All Homecooked Meals Are Cheaper Than McDonald’s

~ Laura

We sometimes end up at the local McDonald’s. Sometimes we have a craving for their salty fries. Sometimes we’re in a hurry and just need to shove something in our mouths.

But, you know, it isn’t cheap. Four Big Mac Meals cost $22.76. I would be hard pressed to spend $22 on an average meal at home. Maybe if I went with a super fancy cut of meat or fish at the super fancy supermarket, I could get up to $22. But most meals are about half that. I was looking at cooking on a budget cookbooks and websites yesterday. I didn’t get them, because almost all meals are cheap provided you keep to the “no fancy meats” and “no fancy supermarkets” rule.

Other fast food options aren’t cheaper. Chinese food costs $20-30. Pepperoni pizza and mozzarella sticks are between $20-30. The best fast-food option is a rotisserie chicken at the fancy supermarkets. I often pick up one for $9 at Whole Foods. And then I make a quick veg and a carb to go with it.

Sometimes, you have no other options. We’ve all had those hellish times when there isn’t 30 minutes to make dinner or the brain space to plan. No judgments here! But if you do have the time, cooking at home is a serious money saver.

Published by Laura

60 thoughts on “All Homecooked Meals Are Cheaper Than McDonald’s”

  1. The Bic Mac Meal is the McD’s equivalent of the “fancy meat” at the supermarket. Compared to the McDouble, you’re paying three dollars for some salad dressing, a middle bun, and a slice of cheese.

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  2. All of their “meals” cost between $5.39 and 6.50. More if you super-size them. Which is just gross.

    It’s possible to get out of McDonald’s for slightly cheaper, if you share fries and drinks, but not much.

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    2. When I was really little we were almost never allowed to get meals at fast food places, because it was too expensive. We all got plain hamburgers, and then a small or medium fries to share if my mom was feeling generous. No drinks.* My grandparents were considerably more lenient, but they wouldn’t allow us to get ice in our drinks, since they saw that as a rip-off. To this day I get a rebellious thrill from putting ice in a soda fountain drink.

      On car trips, to minimize burger stops my parents packed sandwiches and fruit and soda (ever had coke after it’s been in the trunk of a car for 8 hours during a Utah summer? I’m pretty sure it was their nefarious plan to make sure we didn’t become soda addicts.)

      *My mother lightened up when we hit our teens, though we still usually did the fries and drinks to share thing.

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      1. I think I only saw the inside of McDonald’s on road trips as a kid, but of course we didn’t have one in town.

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      2. Didn’t you have eskies in the US when you were a kid? If you don’t understand this weird Australian terminology, I mean a large plastic insulated lidded box with a handle to keep cold food cold or hot food hot. Transporting soft drinks (=”sodas”) uninsulated in summer just seems peculiar to me.

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      3. Helen,

        Ha! Luckily having lived in Australia I understand your weird and foreign terminology 😉 In the US we call them coolers, and people do use them. My family used them for picnics, but maybe my parents didn’t want to use the space on a long car trip? Or maybe they didn’t understand exactly how foul hot coke would taste after baking in the desert sun. Even now I don’t like coke unless it is really chilled. We would usually eat cheese sandwiches, and when the cheese heated up it would get waxy, form beads, and gum on to the bread. I pretty much all cheeses melted and unmelted, but warmed over hard cheeses stuck to soggy bread are an exception.

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  3. We haven’t been for a while, but when we go to McDonald’s, I think we wind up spending around $19 for two salads for the grownups and two kids’ meals, and it’s going to be more expensive once Baby T hits chicken Mcnugget age. We don’t do fast food normally, as when we go to our campus cafeteria, we can all eat for under $16 (and have a drink, fruit, veggie, non-mystery meat, and dessert if desired). As I always say, we live under communism, as it was supposed to be (thanks, tuition-paying undergraduates!). We only wind up in McDonald’s or similar when travelling or when there’s some sort of time crunch when a child has some sort of event or game that interferes with normal meal times.

    For around $30, we can all eat at Rosa’s Tortilla Factory and I can get a beautiful salad and the rest of the family can have all the fajitas they want. For just over $40, we can all go to Panera’s.

    With home cooking, my calculations are that our meals (which tend to be either Patak-curry type things or quasi-Thai) run about $10-16, depending on how nice they are. A holiday dinner with a nice homemade dessert and smoked salmon might run to around $20. However, it has to be shopped for, cooked, the dishes have to be washed, and the kitchen has to be wiped down, so when the cafeteria is open, it doesn’t make sense to cook.

