• Bring food
• Grocery stores
• Drive throughs
• Places that take significant time to prepare food

Bringing food or going to a grocery store are the cheapest (my preference!) but the kids are hard enough to feed that we often buy prepared food when we're traveling. [1] And they often prefer food that takes a while to make (usually pizza) over what you can get in a drive through. A couple years ago I realized there's another option: calling in an order for pickup to where you'll be soon.

We'll use Google Maps "search along route" to identify a place ~30min out, and phone in an order. [2] By the time we arrive, the food is ready. We can combine the speed (and buffer maximization) benefits of drive throughs, with the variety of options from the wide range of restaurants that offer pickup.

[1] I'm also working on getting them to do better with brought food, but I'm focusing on lunch at school here because that's a much larger portion of their food away from home.

[2] It kind of amazes me that pizza places will take the costly action of preparing a pizza to my specifications based on a simple phone call, with no contact information beyond me giving a first name. I mean, it's great, but like so many things in our society it only works because there are extremely few people want to cause havoc and are willing to put any effort into doing so.