Ask HN: Eating and coocking is so inneficient, better way? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Eating and coocking is so inneficient, better way?

41 pointsanonmamwsm116 comments

Am I the only one who finds it bad that I either have to spend around 10 hours a week going to the grocery store, cooking, cleaning the kitchen,... or, if I want to skip all that, that I have to spend a shit ton of money ordering uber eats?

We have rockets that can leave our atmosphere and cars that can run using electricity. Why don't we have a better way to feed humans? Do you realize how much human capital is spent every day on this useless foodstuff, day in and day out, the exact same process for billions of humans?

I mean, honestly, at this point, just mail me a tube that contains my daily food nutrients, I don't care if it tastes like shit, as long as my body can function and I don't have to deal with this inefficient bulshit anymore.

Is that something that exists? a company that does that? If not, is there a better way? can someone find one, as I'm probably not smart enough to find one.

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Is this a legit question or an attempt to build future interest in a meal prep startup?

Many, many companies do this. I can name three companies selling meal replacement shakes that you could probably subsist on for months without noticeable nutrition problems. I'm regularly bombarded with ads for companies that will send me prepared meals I only need to microwave and eat.

I would be very surprised if someone wasn't able to find a reasonable solution to this problem with a few minutes of googling.

Soylent and Ensure to name two

Knowing how frequently products like Ensure are used in elderly care, I'd rather savour good food now, for as long as possible.

Not to mention Soylent's thesis was that if they made it as bland as possible, folks wouldn't ever get tired of it. I would describe their core flavor profile as "beige."

I think it's legit, as I doubt a marketing effort would "cock up" the title

one of the easiest marketing techniques online; give someone a reason to correct you

Buy a crock pot and make a big hearty stew on Sunday. Keep a rice cooker around too. Then refrigerate and eat that stew twice a day, heated up in a microwave, with rice. You can try different stew ingredients and seasonings in the stew according to taste. Use the same bowl and cup, rinse it out each time.

You've reduced your cost and time to a bare minimum (shopping and cooking are a couple hours a week). Note that you can skip the rice and put a starch (e.g. potatoes) in the stew, but rice is highly flexible. You can research the things you need, cut them up and add them to the stew - like beans and broccoli. Since you don't care about taste, don't even bother with meat. Oh, BTW, you're vegan now.

Speak of rice, cooked rice sometimes only lasts for 2 days even when stored in refrigerator. After that, the rice could become inedible due to biocontamination. Ideally you want to cook rice right before the meal (the same is true for vegetables but for nutrition related reasons).

Meat on the other hand, can be prepared days in advance, then freezed in freezer.

Does this mean I've been eating bad rice for years? There are many times I cook rice on the weekend and eat it throughout the week (stored in the refrigerator)

Never seems to get 'bad' only dry. Throw some water in to steam it up in the microwave and its usually fine

Freshly cooked rice smells different than the "expired" ones. You can give it a smell after it has completely cold, if after a few days it starts to small odd, then probably don't eat it.

A rice cooker can usually finish cooking in less than 30 minutes completely automatically, so it's not really worth the risk anyway.

When I was last working in a startup and time was limited I used to just make an epic pot of chili/curry/etc on a Sunday night and eat that every day during the week. It doesn't take much more effort to make enough food for 5 or 6 days as it does for just one meal - you're just chopping and cooking more stuff really. The economy of scale I'd get would save me at least 1/2 the time I'd have spent making individual meals. It did get quite dull though. There's a whole community of people who do it on Reddit at r/mealprep.

The startup failed but one good thing that came out of it was that I realized that I actually enjoy the process of cooking. It's like science, but with a tasty (sometimes) meal at the end. I cook much more now.

It's also worth realizing that there are some things that you just have to do. Eating, washing, etc are basic minimums of being an adult. You can't reduce your life to only doing the fun parts; it's important to accept that some of your time will always be spent on boring, inefficient stuff.

This.

Until you’re really rich. Many wealthy people have personal chefs who cook, clean, and stock their fridge daily with ready to eat stuff that’s nutritious.

before enlightenment chop wood and carry water, after enlightenment chop wood and carry water.

Food is the richness of life.

To be healthy for your body, food has to be much varied, fresh or freshly prepared, nearly industrially unprocessed.

And for your mind to be healthy, it has to be tasty, varied, prepared with affection for/by someone you love, and eaten in an enjoyable place.

But you want to trade health, taste, beauty, meaning and variety of one of the biggest pleasures in life... for efficiency?

Get a good grocery delivery network, arrange a meal schedule of what you like, prepare the groceries list with AI, buy commodities like a freezer, an oven, a kneader, a dicer and a rice cooker, and that's healthy efficiency. Thats why the Vorwerk Bimby sells so well. Prepare things in advance and eat with many people, so that you can prepare big meals in a more efficient way.

Or drink soylent each day and throw your mind and body into a life in the sewer.

