Recently, I came across a clip from The Dave Ramsey show where Dave was warning about why you want to avoid restaurants while you’re broke.
Restaurant food is entertainment. It is not nutrition. If you want to do entertainment, do it when you’re not in debt and you’re not broke and don’t have an emergency fund. You’ll have a better meal when you learn to cook at home.
It really got me thinking about how much of our lives are tied up in eating out.
Food is one of those habits that you pick up from your family from a really young age and can be really deeply ingrained in people. It’s really personal and the habits you have now may be really hard to break.
So while I may agree that restaurant food is entertainment, I think there’s some deeply ingrained feelings that surround the food we eat, and that there may be some bigger factors at play than just seeking out entertainment.
First, I do agree with Ramsey that there is no doubt a premium that’s placed on the food we eat outside of home. It’s usually the place where people have the hardest time staying in budget and it’s the first category that people blow.
I know that, like a lot of people, food is my worst category. It’s the first thing I’ll blow and it’s the biggest stumbling block on my way to meeting my financial goals.
But I do agree that food is entertainment.
In every culture, people come together to celebrate food in their own unique way. There’s a literal comfort when it comes to the way we eat our food. It makes us feel better, it brings us back to our childhood, and it comforts us at the end of a long day. It’s where we go when we experience stress.
We gather around food on Friday night to celebrate the week and during holidays to celebrate with family and friends. We build it into our weekends as part of our social plans.
Food goes deep. It’s necessary for survival but if it was only good for keeping us fueled then we wouldn’t have billions spent in the diet industry each year.
So then if we’re sicker, more in debt, and bigger than ever, why not just never eat in a restaurant ever again?
Because food runs deep.
I realized how much restaurant food really was providing me entertainment. But there’s also other factors at play here.
I grew up grabbing food on the way home. It’s what I like and it’s what I have ingrained in me. And frankly, I think food that I can get out at a restaurant is better than what I can make at home, according to the way my taste buds see it.
I know that we like to think of fast food as being convenient but sometimes I think we should ask ourselves if that’s even true. Can I really not create a burger at home that’s just as good and almost as convenient? Then, you’ve created the challenge for yourself to make a better burger.
There’s many times when I’ll have gotten it into my head that I want to get take out because it would be “easier” but really it would be easier just to grab something easy at the house.
But what’s happening when I’m on my way home from work, exhausted, and something sounds good?
It’s those deep phycological habits at play here. I don’t want to be entertained. I want to be comforted.
If I want something to change, I need to look for another way.
Recently, I’ve taken up two new habits.
The first is giving cooking a shot.
My wife is a great cook. She has an intuition about cooking that I don’t have. We both enjoy great food and going to a nice restaurant is our favorite date. But up until now, I’ve always just assumed that I’m bad at cooking and she’s good at it, so I don’t even try. I love eating good food but I’ve never taken up the challenge of cooking myself.
Why would I just assume that about myself?
So while I’ve always taken a back seat in the kitchen, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to learn. I love great food, so why not take a more driver’s seat approach? Currently, my goal is to cook through Cook This Book by Molly Baez.
And in the meantime, I’m rewiring my brain to believe I can cook my own food for comfort and save time. And by learning to cook, I’m creating my own entertainment in the form of a new hobby. It’s a challenge. And while nobody is ever good at something that they’ve just started, I’m up for trying to get better.
Plus, it’s an opportunity to shoulder more of the responsibility of feeding our family at home.
The other thing I’ve started doing is creating a meal plan.
Not meal prep.
Nothing sounds more terrible than spending my day off just preparing food for my work week. I know people do it. I know they love it, I’m just not there yet.
When planning, what instantly struck me was how few meals I really needed to plan for. When I first started filling in everything that we would know for sure, like what we’ll be doing for lunches, taco Tuesday, and burger night, there was relatively little left to decide. We had the whole week planned out, and it made grocery shopping easy and cheap.
This is still new for me, but I believe it will be a game changer for the way we spend money on food, because like a lot of people, it’s our hardest category.
So while eating at restaurants may very well be entertainment, there’s deeper issues there than simply deciding to forgo grabbing pickup on the way home after a tough day at work.
Since we know that we don’t want to just lie down and lose money to our biggest budget buster, it will take experimentation and intentionality to overcome the factors at play.
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