[haritha-j]

As a broke PhD student, my conclusion was that I just need to cook more. As pointed out in the article, the ingredients cost a small fraction of the price of the dish. Yes, its a bit time consuming but its also interesting to make different dishes, and many things like lasagna or biriyani can be batch cooked. There's a lot of really interesting dishes that don't take a whole lot of time per portion.

[DangitBobby]

If you like Indian food, you can make absolutely gigantic batches of curry in the instant pot for low effort (stove top also viable requires a bit more attention), then freeze or refrigerate the curry and serve it with rice or protein of choice at your leisure. Awesome for college students because you can make not-quite restaurant quality food with very limited kitchen supplies.

[6510]

I would argue that if building one thing is cheaper per unit than building 100 there is something fishy going on. You aren't even good at cooking!

[broken-kebab]

Manual labor may as easy be more expensive at scale, not cheaper. Then if you really read the article there are tax/regulatory expenses which you are spared of as an individual.