As I left the supermarket (which are amongst the greatest achievements of mankind), it ocurred to me that the amount we pay for some types of food, from certain places, makes very little sense. Amongst my purchases was a pizza (an invention which is probably even better than the supermarket) - a fancy, end-of-week treat pizza. It cost £3, which is somewhere between a quarter and a half the price of ordering something similar from a takeaway, which are immensely popular the world over, and, from a rational perspective, cost way too damn much to have remained so.

What are people paying this huge premium for? Speed? Upon getting home from the shopping trip, which I would have had to do regardless of this particular pizza purchase, it took thirty seconds to get out a tray, put the pizza onto the tray, put the tray in the oven, and then ten minutes for the oven to produce a nicely browned crust and deliciously melted cheese. Lack of an oven? I’ve been shopping around for a new place to live recently; everywhere has an oven. In the town of tens of thousands in which I live, I strongly doubt less than 99% of people have access to an oven. Food quality? If you were paying attention, this was no cheap, cardboard-based freezer pizza, but a top of the line fancy one. At least as good as any takeaway pizza I’ve so far sampled, and still a hell of a lot cheaper. If quality can be sacrificed, the price could easily be chopped in half again simply by picking the pizza from a different aisle. Glory be to supermarkets with multiple pizza aisles.

So far as I can work out, this leaves two viable reasons that the takeaway industry has yet to collapse under the weight of it’s absurd prices, and therefore some combination of them must hold the key to it’s continued survival. Firstly, failures to plan ahead even as far as tomorrow’s meal, and secondly, incredible laziness, where half an hour or more of waiting for a delivery is somehow considered less effort than using an oven.

I find both of these sad, and frustrating; although they may be better off than most of the world’s population due to an accident of birth, many people that should be in privileged positions struggle day to day with putting food on the table and paying the rent, yet still order takeaways, pick up sandwiches from cafes, and regularly eat fast food. Our primitive monkey brains cannot seem to resist the allure of a slickly marketed product, often refined in a laboratory to maximize its addictiveness. Doubly so when we’re hungry, when short term thinking becomes so much easier than rational thought and longer term planning.

This was mostly a rant with no real solutions in mind. Better education, both on the whys and hows of feeding ourselves, would probably be a good start. Because, worst of all, my bulging shopping bag also included an entire chicken. It cost £2.30. And that’s a whole other level of crazy.