Not every inefficient process is a sin, or bad. But maybe smartness can compensate bullshit like food, sex and relationships - and finally make us efficient and ethically pure like corpses are.

The real reason is that food is part of the culture, thereby a very slow progression to adapt to the rest of modern world. Besides, once exposed to certain food culture when young, the taste is hard wired for the rest of life. All makes it a rather complex matter to evolve in one life time.

What made me flip the switch and realize cooking isn't a chore was the realization that I don't have to eat a different or fancy meal every night of the week. Find two or three recipes that are simple and that you like--for me at the start I did simple stir frys with a protein (chicken, pork, beef, etc.), frozen veggies, and stir fry sauce. Then just cook those meals every night of the week.

Seriously, just learn to make a couple dishes and make them all the time. You will get very good at making them quickly and with little mess. Over time you'll get good at substituting or modifying them if you want to try something different. Grocery shopping is vastly simplified as you can just go once a week and quickly get everything you need for days and days of meals. Don't be ashamed or afraid of using canned, frozen, etc. stuff that keeps for longer in your kitchen. These are weeknight meals, they don't have to be fancy!

On the weekends or when you have time and feel the motivation, then splurge and cook something extravagant, go out to eat, etc.

Oh and be very critical of recipes you find online. You don't have to do the Modernist Cuisine or J. Kenji Alt-Lopez "best XYZ ever" version of a recipe that takes 50 ingredients and 6 hours of prep. Find the cheap and easy recipes--the Rachel Ray 30 minute meals type stuff. Save the fancy recipes for weekends or when motivation grabs you.

I've been mostly eating potatoes in January. I've eaten other stuff as well and but probably 90% of calories have come from potatoes, early on it was entirely potatoes. I also took a multivitamin everyday. This seems to work fine, just microwave a potato for each meal. The potato is very satiating so there's no issue with over eating.

There's not much to clean up as it's just a potato, I have a plate in the microwave that I use to heat it then put it on a second plate to eat. I just eat it with my hands.

I've lost over 3kg (probably more like 6-7 I just didn't weigh my self before). I wasn't super fat or anything before hand. Perhaps it's too hard to get enough calories from only potatoes?

I haven't noticed any loss of muscle even though I've eaten almost no protein. It's made me very sceptical about nutrition as whole as I thought I would become sick or at least lose muscle mass (I was going to stop after a week if I lost muscle or became sick).

I will eat many more potatoes than I used to, even after January ends.

Potatoes are healthy, so I’m guessing just January is not enough for you to see the mess in your body from eating only potatoes. Moreover each person is different, it doesn’t make sense for you to be skeptical from nutrition based on an anecdotal case (you!)

But I mean, there are so many delicious things in this world, why would you do this to yourself? Please diversify, it can be good for you and super enjoyable!

The scepticism mainly comes from people acting like eating only potatoes for a week would be bad (people do this potato cleanse thing). I don't mean that I'm sceptical of all nutrition but I do think that there's lots of fake nutrition information that doesn't hold up.

I agree that there's so much delicious things to eat that it doesn't make sense to only eat potatoes. I'm only doing it for a month. When I say I'll always eat more potatoes I mean it's my goto lazy food.

I went two weeks without eating anything other then potatoes and a gross tasting multivitamin. Finally I ate half a tiny KitKat and the taste was far better then I remembered. I think eating bland potatoes can help make other food even more pleasurable.

Please at least eat some form of green vegetable. Steamed brussels sprouts with maybe some salt or a bagged salad without dressing if you don't want to significantly add calories. I don't think an all-potato diet is going to do your guts many favors.

s/Steamed/Roasted

My friend roasted some for a dinner party and they were beyond amazing. Avocado oil, salt, and pepper.

The Irish supposedly out "grew" the English because the Irish were limited to a potato and milk diet, which was much better nutritionally than common English fare.

"grew" essentially meaning taller/healthier on average.

Source: IIRC, the Irish History podcast by Fin Dwyer.

Potatoes are almost nutrionally complete (I think you just need butter and in theory they have it all)

So basically, mashed potatoes should cover it all? Heck yeah, and probably tastes better than those meals in a bottle too.

> I haven't noticed any loss of muscle even though I've eaten almost no protein

Yes you have: potatoes are 9.5% protein by dry weight (2% by raw weight).

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Nutrition

Cooking and eating with my family are two major reasons I will never go back to the office if I can help it. You call it a waste of human capital, I call it the parts of my day that I have the most meaningful interactions with other people.

The problems to solve in food today are systemic (eg: the carbon impacts of food production at scale, which are enormous) and at the microeconomic scale (shopping for one person is near impossible).

Shopping for one person is a mess, isn't it?

Eating more veggies helps, if you have somewhere in walking distance you can buy them, because they keep fairly well and they can be combined in different ways.

