Eating out or staying in - which is more expensive?

Do you like to eat out at restaurants? Of course you do. We all do. Do you worry about it being too expensive? Probably, unless you got lucky with some stock options at some point in your life. Do you think eating out is more expensive than eating at home? Probably, unless you grill yourself some filet mignon every night. But are you really sure of this? Joel Stein, the columnist who covers everything you never thot you would see on the Op-Ed page (he once reported on the making of a porn movie, and, when the director offered him a part, almost took it), performed an experiment, comparing eating out for a week with eating at home. It was not a particularly scientific experiment, because Joel Stein, as he will be the first to tell you, is not a particularly disciplined person. But he found out that what most people think should be blindingly obvious is, in fact, true. Despite the best efforts of his wife to skew the results (she wanted it to look like eating out is cheaper), it turns out that eating at restaurants is, in fact, more expensive than eating at home. Whew! Vital social science research performed just in time for the good of a country in the middle of a recession.