Define "cook".

Will you tolerate ripping open a bunch of plastic bags and dumping everything onto a plate or is that too "cook"ish? I'm kind of embarrassed to admit how many of my bachelor era meals were like that. Too busy/lazy to even go to the store, and I keep a stash of those salad bags like alcoholics hide liquor bottles. They don't keep fresh for more than a couple days, unfortunately. The supermarket is full of "salad bags" of various flavors. I wasn't a vegetarian but more of a paleo guy and the lazy paleo mans meal outta the fridge is a salad bag. When you're too lazy or in a hurry to pan fry a steak or bake some chicken or steam a fish filet, there's always salad bags.

When/if you advance beyond "dump everything in the bag on a plate and eat it" you can buy bagged lettuce and vegetables and canned salsa as a topping and maybe even a salad dressing and the "cooking" becomes dumping reasonable quantities of each on a plate. Hopefully not too much like "cooking".

The next step up in "cooking" is adding stuff to the salad which creates salad++, and maybe putting the salad++ in other containers. So take strips of (cooked) chicken, ranging from you took precooked breaded pieces out of a deli container up to you butchered the chicken yourself and then cooked it, and throw that into the salad, and then possibly scoop the salad into a taco/burrito shell with some extra salsa, lots of extra medium spicy salsa and maybe sour cream and maybe some sprinkled cheese, I think I had seasoned feta out of a package. Add some sliced jalapeno peppers if thats not too "cooking". Cheese and sour cream aren't necessarily good for you from a paleo perspective, but they taste good enough to be condiments and my ancestry is lactose tolerant unlike most adult people. Anyway that was my lunch on Saturday. Fitting in with the $5/day theme it was probably like 50 cents, maybe a buck, and most of the money went into the single chicken piece I split with my whole family. It was very filling and tasty. And now I'm feeling hungry. Its not really "cooking" it is just slopping salad out of a bag, salsa out of a jar, and chicken out of a deli container into a taco shell out of a box, and toss in some other stuff out of a jar or bag as you see fit. If that counts as cooking, making a PB+J sandwich or microwave popcorn must be being a chef.

Next thing you know, you're putting salad++ between slices of bread and calling it a sub sandwich. Maybe even seasoning and cooking some fresh meats or fresh veggies. You can make a decent sandwich or wrap in a couple minutes, so if you can afford a potty break you can afford to make a sandwich. Just don't do both at the same time.

If you descend into frying precut frozen bagged veggies in a wok and slopping sauce outta a bottle on it when its done, I'm sad to report you've descended into the depths of hell ... er ... cooking. Tastes really freaking awesome, and cheap and fast too, but it is technically cooking so ... The fresh veggies are usually cheaper than frozen if you can afford 1 or 2 minutes to prep them (rinse, chop...)

Better be careful, cooking is dangerously addictive, and you might end up with pressure cooker, sous vide rig, electric smoker, who knows where the madness might end.

WRT subscription service, if you can get peapod to deliver produce department salad bags, I guess that's close? When my kids were little I had peapod deliver every week, at that age it was a huge epic PITA to take a small herd of little kids out to the store. Like LOTR expedition, just to buy some food, the little hobbits getting into all kinds of trouble. Now they're grown and its more recreational than something to be avoided, otherwise I'd probably still peapod.