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Time Comparison: Cook for Good, Typical Cooking, and Eating Out

How much time do you and others in your family spend planning, getting, and cleaning up after meals? Here's a comparison of how much I've spent at various times in my life. For years, my husband and I ate lunch and sometimes dinner separately, usually out with our co-workers. That doubled the amount of time our family spent deciding where to go, getting to a place to eat, waiting, and paying.

The "typical cooking" shown here is, frankly, now where near as scrumptious or nutritious as what I'm cooking now, even though it took more time a month.

I used packaged breads, bottled pasta sauces, and frozen pizza. We often had frozen appetizers and vegetables, not to mention packaged chips, cookies, and crackers. Delivery pizza and Chinese food was on my speed-dial, too.

The amount you spend will probably be different. But let this chart help you think about all the time you do spend on food. Would you would rather spend that time in your own home, listening to the music you picked? Or would you rather be out fighting traffic, standing in line at a fast-food joint or cafeteria, trying to catch the eye of the waitress, and paying a bill?

	Cook for Good	typical cooking	eating out for lunch and dinner
driving or walking	45 minutes a week, to the grocery store and to the farmers' market	30 minutes three times a week, usually to the grocery store	10 minutes round-trip for lunch and 20 minutes round-trip for dinner, every day
shopping	90 minutes the first week and 45 minutes a week for the other three weeks	20 minutes three times a week	20 minutes a week to the grocery store for breakfast and snack items
cooking	5 hours the first week and 4 hours the other three weeks, plus 5 minutes for breakfast and lunch and 15 minutes for dinner every day	5 minutes for breakfast and lunch every day, plus 30 minutes for dinner every day	5 minutes for breakfast every day
dishes	1 hour for the big cooking day every week, plus 10 minutes for other days	20 minutes a day	5 minutes a day for breakfast every day
deciding what or where to eat	30 minutes a month	10 minutes a day, plus constant low-level stress	10 minutes a week for shopping plus 10 minutes a day for restaurants (for each family member who does this)
waiting to order or be served	none	none	10 minutes a day (for each family member who does this)
eating	not included	not included	not included
paying	none	none	10 minutes a day (for each family member who does this)
Total hours per month	34 hours	42 hours	35 hours or more, depending on how many in a family eat separately
Total minutes per meal	24.5 minutes	30.5 minutes	24.8 minutes, depending on how many in a family eat separately