set aside that time to study, I could have carried on that way for years (though age and how US personal finance and healthcare is structured would have caught up eventually and made that a very punishing choice).

I voluntarily chose very repetitive menus because I didn't want to spend the time to figure out more options, and I'm fortunately wired such that I can tolerate that way more than most. After the Internet's Younger Dryas era ended and we got our deluge of content, it became far easier to assemble menus, shopping lists, and prep plans cooking OAW/OAM when I kept meal prepping to save time instead of financially survive. Not glamorous, not "one weird trick", but accessible to anyone even at brutal retail pricing levels on low-wage incomes.

Another possible way out for regular people that I have been wondering about ever since is communal cooking. There are people who do this in the meal prep communities, but I'm wondering if more automated online-assisted coordination is possible.

It takes organizing and time together, mostly empty freezers and refrigerators, possibly getting some freezer containers, but that and a non-profit filing as a food-related business is all that is necessary to start with a couple neighbors. With that you can go into a restaurant supply store and purchase many raw ingredients for way cheaper than even Costco. Once-a-week and once-a-month weekend cooking between several home kitchens splitting up the work, yields refrigerated and frozen prepared ready, nutritious, wholesome meals. Depending upon what you prepare, you can hit $N USD per meal per person with what you would normally pay 2-5X at a restaurant.

The big savings come not from the ingredients though that is welcome, but from time and monetized time. Bring down the per-meal time to even just near the time it takes you to earn sufficient money for the eat out/take out/order in/subscribe alternatives, and it becomes quite attractive for certain personality types. If you hate to cook less than you hate to lose money, then at least it packs all the misery in one compact chunk of time to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Get enough people coordinating (about 100 is sufficient), and you can access distributor-scale savings, or go straight to producers for some ingredients. Raw food ingredients in the developed world is ridiculously cheap once you cut out the many transactional layers, and if you're willing to absorb the labor cost/time by turning it into a social activity, then it is a non-trivial cost savings for lower wage income stratas. But it takes sufficient time and willingness to plan ahead and organize. It doesn't need much at first, but the hurdle is real.

With an income much higher than median letting me access the bulk quantities at the restaurant supply store and the space and equipment to freeze/store them, I found my time savings still quite significant compared to preparing at retail quantities and times, even though the cost savings as a percentage of income while appreciated were a small fraction of what I would enjoy at a lower income level.

This can scale up in complexity as much as the community desires and has the labor/resources for. Gather enough neighbors to go in together on a very plain building that only contains an airtight door, with Lstiburek-type walls using plain Styrofoam insulation, 4 meters thick (even the floor and ceiling), treated with the AeroBarrier system to make extremely airtight, up on concrete piers. Stick a big enough heat pump on it, and you get a walk-in freezer that can serve as large a community as you want that is better than most walk-in offerings on the market (most leak like a sieve by comparison through thinner insulation, modular DIY adding insulation isn't possible, and no one offers such thick insulation), and you can really start to toy with buffering price fluctuations of freezable commodities.

I'd love to find out someone has built a site that walks someone from those baby steps of my ramen student days, all the way through to entire neighborhoods doing massive communal meal preps with communal industrial freezers they use for much longer times between meal preps.