Cooking in college: Is it worth it?
As many of my fellow off-campus students know, food is expensive. The advice I constantly receive, which I’m sure most of us can relate to, is to “cook everything at home.” I constantly hear: “Groceries are so much cheaper than takeout!” “You’ll feel much better if you make it yourself!” “Home-cooked meals are healthier!” And technically, all of this is true.
However, as I anxiously paid the $80 bill from my obligatory post-fall break Trader Joe’s trip, I thought to myself: Is grocery shopping really worth it?
There are a lot of angles to consider when it comes to food shopping. The first, obviously, is cost. As we’ve all heard, groceries are expensive — and getting more so. Sometimes, when I go to buy meat (especially at any store that isn’t Trader Joe’s), I audibly gasp at the prices — $8 for a pound of chicken is the cheapest I’ve been able to find since I stopped eating at the dining hall and began regularly grocery shopping again. As someone who eats chicken with almost every meal, I sometimes eat a whole pound of it between breakfast, lunch and dinner. That’s $8 a day for meat alone!
I calculated the cost of a random day of fully home-cooked eating. I had a bowl of Cheerios with strawberries in the morning, a chicken and spinach salad for lunch, a granola bar and banana as snacks and pasta with chicken for dinner. My day’s worth of eating, based on a rough estimation of how much of each ingredient I used (For example, I just divided the price of my bag of spinach by three rather than precisely measuring how much I used.), cost me around $19.70.
It’s obviously possible to buy cheaper groceries than I do. You could eat the classic college diet of just ramen and cereal, or even eat similarly to me but skip the meat and/or veggies. But at the end of the day, the cost of groceries necessary to eat my version of a balanced and enjoyable diet is shockingly high.
So what are the alternatives? You could eat takeout for every meal, and despite what people say, this can actually be a relatively nutritious option. There are more marketed-as-healthy “fast food” options available than ever before, and many are not (comparatively) even that expensive. My CAVA bowl, made up of spinach, rice, chicken and various toppings (and about double the portion of a meal I would make at home, meaning I often have leftovers) costs $11.75, for example. Considering a grains, vegetable and chicken meal at home usually costs me around $10 to make, this doesn’t bother me. Especially when you consider the convenience: As most ND students know, there’s not exactly a lot of spare time for going to the grocery store and fully cooking meals (especially ones as elaborate and nutritionally varied as what I can order at a CAVA, or a Chipotle or even a Sweetgreen).
Besides the obvious time expense, grocery shopping comes with several hidden costs. Travel to and from the store is expensive, especially considering I regularly have to Uber when I have heavy grocery bags and a 30 to 40-minute walk or bus ride home. I often waste food, because realistically many items don’t come in portions made for one person to eat (I had to stop buying grapes because I can never finish them.). Cooking time is another issue, and food fatigue has been a big problem for me — I get sick of my own meal prepping, even after eating it for only a few days.
The point of this article is not to demonize grocery shopping. I do think it’s important for college students to learn how to budget for and buy food and learn to plan and cook meals. It has certainly been valuable for me to practice this type of adult skill while the stakes are still low. I do think, however, that it’s time we reconsider the general advice to “grocery shop, grocery shop, grocery shop.” Sometimes, takeout is the most time efficient, cost effective and actually manageable route for a busy ND student who’s gotta eat.
Sophia AndersonSophia Anderson is a junior transfer at Notre Dame studying political science and planning to go to law school. You can contact her at sander38@nd.edu.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
