If you already have access to a kitchen, a decent set of cooking equipment (which you need regardless of whether you go for Blue Apron or not) is only a few hundred bucks, and the "basics" (pasta, rice, potatoes, onions, garlic, spices, veggie oil, olive oil, vinegar, flour, sugar, salt) are maybe 50 bucks more. Then, for less than a months' worth of meals from Blue Apron, you're set to start cooking for life.
My fiancee and I spend a grand total of 100 bucks a week, give or take, on groceries. This is in southern California, and usually including a cheap bottle of wine. We could spend even less if we wanted, but we're cooking some gourmet shit at home and constantly have leftovers, while generating 1/2 the trash of any of our neighbors thanks both to reusable containers for everything and composting. You can do SO MUCH better than Blue Apron, both in health and in environmental impact.
The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches. I'd rather spend a couple hundred bucks on a quality machine (or better, just make smoothies since they're better for you and use the money I saved not buying a Juicero to buy a Vitamix) than buy into some cult hype bullshit.
I do my best to cook traditional Northern Spanish food for myself (well, as close as I can given the available ingredients). There's very little food waste, precisely because so many recipes either use long lived ingredients, or just reuse them. Some are built using another dish's leftovers as an ingredient. This makes it very easy to just have an idea of the stock we need for certain kinds of ingredients, and make a high percentage of the shopping list just an exercise of comparing what we have with our ideal stock.
This only works, however, because we aren't really looking at dishes individually, and we cook almost every meal. Someone that cooks once a week, and isn't thinking about efficiency, in either ingredients or time spent preparing, will end up spending a whole lot more and eat less. Unfortunately, there's no money in teaching people how to understand a kitchen like this, and how to add recipes that will both add variety while minimizing waste.
Old standbys: One jar tomato sauce, one pound ground turkey, some peas, cook it all together and pour over pasta. One large yellow onion, bit more than a pound of chicken, three or four bell peppers, stir-fry and serve on rice.
Each of those makes about half a week of meals (not counting breakfast) using exact multiples of the unit size of the ingredients in the grocery store, so nothing gets a chance to go bad.
I too would be quite interested in how to design a recipe structure for less waste without that sort of restriction, though.
That said, the one point I agree with you on is Blue Apron's generation of trash. It's wildly wasteful in that sense because so many of their ingredients are individually wrapped and packaged.
"You don't have to think or plan anything."
And that is where your one paragraph about how easy it is to cook for yourself falls down. You have to think up a menu. You have to find a menu (and hope it is good), plan, get ingredients, get the right odds and ends and figure out portions.
That is all fairly easy to do (and I do it myself), but not cost-free. If you have more money than emotional energy and time, the Blue Apron value proposition may appeal to you.
I hate the amount of waste it produces too, but "waste for wastes' sake" is not what is going on there.
Yeah, and you lose a lot of what makes cooking cooking.
You put effort into something, your satisfaction goes up. Extend this to how you live your life, and learn the secrets of being happy.
Some people really enjoy the meal planning part. Some people really enjoy picking out fruits and vegetables at the store. But others don't like planning out meals for the whole week and find grocery store trips stressful and frustrating (maybe their local store is incredibly busy). Blue Apron has a value proposition for those in the latter category who also enjoy the part of cooking that starts once you've got the grocery bags in your kitchen.
Where one draws the line at doing it all on your own depends on time available, motivation, and opportunity cost. I'm not going to judge people whose utility function is different than mine.
I enjoy menu planning, shopping, and cooking more than most people.
OTOH, I also enjoy ballroom dancing, and a variety of other non-cooking hobbies. Sometimes, I want to devote lots of time to cooking. Sometime, I want good food at home with the care I (or my wife) puts into cooking without the rest of the organizational and planning overhead. Blue Apron excels at the latter case. It's more packaging than I'd prefer, and than I need for the use case because I have a pantry well stocked with basic essentials (which is where the worst of Blue Apron's packaging excess tends to be), but for something that works in a diverse market and without gotchas, I see why they do it.
We still eat almost all of our meals at home, with or without Blue Apron, but it substantially improved the quality of the average meal.