But for example food delivery services have minimum order costs that are just not designed around single people; it's not practical to eat fresh that way, because to get past the threshold and spread the picking/packing/delivery fee, you have to buy more stuff than you need.

People who live alone overpay for almost everything, though.

That ten hours is a valuable part of the life experience. Discovering new things, developing skills, enjoyment are to be had if you actually go looking. I think the better way here is expanding your horizons rather than looking for a substitute. Also worth finding someone to do those things with.

You must young to have missed it. Soylent was all the rage 5-10 years ago. This is exactly what they are selling

So much the rage on YC, it became a YC company.

Then it went on to become a punchline.

It turns out that the desire to be fed a Matrix-style, nutrient rich slurry like you're on some sort of human foie gras production line is not as mainstream as one would imagine...

I’m not in the target demographic. I thought it was stupid at the time. My views have changed over time. Not-for-me doesn’t mean bad.

It’s no worse than Cheetos.

My kid who is in the target demographic knew all about it when I mentioned it a couple of years ago.

Which is further evidence I am not hip despite what I like to believe.

It's much worse than Cheetos because Cheetos is not marketed as a meal replacement.

> Why don't we have a better way to feed humans?

Better in the sense of not requiring the time of shopping weekly and home cooking meals or the expense of ordering prepared food for delivery, or the various options that are pretty much directly in-between (meal box subscriptions to cook that have lower shopping/prep/cooking time than classic grocery shopping and home cooking, etc.)?

Well, I mean, you can do shakes either those made as full meal replacements or less complete protein shakes with some other ingredients (low shopping/prep, no cooking, much lower cost than eating out.)

Or do what is probably approximately one of the most common historical patterns, adopt a consistent pattern of a long-shelf-life basic staple (probably some form of grain and/or dry legumes) and some consistent accompaniments to get full nutrition, and prepare what you can in as large of quantities as you can eat before it goes bad. You’ll cut down all of expense, frequency of shopping, and total prep/cooking time compared to what you describe. The options you describe are basically ways to exploit the abundance and variety of food options available to modern, wealthy populations, not optimized human feeding within the current economy.

> Is that something that exists? a company that does that? If not, is there a better way? can someone find one, as I'm probably not smart enough to find one.

Soylent was intended to be that. And there were some people when it first came out who made a go at seriously replacing all of their meals with it - not sure if a significant number of people still do. In the end it's probably not any less expensive than home cooking, and certainly a whole lot more dull. If you really want to just replace your meals with a nutritious sludge, though… https://soylent.com

Personally, I know I'm not the greatest of cooks, and I generally find more complicated recipes more trouble than they're worth, especially when I have to go hunt down a bunch of ingredients I don't normally keep stocked. But at least cooking one of the meager list of meal combinations that I can make decently, I find the time spent in reflection doing the prep, cooking, and, yes, even the clean-up somewhat relaxing.

If the price would ever drop into the realm of that being reasonable...

But the bottles on store shelves offer something around $1/100kcal, and the subscription powdered mix on the website isn't sufficiently better than that to really change the calculus. It does get bland, but it certainly could replace meals, if you're willing and able to shift your meal inefficiency from time to money.

I’ll add another method I’m just trying out, attempting to balance speed without meal prep - super simple meals and grocery runs a few times a week. Here’s some I do:

2 or 3 eggs. Toast. 1 pan. 5 or 10 mins max.

Bowl oatmeal, dried cranberries, walnuts. 3 mins microwave.

1 steak, bag of spinach, box of mushrooms. 1 pan, 10 mins max (sauté the spinach/shrooms while steak is resting).

1 rotisserie chicken pre-cooked in bag, 1 bag frozen fried rice, 1 bag frozen veggie mix, 1 pan, 10 mins to warm the rice then the veggies.

Salt. Pepper. In fridge, Hot sauce. BBQ sauce.

I order a chipotle burrito bowl every day for lunch.

Order the ingredients for pickup to save $, or just go when you’re bored or need a break from the computer.

I’m finding that this is a good balance between the blandness of 4 day old meal prep, constant daily cooking for more elaborate meals, huge spending for hellofresh or Uber eats, etc.

Sorry, the typo in the title really bothers me. Is it possible to get it fixed?

Eating and cooking is so inefficient… that’s exactly what uber eats and door dash want to make you believe. Don’t believe the hype.

Cooking scales really well. Each additional person fed makes only a small additional increase in effort and time. Much of the efficiency gained is lost in various ways in restaurant settings. There might be a market opportunity for a restaurant that only makes a small menu of one or two meals per night aiming specifically for high volumes of takeout

Coincidentally that very strategy (a small menu of great meals that are efficient) is the strategy Gordon Ramsay often recommends to turn around struggling restaurants that have good kitchens and bad businessmen.

The choice is a dichotomy either you make it or someone else makes it. Personally I recommend making it in batches called meal prepping for maximum efficiency

This. You'd eat the same thing for a day or two in a row, but this is extremely efficient.

