For a lot of reasons there is no better way. The subject is of particular interest to me as I am a foodie, passionate about nutrition (got my BF to 6% as an exp

For a lot of reasons there is no better way. The subject is of particular interest to me as I am a foodie, passionate about nutrition (got my BF to 6% as an experiment), and friend with restaurant owners. - Cost: a good cook is as expensive as good programmer. A kitchen is as complex as an IT production environment and it requires comparable level of skills to produce quality. You have to manage resources, incidents, bottlenecks, high availability and so on. - Time: there's no rushing quality. Shopping for good ingredients at the early morning market takes at least 1 hour. You have to inspect what is on offer with care each day and it should be done by the "team lead" cook. And obviously that is just the start of the process. - Mass production equals loss of quality. You don't have tons of fresh naturally grown ingredients available. You don't have hundreds of qualified personnel available for hire locally, you can't have accountants drive quality food. - Nutrients: this might come as a shock for a lot of people but we really don't understand nutrition all that well. We basically know not to eat too much of anything in particular but that's it. We're at least 100 years from being able to reduce food to something like Soylent that would be just as good as eating varied unprocessed food. I could go on and on and on... At the end of the day you really have the choices you mentioned: invest time or money for eating and if you want good food you have to invest a lot of time and/or money.