Lately I have been lazy with cooking. Between work, training and everything else, at some point I caught myself thinking: what if I just eat at McDonald’s every day? It is fast, it is everywhere, and I would never have to think about a meal again. Instead of feeling guilty about the idea, I did what I always do: I ran the numbers.

The question was never really about McDonald’s. The question was: what is the cheapest way to hit my protein target in Zurich without cooking?

So first, the McDonald’s experiment. If you optimize the menu for protein instead of taste, the best order I found is a Caesar Salad with grilled chicken (skip the dressing), plus a hamburger with an extra patty. That comes to roughly 525 kcal and 47 grams of protein for about CHF 17.50 in Zurich. Honestly, not terrible. As a single meal it is a decent macro profile, and nobody has ever assembled that order for taste reasons.

Then comes the part where the spreadsheet ruins the dream. My food budget is CHF 200 per week. McDonald’s five times a week is CHF 87.50 — 44% of the entire budget, for one meal a day. Around CHF 380 per month. For a salad and a hamburger. Every day. The math does not care how convenient it is.

The alternative I landed on is a no-cook basket from Migros: things like skyr or cottage cheese, canned tuna, eggs, bread, frozen vegetables. Same job — protein hit, zero cooking — at around CHF 10 per meal. Over a month, that is roughly CHF 160 staying in my pocket compared to the McDonald’s plan, and I still do not have to turn on the stove.

One honest disclaimer: these are estimates. The McDonald’s nutrition numbers come from public sources (their Swiss site was not exactly cooperative), and the grocery prices are from memory, not from a receipt. I will update this post after a real shopping run if the numbers move. But the gap is so large that the conclusion will not change: as a daily system, fast food fails on cost, not on macros.

So McDonald’s stays in the rotation — once or twice a week, as the lazy fallback it was born to be. The rest of the week, the boring basket wins. As usual, the optimized answer is less fun and it works.