alt Hacker NewsThere's a specific category of people who get weird about this on social media. Shorthand for it is "burrito taxi discourse". There's usually a long list of excuses, some of which may have validity, some of which are a bit stretched.
I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper.
Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
I definitely don't agree with this part. Home cooking is often significantly better than restaurants. Not only are cooking and running a restaurant very different skill sets (and 'just hire a really good chef' isn't really viable for a typical restaurant), but you also have issues of scale. Creating a diverse menu that can be created, on demand, in a short period of time imposes significant limitations on what you can produce.
Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices.
The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.