Someone who used to be a lot like you, until I got married. Some advice below, YMMV.

1 - Easy heatables. Whether it's TV dinners or chicken nuggets, it's low effort.

2 - Quesadillas. It's cheap and no harder than putting a can of chicken and hot sauce in a tortilla, throwing it in the oven. Or no chicken. Or add cheese. Whatever.

3 - Crock pots. Would often keep a deer stew going that I'd eat for days at a time. It's a little investment up front in time, but pays dividends.

4 - Staples. Beans, rice, and potatoes all go a long way and are pretty foolproof.

Number 3 is closest to what humans did for a long time, really. The problem is that we lost the sense of community so it's every man for himself.

- Unflavored casein protein powder (mix with water, glug down like milk)

- Quality multivitamin / supplements

- Pectin and/or psyllium husks (fiber)

- Spoonful of extra virgin olive oil

- Electrolyte drink (salt, potassium chloride, magnesium citrate powder, and vitamin C powder; add water until it's tolerable to drink)

That gives you most of what you need with no prep other than adding water. It wouldn't taste good, and I wouldn't advocate doing it for a very long time without eating real food. But I've eaten along these lines as part of some experiments I did on myself, and I had no gastric distress other than that I needed the fiber to not get backed up.

We do have much efficient ways of feeding humans, we have always had it. Live in a big tribe and make it a responsibility of a few people to feed everyone.

In the modern world, it is acheived by restaurants. With the rise of food delivery apps, some of them will be replaced by kitchens without a restaurant front.

The only problem may be the cost (depending on how much you make of course)... but you gotta pay for labor, safety requirements and other expenses.

Unfortunately, something that comes in a tube will not cut it. Products like Soyelnt are made with the peemise that science has figured out all the ways nutrients work... which is far from the truth. This video explains it very well: https://youtu.be/xRAw7yeDO-c

Eating is not just to survive, human body is not an automobile that you fill gasoline in and make it work. If thats the expectation, then whats the difference between a human and a machine ? Buying food, cooking it, or baking a nice recipe you found, sharing food with friends, calling over your friends/family to dinner, having a nice meal with everyone, these are all interactions that makes us human. Get rid of all of them , then humans are not "living" anymore, they are simply "existing".

You could still live without those food rituals if you replace them with other means of human interactions. Instead of sharing a meal, you could also go on a hike with friends. Is there something essential to a meal that cannot be replaced?

Though in principal I agree with you. Food is a pivotal point in life. Which makes me wonder: How much is our life determined by the rituals that surround food?

In Italy, 80%+.

Eating is the main source of social aggregation in the small group. It's the phisiological nature of the gesture, the biological need to eat, that brings everybody to the same table where the resource is.

Also cooking is a ritual, that prepares you to the meal with smells, sight, hunger. It also makes you relax. Try that, if you don't actually cook yourself your meals.

> If thats the expectation, then whats the difference between a human and a machine

I'm pretty sure the difference between a human and a machine is not our fuel source. It's our thinking capacity.

Here's a few ideas:

1) Order groceries online and have them delivered. 2) Meal prep on a Sunday, freeze your own ready made meals for the week ahead. 3) Plan out your snacks for the week.

If you do the above and eat the same things each week then it'll become easier to do over time.

Another benefit to this is you can choose food which is nutritional and healthy ahead of time. It should also be quite cost effective.

You could also just order ready made meals, but then you might worry about what's in them, or for me personally I hate producing so much waste packaging.

Unless you insist on absolute freshness at all times, which is pointless IMO for most dishes, you're probably making small portions which is a ton of busy work in terms of shopping, prep and cleanup as you noted. For many dishes, you can cook them up in larger batches and either eat leftovers for a while or vacuum seal[1] and freeze leftovers, which are often good for at least months. I personally prefer freezing most things as I get tired of them after more than a couple/few times in a week.

If you go the vacuum seal route with half a dozen, or more, of your favorite main dishes then you can pretty much get away with cooking no more than 1-2 days a week to either make things that don't freeze well (depending on your tastes, you'll have to experiment to see what does and doesn't work) or restocking things as you run out of frozen portions. If you do this with enough different dishes[2], you can have an insane variety to your meals with minimal effort. The more complicated the dish, the bigger the payback for this approach.

An added bonus: if you do this you're also prepared for pandemics/shortages... pretty much everything other than extended power outages.

[1] This is critical for long term storage to avoid freezer burn.

[2] Pretty much anything you've ever seen in a grocery store's freezer isle and a lot of things you haven't.

For a lot of reasons there is no better way. The subject is of particular interest to me as I am a foodie, passionate about nutrition (got my BF to 6% as an experiment), and friend with restaurant owners.

- Cost: a good cook is as expensive as good programmer. A kitchen is as complex as an IT production environment and it requires comparable level of skills to produce quality. You have to manage resources, incidents, bottlenecks, high availability and so on.

