Couldn't the same kind of argument be made about buying ingredients from the grocery store to make meals?
"What making meals from store-bought ingredients delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier [than harvesting your vegetables, slaughtering and butchering your own animals, grinding your own flour, etc]"
I don't butcher my own animals, but I do purchase half a cow in the fall from a local farmer here in Idaho. In the end it comes out to roughly $6 a pound for grass fed beef. Much cheaper than the grocery store since grass fed ground beef is $6 a pound. I also do that with a pig (whole, $750 total after butchering fees) and chickens (not economical, but tastes better). I also get to see the animals as they grow and are fed when I visit. More time consuming but I know exactly how the animals are treated and fed.
When I grew up in India, we didn't have "supermarkets" to process food, we would go to a market which had butchers, fishmongers etc. The butchers usually had live chickens that they would slaughter right in front of you. I believe they use the halal method where they slit the throat of the chicken and then put it in a box. The chicken knows whats happening when its fetched from the overcrowded cage, so it cries a very loud, pitiful scream.... that caused me much alarm as a little kid to hear it scream in pain :( :( :(.
Depends what you're dealing with - plenty of things like cakes are weirdly cheaper for me to buy than to buy the ingredients for.
Preservation matters - the cutting up of vegetables for meal kits is a form of processing that reduces their shelf life, and therefore increases cost and waste.
Well, there is buy in bulk and sell at a cheaper price than it takes to buy a limited amount of ingredients and prepare. I mean that's economics 101. The preservatives are really just to extend shelf life but you find that a lot of places are just going preservative free as much as possible.
Actually probably not. You have to get the wheat (or grow it/harvest it) and then raise the animal/butcher it, save the excess. Will you eat everything before it spoils or otherwise goes bad?
"What making meals from store-bought ingredients delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology, doing something much easier [than harvesting your vegetables, slaughtering and butchering your own animals, grinding your own flour, etc]"