Is it worth it to cook for yourself?

I’ve seen this question posted online a lot, and I have asked it of myself plenty of times, particularly by single people.

First, I have to admit that I myself have changed my opinion on this topic over the years. I used to make excuses, including mainly these two:

1. By the time I buy all the stuff I need to cook one thing, I have spent a lot more than that meal would cost. I could just go to a restaurant for cheaper.
2. My time is worth money, and it takes time to buy groceries and cook.

The first argument basically goes as follows: Say I want to cook yakisoba. I need whatever I am going to put into the yakisoba. For sake of argument, let’s say tomatoes, broccoli, eggs, ginger, cabbage, yakisoba sauce, and… soba noodles.

Maybe eggs are 250 yen for 6, broccoli is 200 yen for a head, tomatoes are 300 yen for 3, cabbage is 100 yen, the noodles are 400 yen for 4 servings, etc. Say I start with none of the required ingredients, so I buy all of them, and it costs me 1500 yen. Some people will say “Well you could go to Go Go Curry, Saizeria, or Yoshinoya for cheaper than that” – and they may be right.

Of course, the reality is that now only would the home-cooked yakisoba be far healthier than any of those options, it is also cheaper when you factor in the fact that there will be left-overs. You will only use 1 or 2 eggs, one serving of noodles, and a small fraction of the yakisoba sauce. In fact, you won’t use more than half of anything on the list above, so you could make yakisoba at least twice for that 1500 yen, probably three times or more.

If we assume 3 meals, that’s 500 yen per meal for something with balanced nutrition. Maybe the 4th time you make it, you have run out of broccoli and eggs, but then you just have to buy say.. bell peppers and tofu to replace them. That might cost you 400 yen, and you can have another meal. Now you are out of noodles, but for another 400 yen, you will have enough noodles for another meal, etc.

I picked yakisoba for this example because it’s easy to make and you can switch up the ingredients as you go along, but yakisoba is not the only thing like this. Fried rice and Okonomiyaki are much the same. Soup is even more flexible. Since you can change the ingredients for these things on the fly, you can buy whatever is cheap and in season. Maybe tomatoes are expensive but onions are cheap right now, or bell peppers are expensive but asparagus is cheap. Just use whatever you like that is on sale.

I promise you, it’s possible to have tasty, healthy, and filling food for 500 yen per serving on average. This does mean that you need to look at that you have on hand, and might require some planning to make sure your stock doesn’t go bad before you eat it.

Before COVID, I ate out a lot, and so sometimes stuff I bought would go bad in the refrigerator. During COVID, I started cooking almost every meal, and so I would start out with “What do I have?”, which would turn into “What can I make?”, and finally “What do I need to buy?” I could always find something that I could make with what I had on hand, or something I could make if I bought just one or two items.

Let’s say that you don’t have the time to go shopping that often, and you are going to end up eating out a few nights a week. Having a lot of perishable food might not work for you. Maybe you simply don’t have time to cook. You can’t be away from the computer, or the kids for more than 10 minutes at a time.

There are still options. Rice keeps for months, so you can buy a fairly large bag of rice and use it when convenient. Even 1 Kg of rice is quite a lot of servings – over 6 Japanese rice cups. You can buy preserved curry ready to eat, and pair one pack of curry with one half of a cup of rice. All you have to do is put rice and water in the rice cooker and wait a while. When it’s done, you put the curry in a bowl, microwave it, and add the rice. And curry comes in a lot of styles and flavors: Japanese, Thai, and Indian, with lots of flavors for each.

How much does this cost? Well at the high end, it might be 500 yen for a pack of really good high quality curry, and something like 200 for a cup of fairly expensive rice. So even if you ate an entire cup of rice in one sitting, it would only be 700 yen. If you are eating half a cup and a cheaper curry, it would be as little as 300 yen. You can even mix in some left-overs from the refrigerator for “free”.

Speaking of curry, instead of pre-made curry, you can buy the block style curry and make your own by adding in potatoes, carrots, onions, again – whatever you like. For example, you can buy a 1 kg block of S&B Golden Curry for about 1500 yen. That’s 50 servings! I remember having one of those in my refrigerator for at least 3 months before I managed to finish it all. At the very least, it’s a good back-up plan.

Even if you plan to properly cook, having things like pre-made curry and canned soup around is always a good option because if you are short on time you may be tempted to go out to eat – unless there is something you can make in less than 15 minutes.

That brings us to the second issue, the time it takes to shop and cook.

First of all, I believe that unless you are billable 24 hours per day, counting your time as if you could get paid for it is just silly. Do you say “I shouldn’t have spend time going to the movies with my friends! That took 3 hours, and I get paid 2500 yen per hour – I could have been paid 7500 yen!” No, of course not.

If the time you spend grocery shopping could have been spent working and getting paid more instead, then by all means – pay someone to do your grocery shopping, or use a delivery service.

For the rest of us, though, shopping is not that much of a burden. This is especially true if you shop at least once per week (which you should be doing since fresh ingredients have more vitamins), and have some idea what you want to make so you know what ingredients to buy.

If I am doing a maintenance run to the local supermarket, I can easily be in and out of the supermarket in 15 minutes. I often like to shop slowly at lots of small specialty shops on the weekends, so then I may take my time – but that’s because I enjoy it, not because I need to.

Likewise, cooking doesn’t have to take a long time. Sure, baking and such can take a long time, but the things discussed on this list don’t. Yakisoba, for example should take 30 minutes at most, probably half that if you are organized used to making it. The same goes for fried rice. Soup may take longer, but you don’t have to be paying attention most of that time.

Cooking rice can take over an hour if you are cooking brown rice with a cheap rice cooker – but you can do something else while it cooks.

What’s more, eating fewer times per day (“Intermittent fasting”) has been shown to have health benefits – so you don’t even have to cook 3 times every day.

If you cook twice per day, and you use in-season ingredients common and readily available in Japan, you can easily cook for 700 per meal or less, spend less than 30 minutes per meal cooking, and spend less than an hour per week shopping.

So take a step back and ask yourself – so you really, honestly get away from restaurants spending less than that on average? Keep in mind that cheaper restaurants often make most of their profit on drinks. You can buy a 2 liter bottle of green tea or soy milk for something like 100-200 yen, but a single cup will usually cost you more than that in a restaurant.

The reality is, if you are serious about minimizing costs living within your means, you will probably decide that eating at home is the sensible option most of the time.

I still go out to eat, I just save the occasion for when I can go with friends and have a great experience together. I save enough money cooking for myself that I can go wherever I want when I to decide to eat out, and it won’t break my budget.

All of the above pertains to people whoa re single (or cook only for themselves because their partner always eats out with co-workers, etc) – but the equation only tilts more in favor of cooking at home as the number of people increases. The time spend shopping and cooking won’t increase much with the number of people you are feeding increases, and economies of scale often exist with groceries. Larger items are often lower cost per unit, and you can buy those items if you aren’t worry about them going bad before you can eat them.

Finally, people asking this question are often saying things like “Buy I can eat a Yoshinoya for 500 yen!” Sure, you can – but should you? Is your longevity and health not important to you? Slurping down a bowl of grade D beef with no vegetables is not something that should be a daily habit.