American Eating Habits Are Changing Faster than Fast Food Can Keep Up (bloomberg.com)

Home cooking would be making a comeback if it ever really went away. From a report: Restaurants are getting dinged by the convenience of Netflix, the advent of pre-made meals, the spread of online grocery delivery, plus crushing student debt and a focus on healthy eating. Eighty-two percent of American meals are prepared at home -- more than were cooked 10 years ago, according to researcher NPD Group. The latest peak in restaurant-going was in 2000, when the average American dined out 216 times a year. That figure fell to 185 for the year ended in February, NPD said.

Don't be fooled by reports of rising U.S. restaurant sales at big chains like McDonald's. Increases have been driven by price hikes, not more customers. Traffic for the industry was down 1.1 percent in July, the 29th straight month of declines, according to MillerPulse data. "It's counterintuitive because you see a lot of things in the press about restaurant sales increasing," said David Portalatin, a food-industry adviser at NPD. "America does still cook at home." The shift is weighing on the fast-food industry. Eateries already are struggling with higher labor and rent costs that they're passing along to customers, which in turn makes home cooking more economical. McDonald's, Jack in the Box, Shake Shack and Wendy's have all raised prices in the past year.

Comments

or maybe less people can afford to eat out...

[xpiotr]

because they are poor.
Even when working 2 jobs.
Somethings gotta give...

Re:or maybe less people can afford to eat out...

[Sique]

If one refuses to acquire marketable skills, one will remain poor even in a thriving economy.

It's often stated but wrong nonetheless. If you don't have the opportunity, the time and the money to acquire marketable skills, you will remain poor. If acquiring marketable skills takes more time than the time window the market wants those skills, you will remain poor. If you don't have the personal ability to acquire marketable skills you will remain poor, e.g. if you are shorter than 6', you can train as much as you want, you will never have marketable basketball skills.

Your statement simply ignores the sheer amount of luck you need to have the personal abilities, the opportunities, the financial background and the time to acquire the right skills at the right moment. And it comes with a big dose of Survivorship bias. It might be that most people you know have had that luck. But you would never have met them anyway if they didn't have that luck. This makes it easy to totally overlook the amount of chance that played a role in their and your life.

What about spread of recipe sites?

[SuperKendall]

We usually make food at our house, and have for years.

But over time it's gotten easier and easier to just say something like "I feel like some dish that has apples and rice" and boom, within seconds have some recipes to choose from.

It makes making food at home a lot easier when you don't need to do any work to dig up a recipe and can easily just bring together a few things you have on hand into a full meal.

Also the other aspect I would think helps is that produce in grocery stores is better than it used to be, with more variety as well. There's honestly a lot of stuff I make at home I'd way rather eat than most restaurant food.

It's the Economy, Stupid

[mentil]

Back during the Great Recession, I recall a survey that asked people what they'd cut back on in order to make ends meet. Right at the top of the list, people said they'd eat out less at restaurants. People are feeling the squeeze economically, so fewer people are eating out.

Re:It's the Economy, Stupid

[hey!]

If you visit a supermarket that caters to working class clientele, you'll find a vast ocean of convenience foods surrounded by a narrow fringe of regular food. For example if we call a foot wide section of one level of shelving a "shelf foot", my local supermarket has at least 75 shelf-feet dedicated to numerous variations on boxed macaroni and cheese. The same market only about ten or twelve shelf-feet dedicated to root vegetables.

The reason this market is dominated by prepackaged convenience foods is government subsidies. Take all that pasta and cheese; it's just subsidized wheat and milk industrially converted into a highly palatable food that is cheap because it's largely already been paid for with tax dollars. It'd be easy and cheap to stock up on enough of this kind of food to get you through the week, but doing that all the time would be courting obesity, hypertension, heart disease and stroke.

In other words, many home cooked meals are just crappy fast food, prepared at home. Vegetables, which are not subsidized, are surprisingly expensive when compared to this crap. On a per pound basis they're more expensive than meat, which is just subsidized grain converted into cows and chickens. Consequently it doesn't sell well, and it's not stocked well. I learned home cooking from my Cajun Mom back in the 1960s, but a lot of young people I know would have no idea how to prepare vegetables from raw.

I obviously have to rely on a more distant upscale supermarket to get the stuff I need to cook, but surprisingly this market's ratio of prepared convenience food to ingredients isn't much higher. It's just the the market is vast. You may find yourself buying a yanagi ba knife for cutting your sushi fish. You're not likely to be eating enough sashimi to justify this, but the whole place is a engine designed to provoke impulse purchases.

In the end this tells me wealthier people are eating a lot of junk prepared food too, but they're doing occasional stunt cooking where they reproduce stuff they've bought at restaurants or seen on TV.