- Time: there's no rushing quality. Shopping for good ingredients at the early morning market takes at least 1 hour. You have to inspect what is on offer with care each day and it should be done by the "team lead" cook. And obviously that is just the start of the process.

- Mass production equals loss of quality. You don't have tons of fresh naturally grown ingredients available. You don't have hundreds of qualified personnel available for hire locally, you can't have accountants drive quality food.

- Nutrients: this might come as a shock for a lot of people but we really don't understand nutrition all that well. We basically know not to eat too much of anything in particular but that's it. We're at least 100 years from being able to reduce food to something like Soylent that would be just as good as eating varied unprocessed food.

I could go on and on and on... At the end of the day you really have the choices you mentioned: invest time or money for eating and if you want good food you have to invest a lot of time and/or money.

https://soylent.com/

And, why Soylent is called Soylent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

In the book that the movie is loosely based on, Soylent Green is made, as its name suggests, from lentils and soy. They changed it to people for the movie, without telling the author.

I am with you. Grocery markets are super inefficient. What I really want is to enter a grocery market and pick up a bag of pre-selected items that are labeled "Keto" or "Vegan", daily packs, weekly packs. All preselected and so I can just enter, pick a bag and leave. I feel they're missing on a lot of value by having people pick things for themselves, noone really knows what's good for them or what a complete diet looks like.

I find Albert Heijn here in Amsterdam to be super efficient. They do have some packs of pre-selected ingredients so you can just pick and cook at home, but also they have a very efficient self-checkout so no time wasted in lines, and since you can do everything by bike the supermarket is always 5 min away, with no parking time wasted

I go to the supermarket every other day, takes me ~15 min, I have always fresh stuff, I don’t find it inefficient at all

If you truly cook regularly, you should get better at it slowly over time, just like any other skill/hobby. That includes getting better at timing and efficiency of preparation.

A lot of recipes are simple, cheap, and quick. An egg/cheese/meat on a muffin takes 5 minutes to make tops and really only produces three dirty dishes. Salad mix + dressing + heated up frozen meat like frozen chicken tenders that go in the oven. Overnight oatmeal. Greek Yogurt. Baked potato in the microwave. There's a seriously long list of recipes that are dead simple.

Most grocery stores sell ingredients that are at least partially processed but better than frozen meals. Your seafood/meat section has pre-seasoned meats, and the produce section has pre-sliced/chopped fruits and veggies.

Also, have the right tools for the things you like to make. Like salads? Get a vegetable dicer/chopper. Do you mix a lot of things? Get a stand mixer. Are your knives sharp? You should be honing your knives and sharpening around once a year give or take. Make lots of pasta? Boil your water in an electric kettle (faster) before transferring to the pot on the stove.

Other advice I have is to use curbside grocery pickup. Order your groceries online and pick them up. It's free and saves a whole lot of time.

If you want to save even more time, have groceries delivered.

Also, make your meals with enough portions for leftovers. Many foods can also be frozen if they'd otherwise spoil. You can even look into things like vacuum bags to improve the way leftover food saves.

> a company that does that?

Have you not heard of Hello Fresh/Blue Apron/all their competitors?

> Have you not heard of Hello Fresh/Blue Apron/all their competitors?

Bored of the limited number of things I know how to cook well, I tried one called Dinnerly for a few months. I eventually gave up on it because even at their smallest plan, they sometimes sent more food than I, living by myself, could eat for dinner, and a few times even sent a new box before I even started cooking anything they had sent from last month's box. (Fortunately you can skip a box any week and not have to pay, but you have to remember to go into the site and do that…) Also, sometimes the recipes still required some ingredient I rarely had on had otherwise, like ketchup or milk, so I still had to go to the grocery store to get those - plus the things I still had to get to make breakfasts anyway. And yes, it wasn't very cost-efficient. In the end I decided it wasn't a good fit for me and gave up on it and went back to cooking my things, though I did learn a few things along the way (couscous is great, who knew?).

I'm sure they work great for others, though.

Online shopping for food is way more efficient time-wise (not to mention money: it’s so easy to avoid buying stuff you don’t need).

Also, batch-cooking. Cook one evening a week, but 3-4x what you do normally and freeze the rest.

Initially your freezer will just have 1 thing in it but after a few weeks you will actually have a nice variety of things, ready to defrost.

Cooking 3-4x of one thing takes maybe 50% more time, if that, than cooking 1 portion.

10 hours a week isn’t that much. I get by with the same vegan taco 100s of times in a row. 2 hours to make the rice and beans on the weekend and freeze half of it. 20 minutes to cook one up. 5 minutes to wash the dishes. Took about 5 weeks of iterative development to make the recipe.

2 hours + 30 * 7 is already 5.5 hours. 30 minutes across 1-2 trips to the market. Throw on various other foods like peanut butter bananas, bread with olive and hummus, popcorn.

