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

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.

Re:So...

[PopeRatzo]

Why is this on Slashdot?

Why is there an article about fast food on a site for nerds? Are you kidding?

I would bet that there are more readers of Slashdot who eat fast food than there are readers of Slashdot who compile their own Linux kernels.

Re:Uh- what?

[hey!]

Tiny? About 1/3 of adult Americans have college degrees, but here's the kicker: about 60% of adult Americans have attended college, but a large fraction of them never finish. If you include technical schools that don't grant degrees but which students take out loans to attend, the number goes up further.

Americans owe over 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt -- more than they owe in credit card debt by a good margin. That's why cracking down on unscrupulous or misleading educational institutions is important. Education -- both college and trade -- is a huge industry with a big impact on the economy.

That experience seems to be poor in the U.S.

[SuperKendall]

The trend in New Zealand is weekly delivered food and recipes.

I've seen that approach for a while in the U.S., in various forms.

But it seems to stay niche. in part because you are at the mercy of what they decide you should eat, along with you not being the one picking out produce.

The last aspect is what really has killed it for me every time, there's always something about the stuff that is delivered that I would have never picked that item at the store - like overly wilted lettuce, or especially bananas that are way, way to overripe for me.

It's really 1000x better to go into a store and see what looks good, so it totally puts the balance away from delivery being convenient or useful if you can't rely on what is being delivered to be usable or good.