[mindslight]

Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?

[Auracle]

> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?

Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.

Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.

As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.

[mindslight]

You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way. But as a one line throwaway comment it's still nonsense.

Also freezing things or letting them sit in the fridge for weeks tends to change the texture. A main point of a burrito shop is the fresh ingredients.

[Auracle]

Well, you also don't have to freeze anything. When you cook almost every meal, you end up using most ingredients before they go bad. The ingredients for a burrito are pretty basic and can be used to make all sorts of things.

[mindslight]

"cook almost every meal" is exactly the type of "expanding the scope" I was talking about. Cooking food yourself is a well-known way of saving money. Starting by trying to reproduce burrito shop burritos is not the way to get there.

[Auracle]

To you, that's expanding the scope. To many, many people that's just the way we live, the way our parents lived, etc. We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month? Usually fast food because we're out and about.

If you have the money and you can stay healthy eating that way, go for it. But your original comment seems absolutely ridiculous to anyone that regularly cooks. I sincerely don't mean this in a mean way, but it was quite ignorant, as if making burritos was some herculean task and just what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes that you don't use?

[mindslight]

> To you, that's expanding the scope

No, I'm not talking about my own life, but rather the scope of the original response - making it out as something simple you can just do, rather than an undertaking in both prep time and resource management.

> We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month?

I'm right there too at this point in my life. But it's still absurd to suggest someone casually cook a number of dishes that would make a decent Thanksgiving dinner. "Skip the burrito and pack a sandwich" would be reasonable advice, but we have no idea how much OP is already doing that! Rather they merely brought up the price of a burrito for a benchmark about price inflation. Rather than accept the point about price inflation, people then shot the messenger with some fantasy of easy frugality.

> what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes

You've got guac/pico that want to go bad in a day, and rice/beans/protein that want to go bad in ~4 days. So many other recipes like... more burritos or a different Mexicanesque meal that tastes just like burritos?

[bluefirebrand]

> You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way

No, absolutely not. This sort of thing is seriously just the baseline of how we should be expecting people to act in society. Buying stuff for one meal at a time is ridiculously decadent behavior and should not be affordable

[bluefirebrand]

> I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25

Sort of yes?

But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?

There's no way your purchases wind up being $20-25 per burrito, right? That would be nuts.

[mindslight]

> But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?

It doesn't matter. The post I was responding to said that you could create a substitute for a burrito shop burrito with $4 and some work at home. Spending much more money and then amortizing it over multiple burritos is out of the scope of the original comment. It would be nonsensical to say that you can get a burrito for free by making three burritos and selling two, right?

There is obviously an underlying time-money tradeoff here, and my point is that focusing on burritos is the wrong place to start trying to optimize that for saving money.

(Although I do question why someone would go to Chipotle for anything other than "I'm on a road trip and need food". Their food is so bland it was the literal inspiration for the term premium mediocre. Support your local burrito shop!)

[ssl-3]

I see what you're doing, and you're completely correct. It's expensive to make meals solo.

But it's an uphill battle and you won't win.

Nobody cares that buying new ingredients to make tacos for a party of 1 is expensive.

If they aren't doing it yet, they will soon be telling you that you aren't holding it right, wherein:

You should enjoy leftovers. You should embrace and cherish the idea that electing to have some tacos one night dictates your meal choices for the days that follow.

That extra chopped onion that is all stinky and sulfurous by day 2? The meat that isn't ever going to be remotely the same again? The tomatoes that are reverting to slime? All that extra lettuce? That fresh cilantro that doesn't have any other culinary use in your chosen diet? Buck up and eat it, or shut up.

People are broadly incapable of having non-disingenuous conversations about the cost of preparing fresh food in small quantities.

---

Tacos for 2? Or 3? Or 8? Or 16! That's really easy and efficient to make for a one-time meal at home. It scales up very well, indeed. It's a great way to feed a bunch of people relatively inexpensively.

For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession, tacos get do kind of expensive -- expensive enough that buying them hot, fresh, and pre-made becomes very attractive.

(My personal favorite is when they tell me that I should try having different taste and just change my preference for the foods that I eat instead of complain about the price. Or when they tell me that I'm a very poor meal planner just because I want only one burrito: FFS.

Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito, and that's OK.)

[mindslight]

The funny part is that I'm currently at the home-centric cook-for-multiple-people end of the spectrum. But burritos are just such a comically bad example of things to make at home to save money. Switch to pasta or basic sandwiches and then there is a point.

[bluefirebrand]

> For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession

For this person: too fucking bad, that's life

If you don't want to live that life then you should pay a premium for the privilege

[ssl-3]

Does that mean that folks are not free to complain about the price of a burrito at a restaurant? What's your end goal, here?

[bluefirebrand]

People can complain about whatever they want and Other People are free to tell them "your problems are trivial, quit whining"

My end goal is hopefully to give people some perspective that "I don't want to eat the same meal two or three nights in a row" is a ridiculously entitled, childish mentality and they should get over themselves

[Cyberdog]

But you wouldn't be making a single burrito. You'd be making several over several days, and/or using the leftover ingredients for other meals.

Economic literacy is truly dead, isn't it? Good lord.

[mindslight]

This is what you said: "Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less"

That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.

I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?

[Cyberdog]

I mean, I figured the concept of buying ingredients to make a single meal for one person and then just throwing whatever's left away is so ridiculous on the face of it that I wouldn't need to qualify it, but apparently I was wrong.

I currently live by myself and I bought a pork loin to barbecue for Independence Day as a treat. I bought one of the smallest ones I could find, then ate about a third of it that night. Then I put the rest in the fridge and ate it over subsequent days - one night I had it on its own with some veggies on the side, and another I sliced it up thin and topped some ramen with it. The loin cost me about $5, but to say that the meat for that one meal on Independence Day cost me $5 is baffling logic.

Maybe we can simplify this. Do you eat breakfast cereal? If you buy a box of breakfast cereal for $4 and a gallon of milk for $4, then have a bowl of cereal with milk the next day, do you think that means that one bowl of cereal cost you $8?

[mindslight]

You're talking about meals that take 2 prepped ingredients (pork/veggies, pork/ramen, cereal/milk) versus something that takes on the order of 10 (tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce), many of them individually seasoned. That's exactly where the economies of scale come in!

Point out that prepping meals at home is a great way to save money, sure. It just falls flat when pushed in the context of burritos. I would posit that the majority of people who set out to save money by trying to make burritos at home do end up wasting a significant portion of the ingredients, and end up considering the experiment a failure. So I'd say if you're trying to encourage financial savvy, focusing on burritos actually hurts that goal.

[bluefirebrand]

> tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce

Yes but you never just buy enough of this for one single burrito!

When you're saying it costs $20-$25, you're not talking about per burrito the way you buy burritos at chiptole