It's no wonder we have an obesity epidemic. It's our tax dollars at work.

I'm now a poor slob.

[Anonymous Coward]

I now work white trash jobs. Yes, plural.

All of my co-workers buy fast food because they are jumping from job to job and work too hard and too long to have enough time to cook for themselves. Yes, too hard. They work harder than any CEO who gets an eight figure salary and bonuses.

Why am I stuck in those jobs? Because I was a good employee. I drank my employer's Kool-Aid, devoted myself to my company's "technology" and focused on my employer.

When my employer decided that what we did can be done cheaper overseas, I lost my job. However, since my skills were very very specific to my employer - because I was so loyal - they weren't transferable: or so I'm told.

I should have drank the Microsoft Kool-Aid years ago. I'd be OK now. Or better yet, never went into technology. I should have went into finance. Yeah sure, '08 -'10 sucked - but they're humming along again!

Kids: your employer will cast you to the side on a heartbeat. Don't ever - EVER - think you're essential.

Americans going back to normal at home cooking?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be a golden time for Aldi.

Here in Germany, simple home cooking and buying cheap food at Aldi/Lidl/... is the normal everyday routine for every student or poor person, and richer people also still prefer home-cooked meals, and only eat out if they have less time than money.

To us, US culture is rather strange. You really go out to eat each day, every day? And if you "cook" at home, it’s ready-made convenience food? How do you even survive? Isn't that extremely expensive? Don't you miss real food?

And then we hear, how much you Americans are forced to work, just to survive.
Guys, you're the closest thing to enslaved one can be, without officially being enslaved!
NORMAL is 8-9 to 16-18, with 1/2 to 1.5 hours of lunch break, and going for a pee, a snack, some fresh air, or a chat whenever you like, because what matters is the end result. If not necessary, you can come between 7 and 10, and leave when you're done for the day or it's too late. (>18:00 is too late.)
NORMAL is 20-30 holiday days a year, and ideally Christmas and summer holiday bonuses. And your boss telling you to go home or to the doc if you do not feel well. With an employer-provided healthcare ensurance that you can keep even if you switch jobs or become unemployed. And getting paid for the free/sick days too!
NORMAL is not being harassed by your boss if you don't work hard enough. (Or do you get to harass him to, if he doesn't pay you high enough??)
(And GOOD is having not just a job, but a profession. Something that matters, and that is your passion (which kinda implies that it matters).)

And "hard working" is a BAD thing. Only stupid people and slaves work hard. Especially on /., with its computer experts, that should be clear. Smart people's goal is to get as much done as necessary with as little effort as possible. (But not less, as that is when efficiency becomes laziness.)
The best company is one, that is so good at that, that everyone can sit back and relax, while the money comes in.
Your boss knows that. Because that's exactly the point of management. Look busy while commandeering people around, and calling their work yours. YOU are their automation. That's why they want you to work hard. So they don't.
Sure, there are bosses that actually work hard. But only at small companies or unsuccessful companies where the boss gives a fuck. But the bigger the company, the more that "hard work" only becomes the "work" of making others work for you.

*ramble ramble ramble* ... ... It's true though.

Incorrect assumptions

[sjbe]

No wonder so many people get trapped in a cycle of poverty.

You think eating out is what traps people in poverty? You might want to learn about poverty traps and their causes. There are lots of causes of poverty. Eating out is not a meaningful cause.

That's more than every other day! And the latest figure is still more than every other day.

If you look at the number of restaurants out there (and the obesity statistics) this should not surprise anyone. People like to look down their nose publicly at McDonalds and the like but the simple fact is that vast numbers of people eat at these places routinely regardless of what they actually say. You think they stay in business because people are eating at home? People LIKE to eat out, they like fast food, and honestly a lot of the food tastes better than what many people can cook themselves.

WTF people, the fastest way to save money is to not eat out; doesn't everyone know that??

Several points on that. Basically your thesis isn't necessarily supported by the facts.
1) There is plenty of evidence to suggest that eating healthy tends to be more expensive than eating badly, at least in the short term. Even if you do manage to save money (which can be done) it's going to come at the cost of an investment of time and energy.
2) There is also evidence to suggest that eating out can be cheaper than eating at home for many.
3) Eating at home requires having the time to prepare the food. Speaking as someone with a young child and a working wife this time can be hard to come by for many people even if you would prefer it.
4) Eating at home does not necessarily equal eating healthier nor does it necessarily equal costing less. It CAN but it often doesn't.
5) Many people don't know how to shop economically in grocery stores and grocery stores have no incentive to help.
6) Food culture is as subject to fads as anything else. One should expect to see variation over time in where and how people eat their food.