not answering the question, but comparing with my own situation: I cook all my meals during the week, and clean up afterwards. On average I'm maybe spending $2

not answering the question, but comparing with my own situation: I cook all my meals during the week, and clean up afterwards. On average I'm maybe spending $270 / month for groceries and maybe another $100 - $150 / month for a few cheap meals out each weekend. I spend 1 hour or less per day cooking and cleaning -- when I cook something on the stove in the evening it's usually a stir fry where I can go from raw ingredients to eating something in about 20 minutes. I spend 4 hours a week grocery shopping, but that's mainly because I use it as an excuse to get some exercise walking to the grocery store - that habit is a relic of two years of coronavirus lockdown. Compared to spending $2700 / month on food, lets round up and say I spend $450 and 50 hours of my time each month. Compared to that $2700 / month figure, my 50 hours of shopping, cooking and cleaning work each month effectively pays me around $45 / hour tax free. It'd be closer to $75 / hour tax free ignoring the time spent walking to the grocery store and back again which provides light exercise. I don't love cooking but I find cooking more intrinsically enjoyable than many aspects of my real job -- while cooking I have complete autonomy over the work and working conditions, produce something that gets used and that I can see the value in. Another way to think about things is "how much cash would i need to invest in equities to generate income to cover my annual food expense?". For $2700 / month and 4% real return you'd need to invest about $810k in equities to generate a return to cover outsourced meal expenses. For my expenses I need to save about $135k in equities for the return to cover grocery spend and a few outsourced meals. Then the next step is maybe "how many years of my life do I need to work to accumulate a portfolio that large". If one really despises cooking and finds one's day job reasonably tolerable, maybe that's a fair trade!