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    2. Anyway, I should probably eat less fast food, but I have strong opinions about the McDonald’s menu. I may go see if they’ll sell me the stupid Happy Meal toy because it’s “Adventure Time” stuff.

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    3. I just remembered that over this break, the $16 dinners were yielding a fair amount of leftovers (enough for 1 or 2 big lunch servings the next day). Leftovers do not generally happen at McDonald’s.

      We also discovered during break that while Baby T (age 1 and some) enjoyed our cooking, all those curries started giving her TERRIBLE diaper rash. I had to put her back on the grilled cheese-quesadilla-pizza regimen and be more moderate with fruit and veggies to fix the rash.

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  5. Time and access to quality ingredients (not fancy gourmet ingredients but fresh produce and staples) are key. You need planning skills to pull of a busy family schedule plus feed them well.

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  6. Yes, I’ve noticed that McDonald’s isn’t cheap at all. But, you don’t have to take the time to prepare the food, which is a significant value. Our kids won’t really eat at McDonald’s anymore. It’s interesting. Once you get out of the taste for the food, it starts to feel wrong.

    Our issue though is that we do have really complicated schedules and difficult to feed children, so it’s hard to figure out what to do, say, on an evening like this one, when one kid goes directly from school to a game, and then a practice. Have to remind the driver (dad) to bring something substantive to eat and not just Starbucks pastries.

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      1. Yes, that might turn the girl off, but I’m trying to stay away from using calorie counts as behavioral tool. The problem around here is getting something that has some protein in it along with enough carbs to fuel the activity, but that can be kept and eaten in the car.

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      3. Yes to the protein boxes! Also, Starbucks has very good little breakfast sandwiches (it’s sort of an upscale egg McMuffin). My tween girl really likes them.

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    2. Now THAT’S an opportunity for a cookbook – healthy, nutritious snacks that you can eat on the go while zooming around to various activities with the kids. After school snacks and on-the-road snacks/meals that are yummy and provide good energy while being healthy.

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    3. We have that problem of food on the go too. I’ve addressed it a few ways, none of which are perfect…I make a cheese or apple-cheese bread or cheddar-ham muffins or nut-free cereal bars with sunflower seeds (not nuts!) that can come to work and go in the car after; in warmer weather I freeze them so they defrost slowly, and then add in fruit and raw veggies, edamame, etc. We make sandwiches to keep in the fridge that can be grabbed up if one parent can stop at home before the activity trip, and hard boiled eggs have worked for the child that eats them. If a kid is eating on the sidelines and not in the car itself, hummus and pita wedges add some variety because it’s a dipping experience. I also make oatmeal and seed and dried fruit packed cookies and that kind of thing which isn’t really /a meal/ but helps get from a to b.

      I have a copy of the Vegan Lunchbox but rarely have had time to make the little samosa-like things.

      On the nights with tight windows but where we can stop home I use the crockpot so dinner is ready if there’s a 20 minute gap to eat.

      I really miss nuts as a great source of protein that’s not too perishable, but allergies make them pretty not a great pick on the way to anything. On the way home they can be okay, like a peanut butter and banana sandwich. But the parent packing it has to do it safely, so it’s rare.

      Breakfast is our family meal of the day right now because of martial arts.

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  7. During the holiday season, I made an interesting discovery–namely the existence of fully-cooked turkey breast in the rotisserie section. For about $9, I was able to buy 2 pounds of it, which was enough for two dinners. We made turkey curries (one Patak sauce, can of kidney beans, can of garbanzo beans, 1/2 the turkey, big bag of frozen veggies, and brown rice) and turkey pad thai (rice noodles, pad thai sauce from jar, big bag of frozen veggies, 1/2 the turkey, can of water chestnuts, peanuts–and I thought it was really good with chipotle hot sauce). As both my husband and I really hate the cold sliminess of raw chicken, the pre-cooked turkey is very helpful. Also, with fewer bones and more meat, it’s much less fiddly to cut up than the rotisserie chicken.

    The downside of all of this home cooking during break is 1) we seem to live at the grocery store and 2) the dishwasher runs all the time (2-3 times a day versus once a day during term)

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    1. I do that often too – pick up already grilled chicken breasts and use them as protein in weekday meals. I also try (not as often as I’d like) to prepare 2x recipe for various stews and chilis and freeze family meal sized portions.

