Time - Cost - Quality Pick two. So you can have fast, cheap, but low quality food ('fast food'), or slow, cheap, good quality food (cooking at home), or fast,

Time - Cost - Quality Pick two. So you can have fast, cheap, but low quality food ('fast food'), or slow, cheap, good quality food (cooking at home), or fast, expensive, high quality food (decent restaurant). By time I would also include mental overhead required, i.e. thinking about cooking. Unfortunately poor people often have neither the money or the time to choose quality. The daft thing is that cooking individually, or indeed to order in a restaurant, is very inefficient. In fact it is possible to win on all 3, but this requires a communal style cafeteria as would be found in offices, schools, the military etc. Wouldn't it be great if such cafeterias were available to the general public, with a limited but rotating good quality menu, using actual plates instead of single use plastic, bench seating such that singles would feel comfortable dining there, tap water on tap, self serve with trays. You can find something like this in shopping malls, but often a wide menu instead of a rotating menu, so failing to scale and thus falling behind with quality