I used to say the same as you. I got a big order of Huel and that’s darn good (no flavoring), yet not much faster unless it’s literally all I eat. It’s no cheaper than the taco bowl either which is full of produce, so I prefer to pay for more fresh food. I feel better when I eat fresh food too.

Pardon not answering the question. Huel is the best but it really doesn’t get better than meal prep with fresh food. Not even a partner would be faster TBH because you can’t treat them like a robot—-no free lunch.

Someone else mentions intermittent fasting, that helps a lot and I’ve been on it since like 2017, warrior mode.

This is the wrong way. Food is one of the major things that keeps you working. Thus it is essential to eat high quality and healthy food. Companies do not provide this kind of food because its quickly perishable. So you have two options:

- Cook yourself

- Get a cook

Also you do not work 10-12 hours a day either or at least your mind is not able to do so. Why not using this time for cooking something healthy?

This is pretty much solved, it’s just not sexy and won’t ever be worth a billion dollars. (1) I. many cultures one person cooks for the entire household, so it’s efficient time wise. (2) But assuming your grandma is not around to cook, it’s still solved but even less sexy:

On Safeway/kings soopers website you can reorder your entire grocery list with a couple clicks and have it delivered for $10. On Sunday afternoon spend a couple hours watching a movie and meal prepping. You’ve now got your food for the week and it took a couple hours.

To tackle the “eating” part - there are tons of meals that are extremely extremely basic but still taste good. For example, the Japanese breakfast “tamago kake gohan”. Microwave some left over rice, crack in a raw egg, dash of soy sauce, stir for 1 minute, put on some rice seasoning. This meals takes 3 minutes to make and is tastes incredible. Also look at the Spanish sopa de fideo for a similarly easy lunch/dinner.

It's the country/culture you live in. In most parts of South-East Asia cooking at home is uncommon and a massive street food scene emerges (tiny kitchens factor in to this).

If you can stand the humidity - move to Singapore! No rockets required, just jet airplanes.

>In most parts of South-East Asia cooking at home is uncommon

Is that true??? I would be deeply, deeply surprised if it is.

Like everywhere in the world, it still depends on where you live. In capital cities, the working people sometimes live alone in their own/shared apartment, so cooking for yourself is less preferred since food stalls are affordable and almost everywhere.

But in small cities or villages, you usually live with your main family or even your big family, so it's cheaper to cook in large batches at home everyday.

I'd also confidently say (I'm Indonesian) that almost all house has a rice cooker, so you could count that as cooking right?

A lot of my friends and colleagues in Japan rarely cook at home. Food from convenient stores, supermarkets is often good, cheap and healthy here

It's true, a lot of working-age people in Japan basically live on food from vending machines and 7-11 stores. I wouldn't call it healthy, though.

perhaps in mega-cities and as far as the young generation is concerned, eating out multiple times a day is not uncommon

I put a lot of effort into figuring out this conundrum for myself two years ago and never got to a solution.

I used to live in a large city and basically off of fast food. I then moved to a rural area and then got a diagnosis that means I can't eat wheat. Those two things have made it basically necessary that I cook for myself twice a day, which is an insane amount of time and effort that I consider wasted, as food ranks quite low on my personal ranking of priorities.

"I don't care how it tastes" was my initial starting point, too, but many options are just too bad to bear. Vanilla-flavoured superfood shakes, when mixed with a hand shaker and when I don't use ice-cold water, for example, actually bring me to the edge of vomiting. Food just shouldn't be that bad.

In my exploration of that direction, the local optimum I got to was vanilla Huel mixed in a blender with frozen red berries. This would be impractical for some people, as you have to wash the blender parts and drink it right after blending, or keep it refrigerated, which you can't do when you're on the go. Working remotely from home, however, this worked nicely for me.

But: Depriving myself of real food just remained a constant drain on my willpower, and I ultimately had more important things to do with my limited willpower resource. The reduced effort around food preparation was just not worth it.

Then I started learning to cook while intensely focusing on reducing recipes to their bare essentials. I also optimized efficiency by always using my kitchen utensils to full capacity and refrigerating/reheating components of future meals or even entire meals, where possible. It was still a boatload of work—way more than I ever felt happy putting into this.

The next thing that happened was that I got into a long-distance relationship with someone with different dietary restrictions. This complicates the refrigeration/reheating part of the equation, as it distributes food consumption between two households, and taking food with you means breaking the cooling chain.

At this point, it's just, "Ahh, screw it; this is just an inescapable fact of life".

> Then I started learning to cook while intensely focusing on reducing recipes to their bare essentials.

This is really interesting and it's very much an under-appreciated discipline in cookery. Despite the whole nouvelle cuisine thing which fetishises it.

There's no reason a meal has to have loads of ingredients or loads of steps; both of these things put people off thinking they can ever learn to cook.