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    2. I roasted a chicken I bought at T Joe’s for $8 this Sunday. Sunday we had roast chicken (w/ lemon, garlic, and rosemary), roast potatoes, and salad with three people. Monday we had roast chicken sandwiches for lunch, and dinner was a salad, pasta in a wine/lemon/bechemel sauce, and cold roast chicken. Tues dinner was chicken burritos, with beans, cheese, spanish rice, guacamole, salsa, and lettuce. Tonight was a repeat of yesterday. So far this chicken has fed about 11 adults (1×3 adults + 4×2 adults).There’s maybe enough meat left on it for more small serving of chicken, and then I’ll make chicken stock with the carcass. The initial roasting took a little more effort than I’d hoped, but the pay-off was so worth it in terms of time and money saved down the road. If I’d bought a rotisserie chicken, that would cut down on even the first investment of time, although there might not have been as much meat.

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  8. We also like store quiche ($8) and store tamales ($8), both of which Baby T eats. Add some frozen vegetables and maybe one more item (sweet potatoes?), and I suppose that runs around $10 or $11 for dinner.

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  9. We have had to become a lot more conscious of our eating-out budget, because of the teenager boy. He eats serious quantities of food and can’t seem to break the 110 pound ceiling. Ian is no slouch either. Anything slightly better than a McDonald’s is a $50 meal for us. Minimum.

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    1. I don’t eat as much as a teenage boy (and I weight much more than 110 pounds), but a dinner of turkey breast, brown rice, and vegetables would have me eating a second dinner by 10:00 p.m.

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      1. Our kids eat about six times a day (breakfast/mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner and bedtime snack) and I do too (more or less), so they don’t need a huge dinner. Me neither, actually. I’m finally starting to do a caloric budget for me, and it looks like 400 calories for dinner is what I get. (I started gaining about a pound a week once I started weaning, so I have to be pretty radical to avoid blimping up. I had this happen in a big way after I weaned my middle child, and I didn’t see what was happening until too late.)

        My husband, on the other hand, is on a completely different dining plan. He doesn’t snack and doesn’t think about food between meals. He has a small breakfast, moderate lunch, large dinner and maybe some ice cream with me at bedtime. He actually has to watch his calories in the other direction, because if he eats less than about 1,000 calories at dinner, he’ll start drying up and blowing away.

        It took me well over a decade to realize that I had to not keep up with my husband at dinner. Last night, I was playing with a calorie calculator with age, weight, height, activity level and sex, and it turns out that my husband’s allowance for his particular stats is 2600 calories a day to maintain his current weight, which is one of the most disheartening facts I’ve heard this week. As I was telling Wendy, I blame the patriarchy.

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    2. True for us, too, though we haven’t had to deal with the hunger of a teen boy yet (teen girls have their own food issues). Our problem is that the kids like to eat the halibut, or something else off the special menu. And, we don’t like to tell them to order the buttered noodles instead, ’cause it’s better to eat the better food.

      I looked through my Mint directory to see how our food costs are panning out. I think it’s $100 at a medium nice place (in our case, that tends to be upscale Asian), $60 in ethnic asian (teriyaki, take out chinese), and $45 in fast food (burger shops, sub shops, usually not McDonalds).

      We don’t need to limit our food budget, but I am sensitive to the idea of spending on food that isn’t good for you and eating poorly because of eating out. So in our case, expensive restaurants can be a better plan, since we are less likely to eat fries and fat (something worth paying for in our house).

      We are also very inconsistent cooks, though that’s a goal we’re trying to work on, as well.

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      1. “So in our case, expensive restaurants can be a better plan, since we are less likely to eat fries and fat (something worth paying for in our house).”

        And kids are often more friendly to vegetables when they come with Asian food.

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    3. He eats serious quantities of food and can’t seem to break the 110 pound ceiling.

      That’s a nice problem while it lasts, but do let him know it won’t last, the end will come surprisingly soon (for me, it was about 18 or 19, I think) and it’s really easy to then develop a gut that will take a fair amount of work to get rid of. I think this is one reason why it’s not at all unusual to see a lot of soft, semi-pudgy late teens-early 20’s guys. (Beer also plays a part, but of course that’s part of the calories.)

