"It's cheaper, or near enough"

I'll keep this short, because money isn't this book's argument, and because there's an earlier book in this series, Put the card away, about spending you don't look at, and another, Ask the price of the evening, about the evening that costs more than you'd have chosen. If the order is on a card you're not watching, those are the books.

The belief is that once you've bought the ingredients, the oil and the rice and the things that go off, cooking costs about what ordering costs. It doesn't, and you know it doesn't, but the belief survives because the comparison is never done. The order arrives with its price on the screen and the ingredients arrive across three shops and a fortnight, and the mind doesn't add up the fortnight. Monsivais and colleagues found that the people who spent the least time on food preparation spent significantly more on food away from home. That's a description of the same money going out through a different door, and the door with the app on it is the more expensive one.

The point I'd rather make is that the price isn't the reason to cook. The plain plate is cheaper than the order by a wide margin on most nights, and if that's what moves you then let it. But people who cook on a Tuesday mostly don't do it because it's cheaper. They do it because it's what dinner is. The money is a side effect, the way the box on the side is a side effect. If you get the habit, the money follows, and you'll notice it in the statement a month later, and that's the right way round. Cooking to save money is a diet, and diets have a way of ending. Cooking because the seven o'clock question has an answer is just how the evening goes.