And despite a lot of ill-advised dogma there's no reason any particular individual meal needs to be nutritionally complete unto itself; you don't have to worry so much about X amount of protein, Y amount of starch in each and every main meal, as long as the meals you make for yourself average out as good enough.

I think at some level we self-sabotage and deliberately overcomplicate what we expect from our own cookery, or build up a need for food tradition or cookery as a traditional role for just one person in a family, as an excuse not to do it at all.

It's like deciding against playing guitar because you'll never be Hendrix.

Regarding the impracticality of eating blended foods on the go: Portable and rechargeable blenders exists, and I've used them successfully.

They are smaller than what I need ("The Ultimate Food"), so I divide the ingredients in half and use two of them (so I take two blenders with me pre-loaded with the ingredients). This also helps just in case the battery of one runs out (a fully charged one is theoretically good for > 10 uses). I add the water only right before blending, and they can be cleaned up pretty easily after use by blending water only (which I drink).

I've tried several models, and ended up with this one:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sayano-Smoothie-Blender-Portable-Re...

... but BlendJet 2 was OK as well:

https://www.rtings.com/blender/reviews/blendjet/2

I really dislike the idea o Soylent or any kind of tube food, but also even frozen meals, fast food and up to a point food delivery

I think all that just pushes people away from their connection with food, the best way for people to eating healthier (and tastier!) stuff is by increasing their love for food. If you just give it ready to them, you take their opportunity to learn.

That’s why diets don’t work a lot of times, people just follow blindly a list of stuff to eat, which they eventually give up, instead of understanding the underlying idea and introducing it to their routine.

Learn how to cook, taste it slowly, enjoy it. Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants

For me cooking rarelly equates to preparing nutritients for my body. If that's the case for you, then it's nothing else than a chore. It can be done by you or by paying someone else to do it. And since aquiring a passable cooking skill is quite some effort (compared to for example ironing) cooked food is more expensive than for example hiring someone for ironing.

My advice would be to try to find additional benefits in cooking, like the social aspect, or its meditative nature, or self expression in it, or whatever other than preparing stuff to eat. Oh, and pay for cooking classes, they are worth more than it seems.

Meanwhile I've come to find joy in cooking. To each their own :)

But I love the ritual of waking up, cooking up bacon, eggs, and a lot of fresh veggies. It's a highlight of my day. And don't forget some fresh brewed coffee.

Have you heard of this disruptive new idea. I think it's called the μWave. It uses a sort of high frequency energy pulse to excite water molecules. It even works through the walls of containers. There are some small plasma discharges when you use it wrong but I've had one for years.

In my local grocery store there are aisles worth of compatible containers filled with nutrient rich bits of protein and all sorts of plants. No idea what they're for but when I stick them in my μWave I can convert them into edible food in just a few minutes.

You can invest in my startup.

> I don't care if it tastes like shit

We must be of different species. If it doesn't rhyme with "stone nut" and isn't made fresh at the bakery every Friday morning then all my other normal food feels like shit tube food, maybe that's getting close but still.

Have you thought about building a system of your own for this? Components could be humans, paid or unpaid friends who love you, robots, tubes carrying different materials, army food, whatever needs to work could be designed...

Astronaut food maybe?

[1] https://foodperestroika.com/2018/11/18/russian-space-food/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_food

Because of what I now consider my "legacy ARFID", I can both see the attraction of consistent foodstuffs like Huel/Soylent and also the horror of them. Personally for me the horror outweighs the attraction.

I would ask the OP if any ARFID-like feelings/emotions are driving his quest.

- If they are, consider talking to someone about this, or joining an online support group. ARFID is pernicious, hidden, often derided, and affects a _lot_ of tech-type people; it seems to ride along with a lot of the traits that can make us a little different. It's time to take the shame out of admitting that it's more than just fussy eating; it's deeper, darker and scarier.

- And if not, I'd really recommend looking at fresh soups, part-baked bread, five minute meal recipes, three-ingredient recipes, and listening to podcasts or music in the kitchen. There are ways to make food less of a chore.

Also, it's an old-fashioned idea, but if you're really uninterested in cooking, look at your options for canned foods. You can buy them and keep them for months or years, and if you can find a thing you really like out of a can you need never be short of at least one ridiculously simple thing to eat. Canning is truly one of humanity's greatest achievements, and it's puzzling to see so many attempts to solve a problem that is in many ways already solved.

(My tip: canned curries are better than they sound.)

Fighting through my distaste for food at every level has made me a happier person, and as much as I can see the benefit of trying to "solve" this problem in one go like this, I'd urge the OP not to do so.

Hey PAWD[1], that's: Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder.

1. people using acronyms without defining (them).

I genuinely thought that in this case, using it without mansplaining it, and leaving it to be looked up by those interested, was the better way.

Food fears are terrifying and not everyone wants to be confronted with chapter and verse on new ways to feel inferior to people who can eat anything, every single time.