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  11. its hard with twin 7 year old tiny girls, that don’t eat kid menu food, to do a meal for under 50 bucks. We always steered them away from chicken fingers/burgers toward splitting a nice grown up meal of salmon or pasta. Now they can eat a full adult meal and they want Steak or tuna! I’ve cut back on eating dinner out to 1x a week and our food budget is just enormous. I can’t keep fruit in the house, I probably do 100 in produce a week. Fast food for us, chick fila, is about 25-30 a meal. Not worth it.

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  12. I’m weeping a little at some of the prices listed. The only budget supermarket in my neighborhood closed, and now my options are a co-op with everything local/organic/European + nice cheap fresh produce, and a supermarket whose motto seems to be “normal supermarket food at Whole Foods prices.” I go to the first, because 1) next door to my house and 2) if I’m going to pay Whole Foods prices I want Whole Foods quality. I have a list of foods I just don’t buy unless I can get to Trader Joe’s or some other normal supermarket, like meat, peanut butter, cereal, flour, sugar. The beef where I shop is around $15/lb, and the chicken and pork aren’t much cheaper. Deli meats on sale are about $6/lb, though I do think they have affordable rotisserie chickens for around $8, which is what a whole roasting chicken at T Joe’s costs. I am lucky to have cheap fruits and veggies, and it probably keeps me healthier. I’ve had moments where I walk in wanting to splurge on something unhealthy, but then can’t bring myself to pay $7 for a few pre-packaged brownies or $4 for a bar of chocolate, so I leave with some oranges instead.

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    1. “I’m weeping a little at some of the prices listed.”

      I feel your pain. We used to live in NW DC, about a 30-minute uphill walk from Safeway. There was a Dean and Deluca’s much closer, but it was exactly as you describe, and the produce wasn’t even that great. We did Peapod grocery delivery while we lived there (no car) and it was about $200 a week for everything when we were a family of two adults, one preschooler, and a small toddler. (That involves some non-food, but not a lot.) We spend about that now in TX (two adults, one 6th grader, one 3rd grader, one small toddler), but we get a lot more for the money.

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  13. To be honest, we usually do have expensive cuts of meat or fish (plus wine), so our homecooked meals probably run around $40. But the proper comparison for meals of that caliber is the local restaurant, not fast food. A comparable meal at a restaurant would be about double.

    I don’t understand the issue about having time to cook for a family. Don’t all children eat pasta? An endless rotation of pasta marinara/carbonara/alfredo etc. takes 20 minutes a night and it is all that young children need, although teenage boys or husbands may wish for something a little more substantial.

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  14. Pasta cant be served on the road (not willing to eat cold pasta). And, it doesn’t have protein. And, the kid doesn’t eat cheese or cream sauces. We could do pasta + marinara, but only when we can serve it warm.

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    1. “Pasta cant be served on the road (not willing to eat cold pasta). And, it doesn’t have protein. And, the kid doesn’t eat cheese or cream sauces. We could do pasta + marinara, but only when we can serve it warm.”

      Exactly. Very few things can be eaten safely in a car. Plus, even at home, my kids had a long stretch of hostility toward anything involving obvious tomato involvement, which rules out a lot of kid standards (pizza, spaghetti, etc.).

      I’ve gotten to be a big fan of Panera’s drive-thru ever since we added a third kid. You can ask for them to add bacon to their original grilled cheese sandwich. It’s ridiculously expensive for grilled cheese, but I hear no complaints about it.

      It kind of drives me nuts the way activities = fast food. To my mind, it pretty much negates the value of a lot of athletic activity if participating means eating something with no fruit or veggie in the car. And if it’s a sedentary activity, combining that with car dining is terrible.

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    2. Crockpot has a little lunch warming thing–costs $25, and with an inverter, you can plug it into a the cigarette lighter. (It may actually come with a car adapter; I never bought one, but it gets pretty decent reviews). You can put basically anything in it that your kid will eat, and it will be hot in a few hours. http://www.amazon.com/Crock-Pot-SCCPLC200-PK-20-Ounce-Lunch-Warmer/dp/B006H5V7ZY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390602049&sr=8-1&keywords=crockpot+lunch

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  15. Pasta salad? A ziti or a curly pasta shape with chicken chunks, a cut up cheese (mozzerrella or cheddar), and a crunchy veggie? Dressed with a high-end supermarket salad dressing. Really easy to make and eat on the road.

