Just getting to read this thread now. It will never cease to depress me how patronising people can be about how easy it is to live like them.
The comparison I always see, without fail, when the question of fast food versus homemade meals comes up is between the most cost-effective and cheap homemade option and the most over-the-top example of fast food, so that you're comparing wildly different things. A bacon cheeseburger and garlic fries might be ten dollars, and a homemade chicken curry might be two dollars a serving, but they're not really the same thing, are they? To compare fast food to homemade, you need to reach for a pack of brioche buns, a pack of sliced cheese, a bunch of actual beefburgers (and if you're comparing to the newer style of fast food burger, frozen crap will absolutely not cut it), a couple of beef tomatoes, a head of lettuce, a jar of mayo, a few potatoes, a bottle of peanut oil and a bottle of garlic dip. Now how are the prices looking? And how do they look when you factor in cooking and prep time?
The other fact that isn't really talked about, at least not here, is that fast food (and junk food in general) is stupidly, ludicrously loaded with taste hits that set off pleasure centres in our brains. That greasy bacon cheeseburger and fries? If you offered me that, and switched it out for grilled chicken and broccoli at the last second, I would quite possibly try to fight you. No joke. And once you've eaten that stuff enough to hit the point of obesity, the rest of your life is a war against your own body: people who are obese have worse odds on getting down to and maintaining a healthy weight over the following five years than fucking heroin addicts do on getting and staying clean. I can close my eyes and recite, from memory, every single place I can buy junk food on every route from my bus or train station to every office I've ever worked in. I can tell you, pretty accurately, which shops on that route I last followed in 2011 stock my preferred brand of soft drink. I run three or four days a week as hard as I can, and I ride to work and race duathlons when the summer arrives, because it is literally the only thing I have ever found that keeps my weight at a healthy level. I find it seriously difficult to stick to a lean and healthy diet; after a single day, I can feel my body almost itching for a sugar hit, and I have to fight my own desire for it every single time I pass a shop doorway. If you've spent your whole life eating lean and healthy, then you have no business telling me how easy it is simply because you find it easy.
This, however, is slightly tangential: criticism of cheap food absolutely is class snobbery dressed up as something else by people who don't want to admit it to themselves. You can talk about how you've been meal prepping for years, and how a two-mile walk is nothing with ten pounds of groceries three times a week, but none of that changes the fact that the person you're looking down on is buying three frozen pizzas for five dollars because they have hungry mouths to feed, very little time to cook, and absolutely no room for error - if one of the meals they buy for the week turns out inedible, then the family doesn't eat. With relatively few exceptions, the people on this forum have free time, have emergency funds, have at least the basic education and the basic equipment required to start cooking, and will absolutely not starve if their first effort into meal prepping is a disaster. The people who are being derided for their decision-making, by and large, don't have those things, and their family is in real trouble if they have to abandon the prepped food they spent a chunk of their weekly food budget on.
Lastly: I meal prepped this week. I made a huge pot of chicken and chickpea tagine with couscous shot through with diced radish and spring onion. I used a recipe from a cooking-for-fitness cookbook written by a chef with three Michelin stars to his name. It's a good recipe, and it's a good dish.
And tomorrow, I'm buying a fucking burrito, because I am sick to the back teeth of that chicken and chickpea tagine right now. It's good in small doses, but it doesn't provide anywhere near the absolute flood of dopamine I get from a fat burrito and a freezing cold can of cola.