The problem with Blue Apron is that they made meals complicated for the sake of being complicated. Way too many sauces to make, things to reduce, things to mix, etc. Every meal took at least 2x what they claimed it would take, and it seemed to take tons of dishes just because of how needlessly complex they made them.
We're using Gobble now, which is billed more as 15min meals and usually only dirty a couple of dishes. I vastly prefer it.
I don't like the trash aspect of it, I'll give you that.
I'm sure with a bit of culinary expertise and experience I could probably do it all on my own, but I don't have that experience, and I don't really have the time to acquire it, but I sure don't want to order out every night.
I haven't tried it, but Blue Apron sounds pretty great to me. I can cook but I don't need to worry about having no real idea what I'm doing? Good deal. That is way more approachable than doing a bunch of independent learning.
What am I supposed to do with 90% of the smallest bunch of scallions the supermarket will sell me after I use the 10% the recipe calls for? I know, I know, I'm supposed to have 5 other recipes that I either know or can invent at the drop of a hat that just happen to use all the same ingredients. But how realistic is that for those of us that aren't amateur chefs and don't really want to become one?
If you ignore time costs, sure; pre-measured ingredients in the quantity necessary for the recipe provided is a huge time saver.
Yes, it creates waste, but it's not without utility.
That being said now that I don't get free food from work, I'll be buying groceries and cooking often enough to use the larger portions.
I also think getting ingredients at your doorstep from some VC backed startup with YouTube recipes on how to cook them is one of the most privileged things you can do, but at least people are cooking. Anything to get more americans cooking is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.
Instead I use a service called plantoeat which lets me import my own recipes and optimize my grocery store runs. Once you get a good rotation going it helps with the problem of over buying certain ingredients.
It's different because making fresh juice is more time and labor intensive than "just buying a juicer" (try it... I did). Want bananas in your orange juice like Dole sells? Now you need to combine that juicer with a blender, etc. Peeling a bunch of oranges by hand takes time. Making fresh juice by hand is completely not worth it.
Imho even recycling is mostly useless. The return, both environmental and economic, on everything but metal recycling is abysmal. Most plastic and paper processes are lucky to break even, with a few exceptions (hdpe comes to mind).
Sorry, but I can't really agree with that line of thinking because it's basically throwing any and all personal responsibility out of the window.
While pushing for better/smarter regulation is an important part of the whole process, it's only one part of the whole process that involves many different parts.
On an individual basis recycling might only add up to a rounding error but the same could be said about many improvements in energy efficiency, the point here being that many of these rounding errors add up to a bigger actual impact.
If everybody thinks recycling is a waste of time and they should instead just lobby for carbon tax, then barely anybody will be more conscious about their waste production and how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.
It's estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastics swimming in the ocean than actual fish, we are on a steady course of turning this planet into a massive garbage dump.
A huge percentage of it is a waste of time. It is a small positive for paper and aluminum. If this doesn't make people feel like they are doing their part, this adds up to a tiny benefit. However, it probably does make people feel like they are doing more then they actually are. The net effect could easily be negative. For many other things, recycling has no effect or a small negative effect on carbon. This does not add up to a bigger actual impact. It is only negative.
> if everybody thinks recycling is a waste of time and they should instead just lobby for carbon tax, then barely anybody will be more conscious about their waste production and how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.
I am saying this would be a good thing. People are way too conscious about their recycling when it has almost zero impact. Doing literally almost anything else, has a bigger impact in most cases.
> how to prevent more needless waste from being produced, which is just as much of an actual issue (if not even more) as farm subsidies or carbon production.
I don't know how you decide is needless waste but a carbon tax will cause everyone decide what they need vs don't need. Regardless, there is no chance that needless waste is as much of an issue as farm subsidies or global warming.
I'm not a customer, but I've been thinking of trying it. Honest question.
That said, the idea of getting a single ounce bottle of something any reasonable kitchen should already have (like vinegar) does feel pretty gross.
