You are describing time, not cost. I can assure you my family worked pretty demanding jobs with long hours. And spent hours preparing food on top of it.
The average American spends 4-5 hours a day on personal screen time, and this skews higher the poorer you get based on a few studies. I've found from talking with folks on the subject many of them are the ones glued to social media and/or the TV.
I agree it's much more convenient to toss a couple pizzas in the oven. I do not agree it's less expensive. I don't know where you're buying your rice or chicken, but even at $4/pizza I can't pencil that out. Chicken comes with free chicken stock if you're buying $5 rotisserie chickens (or whole chickens) and keeping the bones and vegetable ends/etc. around for stock making. This is the level of poor I was talking about. Even at $2.69/lb (the price I paid ~3 weeks ago) for chicken breast, it's going to be cheaper to feed two people than split a whole pizza. Rice is less than 30 cents a serving bought in bulk 50lb bags from a local ethnic store. $1 of rice and a $5 chicken is going to feed around 3-5 people, or give 1 person a lot of leftovers.
I agree one cannot live on just chicken and rice, but one cannot live on just the cheapest frozen pizzas either. I've kinda done both during my life. I lived probably a decade on junk food because I was either too busy or too lazy to do my own cooking like I did growing up. But this was after I started making IT money and could afford it.
> But then there's the sort of 'generational passing on' where we now have multiple generations raised on carry out, fast food, or microwaved meals. Sometimes where they were never given the teaching or responsibility of cooking because (for reasons similar to above, including more affluent cases) the general concept of 'a home cooked meal' becomes the exception case rather than the norm
I definitely agree with this one. Habits and skills are passed down generationally. Someone may not even know where to start looking at youtube for how-to videos to make their own chicken stock for close to free with a $5 crock-pot from the local thrift store these days. And that's probably intermediate level cooking skills, much less beginner level. My wife and I joke about our "depression era cooking" hobby.
I agree there are exceptions, nuance, etc. to this topic. But I get so tired of folks pretending eating home cooked meals is somehow more expensive than an equivalent quality prepared meal. Yes, you can spend as much as you want cooking at home. But the same is true eating out or buying pre-made stuff.
The time factor is certainly very true though. You get much better at it as you practice over the years, but it's always going to be easier and faster to just toss some chicken nuggets into the microwave and be done with it.
This is not moralizing or anything like that. I have lived well over half of my adult life eating junk, and only since getting married to a partner who loves cooking have I turned this back around to my childhood experiences. And we certainly do not optimize very hard for cost - just smart choices by buying stuff on sale, in-season, and in bulk when it makes sense to. I just really cannot square the claim to reality that it's cheaper to eat junk food than it is to eat moderately healthy at home. It's one of those Internet social media memes that just becomes truth by repeating it so much.