> Living expenses are high, work demands are high, people are stressed and all the easy options are terrible for you. It's not obvious, but there are some ways

> Living expenses are high, work demands are high, people are stressed and all the easy options are terrible for you. It's not obvious, but there are some ways to trade relatively small amounts of inconvenience for food that's healthier and often cheaper. Some people will cook enough food on a weekend to last the rest of a week with refrigeration, optionally dividing it up into single-serving containers. Since a lot of recipes scale up well, this ends up taking much less cooking time than doing one meal at a time, and the labor is shifted to weekends when you might have more energy. A quality-of-life variation on this idea is to do ingredient preparation for a week on the weekend -- chop the vegetables, measure things out, etc. -- and cook meals for four days, then do a second (much quicker) batch of cooking mid-week so the food doesn't spend too long in the fridge. Googling for "once a week meal prep" will turn up a lot more information on this. The big problem with the approach above, of course, is the monotony: having only a handful of meal choices each week can get old after a few days. For people who are willing to cook more often but would still like to economize on time, this guide from last year on quarantine meal-planning for people who normally don't make most of their food at home is very good: https://www.seriouseats.com/our-tips-for-meal-planning-during-self-isolation https://www.seriouseats.com/our-tips-for-meal-planning-durin... In particular, the big thing to take from it is the idea of making larger batches of meal components that you can quickly put together in various combinations with different flavors, which lets you save on cooking time (and shift it to when it's more convenient) while also giving more variety in your diet.