Don't people poach eggs? You need vinegar for that. Boil a pot of water, two capfuls of vinegar, crack 2 eggs into something like a 3/4 cup measure, turn heat off wait for water to stop aggressively boiling, lower the measuring cup of eggs so it partly submerges, tip it to empty the contents (you don't want to drop the eggs in from altitude), lid on the pot, set a timer for 5 or 6 minutes. Play around with the time. It'll take less time if you have a stove with residual heat: glass or coils. It'll take more time if you have gas or induction.
If you do it a bunch of times, you can figure out when they're done the way you like them just be jiggling the pot and seeing how the eggs move under water.
The fresher the egg the more it will hold together. If it flattens out on the bottom, oh well some eggs do that even with vinegar. You'll get over it.
Next start making homemade bread for your eggs. And now you'll be willing to pay $6 for really good eggs from chickens that eat insects. OK I'm carried away now...
* 1 big box
* 1 "bubblewrap" cooler bag
* 2 huge ice packs
* Misc. plastic bags for produce
* 3 small paper bags for "extras"
There's really no need to spend 4-7 hours a week prepping food if all you want is a decent and healthy dinner - though spending time preparing something fancy for friends and family is a rewarding activity in it's own right, but that's an entirely different matter.
But I also just flat-out don't like going to the grocery store, mainly because the one near me is so busy. It's great if I go at 11PM on a weeknight, but I'm usually too sleepy to do that. It's complete chaos on a Saturday or Sunday (and go too late on a Sunday and the produce section will be emptied out too).
Thank you,
Hadi Founder, PeachDish - also use coupon code HADI
Obviously it's not ideal, but it should be compared to current behavior, not ideal behavior.
Can we tell how much food waste Blue Apron is saving? I remember reading that they're extremely picky about what they're willing to ship out and end up wasting quite a bit to send out "perfect" ingredients.
When I was doing a MSc in environmental engineering we were careful to let the stakeholders decide what environmental problems are important based on their feelings and not try to prioritize ourselves. Part of it is practical, it's very hard to have stakeholder buy-in on problems they don't care about, but part of it is that I don't think there is consensus on how to do comparisons across problems. You have to make difficult value judgments. (How many kgs of CO2 is one beautiful pristine forest worth? etc.)
Some keywords you could look into are multi-criterion decision analysis and ecosystem services.
My intuition and back-of-the-envelope estimates say that household waste, recycling, and water use don't matter that much.
I'm not too popular with the environmental committee at work because I like to remind them that their annoying, time-consuming eco-friendly intervention of the week matters an order of magnitude less than switching a single meal per week from beef to a veggie alternative.
I think the big questions are: how big is your house? what type of energy do you use for heating/AC? how much do you drive/fly? do you eat animal products?
For most people the rest is comparatively not super consequential. (With some exceptions of course, there are hobbies that are 100x worse than others. People around here drive snowmobiles with 2-stroke engines, they are much less regulated and produce horrendous pollution compared to cars.)
I love cooking. I cook six meals a week, the seventh is take-out or off the grid or something. Three of those six meals I cook a week are sunbasket, and those are weeknight meals where I don't have to go to the store ahead of time. I don't stress the meal plans, which means I can actually cook dinner and eat at a sane hour (say, 7pm) without having to leave work early or stress about starting cooking as soon as I'm able.
I also regularly alter recipes I get, as part of the "I love cooking" bit - I add ingredients, rearrange stuff, change out the process to make it easier / simpler / better. I'm able to express myself, cooking-wise, even though the recipe is mostly fixed. Price-wise, I end up spending about $10 per person per meal. That's around 140% of my average per person per meal cost when I just shop on my own (although there's an externality here: i get more actual meals when I shop for myself, because I usually cook for at least one lunch worth of leftovers when I shop, so up the price a bit more).
Personally? I'd be happy with a box of food where things weren't pre-measured and stuff (every N weeks they send you a new bottle of coconut vinegar or whatever), cutting down on the single-serving bags that hold a single clove of garlic or whatever. I'd also be happy with someone just shopping on my behalf, but these boxes are a real bargain compared to instacart prices, so there's that.
I do agree that the vinegar and a stuff like that is a waste. I would rather get a large bottle
We started using them a month or so ago and its been pretty good.
Disclaimer: My Fiance works with the husband of someone who works there. (Not sure if that is a real conflict of interest or not)