Home food prep takes a lot of time, quite a bit of skill, and a ton of knowledge, for the whole process, not just the cooking itself, especially if you want the

Home food prep takes a lot of time, quite a bit of skill, and a ton of knowledge, for the whole process, not just the cooking itself, especially if you want the supposed health benefits and savings it grants. 1) Shopping. What's a good price on X? Meal planning's a factor and takes time, and you've gotta already have some notion of what's cheap right now for that, or else much better cooking skills to be able to make something with whatever you happen to pick up, in which case you also need to be a good judge of how much of each thing to pick up to cover meals for a given period of time. All this also takes time. 2) The actual cooking. Obviously. Takes time, takes skill, takes schedule stability if you don't want to end up with a bunch of "well shit, I guess we're ordering delivery pizza again" days. 3) Cleaning. Even if you're great about clean-as-you-go while also trying to watch kids or whatever, is your spouse? Uh huh. And cleaning as you go is another skill in the cooking department, gotta know when you're done with things, when you have minute to wash a pot without ruining anything, how to prep your ingredients and space and in what order for maximum effect (being other-than-awesome at this adds quite a bit of time to your cooking process). How to clean various things requires a little knowledge and experience, too. (Of course it can be super cheap and incredibly easy and low-time-commitment if you can convince your family to be OK with rice-cooker rice, beans, and steamed whatever-frozen-veggie-was-on-sale for every dinner. Good luck.)