    Also there’s nothing wrong with nuking something as you’re leaving the house and eating it in a container in the car.

    It’s a lot easier when they get to high school, because all activities are at the school and finished by 5.

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    1. Hah. I want that meal. But kiddo doesn’t eat cheese or cold pasta.

      But she does like high end salad dressing and crunchy veggies. may be the dish is a salad, with some chicken & bread. Hmh will have to try to make that work.

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    2. The one food my vegetarian daughter is truly repulsed by is pasta salad.

      “Also there’s nothing wrong with nuking something as you’re leaving the house and eating it in a container in the car as long as you’re a passenger.”

      I fixed that for you. 😉

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  16. I came back from supermarket shopping a couple of minutes ago. I went to pick up stuff for dinner, fill in items in the pantry, and get sale items. I spent $150. I could feed my family 3 meals per day for a week or more just using the things on the counter. I took pictures. Will share tomorrow.

    Y81 – food in NYC is a lot more expense than out in the burbs, because of trucking and transportation issues. And I wasn’t figuring in wine into my nightly food expenses. Wine always busts my budget.

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  17. It is an ongoing frustration for us that we put something swell on the table and they say, we’d rather go to McDonald’s. We keep at it. We tell ourselves that we are modelling good food behavior. Ask me in 6 years, whether we had any success…

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  18. Where would a rising adult learn this, if not from parents? All the grocery stores around us offer prepared food; the space allotted to prepared meals has grown in the last 10 years. My mother taught me nothing about how to cook. It would have been very helpful at the start to have had a cookbook which laid out things such as 1) weekly budgets for food, 2) meal plans for a week, with 3) shopping lists for a weekly meal plan.

    I’ve learned a great deal in the interim, and as the kids grow up, I’m not cooking for as many people as I once did. But boy, it would have been helpful.

    Other things which would have been helpful:

    Lists of snacks for on-the-go.
    Subset: nut-free snacks

    school lunches

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  19. In addition to the obvious sandwiches, used to have: peeled hard boiled eggs, celery sticks filled with peanut butter and raisins, cold shake and bake style chicken, carrot sticks, celery sticks, grapes, apples, oranges.

    A favorite was cold chicken with grapes.

    McDonald’s was a very rare treat

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  20. I think the style of cookbook cranberry described would be very interesting. I’d expect it exists, too in various forms.

    But, maybe what someone needs to work on is a cookbook like that in interactive format. So, in the example, you could add lists of ingredients to avoid (like nut free snacks, or cheese or whatever), lists of ingredients to eliminate. Then, pair that with a pantry and a weekly shopping list and then test it. You could also give lists of individuals you are cooking for and food preferences/allergies and have the menu planned accordingly (automatically), allowing you to substitute dishes. Over time, the interactive site could pick out a monthly rotation based on your family’s preferences. Hmh, kind of like someone who actually cooks would do or would have done with their parents. I think a big part of our barrier to cooking more (something we’d like to do) is planning and knowledge now (though cleaning up and time do play a role, too).

    I know there are websites you could tweak to do this style of menu planning, too, but it seems like an out of the box solution would have promise.

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    1. My dad taught me to cook from the Ladies Home Companion Cookbook. This was the cookbook his mother gave him when he left home. (My parents still have it – it is falling apart and I think the copyright is 1940 something). I think of it as a more comprehensive Joy of Cooking and I think it also covers budgeting (though very briefly).

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    2. I think a big part of our barrier to cooking more (something we’d like to do) is planning

      I’m lucky that my wife is a really good cook. One thing she’s especially good at (much better than me- I’m an okay cook, but much worse at this) is being able to just look and see what we have in the fridge and then figuring out how to make something very tasty from it. If you have the choice, learning how to do this will be a much better skill than planning meals for the week. You can then just buy the sorts of things you like, and just make something, depending on what you have and feel like.

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    3. You can already do that (search for these ingredients, and avoid those) on the Allrecipes site. I htink pretty much all of them work that way.

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  21. I’m pretty good at the pantry-fridge round up, but it doesn’t work for a family, especially one with at least one teenage boy. You have to do some planning. I hate planning, but it has become a necessity. You need to have enough defrosted meat and some veggies and milk on hand. Even in families with younger kids, planning is necessary, because both people may be just coming back from work at 6 or 7 or kids need to be driven to activities. There’s laundry and homework. If you don’t have dinner planned out the night before, you’re screwed.

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