A quiet monologue is constantly running through my head. It is as follows: dinner dinner dinner dinner. The problem with dinner is that you have to deal with it every night. Thinking about what to eat is always fun until it ends up being a low quality meal. It’s not just cooking that makes me tired, it’s meal planning, grocery shopping, and all the food that’s sitting in my fridge that’s going to spoil quickly. It’s an exhausting time of the week. It is infinite spiritual energy. SighAt 6pm, I think I’ll start chopping onions. So are we still doing this?
You can compromise on breakfast. It’s perfectly normal to eat the same breakfast every day for years, and it’s equally normal to eat nothing at all. Lunch: You can eat it, skip it, or have carrot sticks. Lunch is a quick meal. But dinner is special. Dinner is not only the largest meal of the standard American meal; It is the most important, the most nourishing, and the one that carries the most moral weight. The mythical dream of dinner is for families to reunite and eat a freshly cooked hot meal after a hard but wholesome day at school or work. Even when eating alone, dinner tends to be eaten in a relatively leisurely manner, indicating a transition to a less busy time of day. “You can eat a whole bag of Doritos, but that’s not enough for dinner,” said Margot Finn, a food researcher at the University of Michigan. There’s something missing. ”
The dinner problem can be especially acute for working parents like me. Children keep asking for food at regular intervals, and few are immune to this problem. Disposable income helps alleviate problems (disposable income helps alleviate most problems), but money cannot solve problems because there is a lack of paid staff. This can be accepted as the price of being human, even if everywhere you look there is no one promising you a way out. The sheer number of hacks, services, appliances, and startups suggests that some kind of dinner party solution is on the horizon. do not have With so many options, can we solve the problem? We live in what could be considered a world-historic zenith of dinner solutions. Entire cookbooks are dedicated to easy weeknight dinners for busy families, and entire freezer cases are dedicated to microwaveable meals. Incredible selection of takeout, side dishes, and Door Dash options number of preparation guide give an overview how cook in bulk 1 day a week. Still, none of them have solved the problem. There are creepy dinners that will leave you feeling uneasy.
As it stands, dinner is a game of trade-offs. You can work hard to eat beautiful and healthy food, but it’s a lot of work. You can warm up a frozen burrito from Trader Joe’s or buy McDonald’s. There’s a reason one-third of American adults ate a burrito in 2016, the last government count. fast food You don’t have to be a health fanatic to want to stay healthy all the time. A balanced diet. You can get takeout, but it’s notoriously expensive and often soggy, which is more of a rarity than a common occurrence. Delivery apps, at the very least, promise to be very convenient. even more expensiveand the food is often even more soggy.
If all these options don’t free you from dinner, you’re not alone. Many attempts to make dinner painless fail to deliver on their promise. Remember Soylent? One of the more daring possibilities, which has been around for a while, is that pledged It’s about “simplifying things much more” by replacing traditional foods with a slurry of broken down nutrients. We want things to be less complex, but we also want variety. I want to bite it. It seems like a lot of other people want these things too, and that’s probably one of the reasons why meal-based dinners have endured and Soylent has settled on “.”nutritional supplement lifestyle brand”
Given the general enthusiasm for eating, most of the proposed innovations focus on reducing the effort of making dinner. Grocery stores sell pre-chopped produce. Whole Foods conducted a simple experiment on the ground. “Produce Butcher” Who will slice, dice, or julienne your vegetables? Meal kits, which deliver pre-portioned ingredients to your door, should be an obvious solution, and for a moment I thought they might be. In 2015, Blue Apron was valued at $2 billion. According to TechCrunchwas ready to reach “99 percent of potential home cooks.” In fact, we couldn’t reach 99% of potential home cooks, and neither could our competitors. “There are still people who really love meal kits,” says Jeff Wells, Meal Kit’s managing editor. grocery diveThat’s what the trade press told me. “Compared to the overall food shopping population, that number is not that large.” Issues include cost, menu, quality, whether there are leftovers, and preparation time.
If one dinner solution fails, there’s always another, and then another to take its place. Wells said grocers have recently invested in grab-and-go items, including in-store pizza counters, plastic clamshell deli salads and ready-to-heat spaghetti containers. Everywhere you look there seems to be a flood of new or somehow improved solutions. I learned about a new delivery service expanding to my area on Instagram. While streaming movies, I’ve been introduced many times to companies that sell healthy meals that can be prepared in two minutes. Every time you turn on the podcast, you’ll hear about a meal kit company that will give you free desserts for life when you use a promo code. They all promise the same thing. I mean dinner might be painless if I let it. I had dinner and my sanity.
Of course, all of these options require a departure from the Norman Rockwell dream of home-cooked dinners. When I think about the ideal of dinner, I can become exasperated and sometimes unpleasant, and at the same time I instinctively don’t want to eat a vat of cooked spaghetti. You can also make spaghettiI thought. But then I was back to where I started. Most of us have two basic choices. You can either make the necessary compromises and accept something less than optimal, or you can surrender to a healthy trap of your own making. You can buy pre-chopped onions or smoke it and chop the onions yourself. That’s the option. The idea that there is a permanent solution, be it a hack, a kit, or a service that provides all the benefits of a dinner cooked from scratch without the hassle, is an illusion. You can’t eat something that is both homemade and not. Schrödinger salmon with couscous and broccoli rabe.
Dinner resists optimization. It can be creative and it can be fun. None of this negates the fact that it’s hard work. It will always be a struggle. You always have to think about it unless someone else does it for you. And it always requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of money, or a combination of the three. It is constant, just as breathing is constant. Even in this golden age of technological progress, there is freedom to surrender to refusing to let dinner be settled.
