This this this.
It's all well and good cooking and prepping etc when you're in a comfortable house and have stocked kitchen space to yourself at home, but when you realise that a lot of people eating out every day don't have access to space in a kitchen that isn't busy with the four other people they live with, that don't get home until 7pm at night and have to leave at 7am in the morning to get to work etc, and you realise that unless cooking is your hobby in those situations you wouldn't have time to decompress after work and make a nutritious meal and also prep lunch for the following day etc.
Yes weekend meal prep is a thing too - but freezer space is at a premium in shared households and there's always the threat of a roommate or family member taking the food for themselves.
seems like people need to enter a 'team' mindset, where you share cooking duties with roommates etc.. trying to help each other pull themselves out of poverty. ofc this is 0.1% likely to happen, but when it does, i think it would work.
I think you severely underestimate the power of teamwork.
That's how our family has survived through 90s. This grandma will watch after everyone's kids. That only guy who has a car will buy cheap potatoes in bulk for everyone.
The difficult thing is that we've gone a long way towards eliminating the tight-knit communities from our society. It's a lot easier to coordinate resource and effort sharing with people you've known your entire life (family, family-ish, and church cohorts).
Even just the church tradition of organizing bringing food to somebody in the community who is sick, indisposed or undergoing a stressful time in their lives (think: just had a kid) is falling by the wayside.
You're making the assumption that poor people expect upper middle class standards of inconvenience (well, lack thereof) in their daily lives. This is not the case because if you don't know what you're missing it's hard to miss it. If the kitchen is busy you wait or work around people. "Time to decompress" isn't even on most people's radar as a thing they want to do. When you have to eat dinner make lunch and go to sleep to get to work the next day that takes priority. It's not "woe is me I can't sit on my butt for half an hour and watch Jeopardy tonight," it's just life.
Yes weekend meal prep is a thing too - but freezer space is at a premium in shared households and there's always the threat of a roommate or family member taking the food for themselves.