Cooking for One Is Not Always Cheaper

Cooking for one is tricky because most recipes don't accommodate single servings. Sure, it can be nice to have leftovers. But sometimes you don't want to eat the same thing three days in a row.

The alternative is just not cooking. You order takeout, pick up something ready-made or throw together whatever's left in the fridge. And if you're only feeding yourself, it's easy to wonder whether cooking is really any cheaper. Cooking at home is supposed to be the cheaper option. But the doubt isn't new.

In 1963, Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, needed a way to measure poverty in America. She based her calculations on the government's cheapest food plan, setting the poverty line at roughly three times the cost of food. In early 1964, that plan cost about 22 cents per meal per person in a family of four.

Orshansky also recognized that smaller households faced higher costs relative to their size. She described them as having "relatively larger fixed costs" and adjusted her calculations for couples accordingly.

More than 60 years later, the USDA still prices its food plans "for individuals in 4-person households." For someone living alone, it recommends adding 20%. The reasoning is that feeding several people costs less per person because they can share ingredients and make use of larger quantities. Fair enough. But what happens when there's nobody to share the food with?

Food waste is one part of the problem. The USDA's cheapest food plan allows for only 5% of food to go to waste. Meanwhile, researchers at Penn State estimated that American households waste nearly a third of the food they buy, with larger households generally wasting less.

Edward Jaenicke, one of the researchers, explained it using cauliflower: "A household of two may not eat an entire head of cauliflower, so some could be wasted, whereas a larger household is more likely to eat all of it, perhaps at a single meal."

Packaging makes the waste worse. Smaller packages can cost more per ounce, while larger ones may mean buying more than you can use. Travis Smith, an economist at the University of Georgia who has studied household waste, put it this way: "If you want to eat kale, you have to buy a huge bag and the rest might get thrown away."

That's where cooking for one gets frustrating. It can still be cheaper, but the money you thought you saved at the supermarket can end up in the trash along with the food.

WRAP, a British organization studying food waste, found that in Britain, people living alone throw away about a third more food per person than larger households, much of it because they don't use it in time.

Food companies figured out that individual portions had an appeal a long time ago. In 1953, Gerry Thomas, a salesman at C.A. Swanson & Sons in Omaha, saw around 260 tons of frozen turkey left after Thanksgiving, stored in ten refrigerated railroad cars. The solution, as the story is usually told, was a single meal on an aluminum tray. The TV dinner went on sale the following year. Swanson sold ten million trays in its first full year.

Home cooking still wins on price. A fast-food combo costs around $10 as of May 2026. The cost of a home-cooked meal is less than $5 when you take the average meal from the USDA's thriftiest food plan, priced for a woman over 70 living alone, and add the share of food wasted by an average household.

Still, this largely depends on how much of the food you actually eat. If you end up throwing away two-thirds of what you've bought, the takeout option becomes cheaper. And that's before we even factor in cooking time.

People who cook spend about an hour a day cooking and cleaning, or about 22 minutes a meal. If you enjoy being in the kitchen, that's probably not a problem. But if you've had a long day and don't feel like cooking, that time has a value too.

At $17 an hour, about what a kitchen worker earns, 22 minutes of cooking time adds about $6 to the meal, bringing the total to around $11. That's a little over the cost of a fast-food combo, or about the same once you allow a few minutes to go and get it. Yes, this calculation changes if you're making a larger meal and freezing the portions.

Then there's a third option: the shared meal. In 1954, a group in Philadelphia started what is seen as the first home meal delivery service in the U.S. This later grew into Meals on Wheels. In 1972, Congress added a national nutrition program for older Americans to federal law.

Today, these programs serve people 60 and older at shared tables in senior centers, or bring meals to people who find it difficult to get out. There's no income test, though local programs set their own rules, and those who qualify pay what they choose. This can cost less than anything you cook, and at the shared tables, it comes with company.

Nearly three in ten American households are now just one person. Plenty of them would still rather cook their own meals and keep it cheap. There are ways to make home cooking less wasteful, although they require a bit more planning than following a recipe. Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who got Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking published, discovered this after her husband, Evan, died in 1996. "I was not sure that I would ever enjoy preparing a meal for myself and eating it alone," she wrote. "I was wrong."

Her approach was to plan ahead. One pork tenderloin could become three different dinners. Rather than calling them leftovers, she preferred "second rounds" and "new incarnations." "It's not impossible to use a half an egg, it really isn't," she told CBS at 85.

In 1948, M.F.K. Fisher wrote about dining alone. In "A is for dining alone," written for Gourmet, she admitted that, given the choice between her own company and that of most people she knew, she would choose herself.

Cheap depends on who is at the table.

Sources

• Poverty line: Mollie Orshansky, Social Security Bulletin, January 1965 ssa.gov; Gordon M. Fisher, Social Security Bulletin, 1992 ssa.gov
• USDA food plans: Thrifty Food Plan cost, August 2026 USDA report (PDF); Thrifty Food Plan, 2021, page 19 USDA report (PDF); SNAP household size adjustment, 2026 fna.usda.gov
• Food waste: Penn State, 2020 psu.edu; WRAP, 2014 wrap.ngo; University of Georgia, 2020 uga.edu
• Package prices: Hossain and Bauner, "Less is More Expensive," 2023 umass.edu
• The TV dinner: Smithsonian Magazine, "A Brief History of the TV Dinner" smithsonianmag.com
• Meal cost and cooking time: Revenue Management Solutions, June 2026 revenuemanage.com; BLS American Time Use Survey 2025 bls.gov; BLS pay for food preparation workers, May 2025 bls.gov. Arcanomy calculation: one USDA Thrifty Food Plan meal for a woman 71 or older, plus 20% for living alone, with waste at the 31.9% household average; 22 minutes at $16.98 an hour.
• Senior meal programs: Meals on Wheels America, 2020 mealsonwheelsamerica.org; U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, 2022 aging.senate.gov; Administration for Community Living acl.gov, acl.gov
• Cooking and eating alone: Judith Jones, O, The Oprah Magazine, October 2009 oprah.com; CBS News, November 2009 cbsnews.com; M.F.K. Fisher, Gourmet, December 1948 gourmet.com
• One-person households: U.S. Census Bureau, December 2025 census.gov