I don’t eat veggies, and I’m definitely not eating the gross parts of my meat like liver, so I have to take a big bowl of supplements. It works out for me.

Liver: I am totally with you! It's something I'd like to be able to eat because it has nutrition, but... yeah it's still on the list of horrors. Many things are.

Veggies: there are still some that give me the horrors, but it's really all in the cooking (and the seasoning). Which is not to say I am a good cook.

I hope over time you find a bit more enjoyment from food but I do fully understand where you are, and very often I am reminded that I could end up back there.

(When I was a kid, early '80s, my mother, exasperated, took me to the doctor and said, he only eats (lists three things). The enlightened doctor said to my mother, in front of me, and I quote: "That sounds lovely. Invite me round for Sunday lunch". And then to my mother when I was not in the room, that worrying about my intake and pushing me to eat things would only make it worse for me.)

Oh I love food - quality food. I don’t eat trash like McDonald’s (at least not very often..).

But I have to consume like 5k calories every day for sports, and that gets tiring.

I am very torn re: McDonald's because like many former food-avoiding kids I was probably kept alive in part by the Filet-o-Fish. White food, bland, precise.

When you look at McDonald's at a distance, what they sell is comfort, consistency, and freedom from disappointment. It's always the same.

Haven't eaten there in years, but decades on I can see that there are people in our high-stress world for whom that provides some value.

I used to think this way but it’s pretty strange when you consider that the primary reason we are alive is that we have eaten. In some sense, eating is our primary function, not working. Spending time on obtaining and making food is probably one of the most natural things possible.

Cooking and eating are one of life’s great pleasures, especially when shared with family and friends. Cooking for yourself is a great way to learn and experiment, so that you have a skill worth sharing. And, for me it has the added bonus of being entirely unlike computers.

Plan better? I’m useless at it personally. But my mum used to hit the supermarket once a month for about 2hrs, but about 2 fully loaded trolleys.

For a family of 4 this pretty much lasted the month (stuff was frozen etc and maybe a quick 20 min trip once a week for fresh stuff)

If food for you is just a container of nutrients and if you don't care about taste either, you can cook 1 day a week or a month and store everything in a freezer. Also, you can store lots of doomsday food since they take years to expire.

Meal Replacement: Crimes Against the Gut [2021] https://youtube.com/watch?v=yUCm403rkBk Summarises the topic pretty well

I am surprised noone mentioned...

The answer is frozen/microwavable food.

It's unsexy business, but it can grow to a unicorn - create quality/healthy frozen food, and people will buy it.

https://www.cookfood.net/

And cans.

By no means all canned food is terrible.

(Though canned button mushrooms are a crime)

Learn to enjoy cooking, it's a great hobby. But also load up your freezer with pre made burritos and soup in ziplock bags for when you can't be bothered.

I wonder if in some future, eating meals would be an optional leisure like driving cars.

You would get your nutrients and a full sense of satiation from IV infusions and sleep pods.

That's kind of the present with fast food, Slimfast/Soylent, etc.

I found this helpful.

"5 Easy & Healthy Meal Prep Recipes"

https://youtu.be/1S3998B6BjI

I love to cook and eat food. Along with sex it is, for me, one of the pillars of life.

Your question, to me, exposes an utterly repulsive attitude to life.

What do you plan to use the 10 hours you save on?

To hell with joy, efficiency is all that matters!

Huel. It will also make your bowel movements quicker, getting you even more time to crush it at optimal productivity.

Recently just got an air fryer for cheap. Turns out super useful. Steaks just press a button and leave for 20min.

If you pay for a year of food delivery you should be able to negotiate a good price.

I did this pre-pandemic with a local place that still had their own delivery couriers, it was great. Unfortunately scum delivery companies have taken over the market and most restaurants no longer have their own delivery drivers so it's difficult to find places that still do in-house delivery.

perhaps you can hire a delivery guy directly?

They're called pots and baking trays. Are you a teenager (legit question)?

Soylent for the win, but only if you don’t mind the flatulence.

sometimes I wonder how many on HN would opt to be a brain in a jar for a 10% productivity boost.

Why don’t you just hire a chef?

Post sponsored by Huel

This is the classic “what you really hate is capitalism”

Why wanting so much efficiency? Redirect that productive developer energy, find food you really love or find challenging on learning how to cook it, and enjoy the slow cooking and eating of it, it’s one of the great pleasures of life

If you want to save time, and some.money, you could try intermittent fasting by just eating one larger meal per day, either lunch or dinner. It takes a couple of weeks getting used to, but it has both health benefits and I feel less bad about enjoying something less healthy when I do get to the feeding window.

Huel hot and savoury seems like a decent option. www.huel.com Nutrionally complete meals, you just have to add hot water

the chili, spicy curry, and tomato recipes are pretty good they also added mac and cheese now(with high protein and vitamins)

the powdered stuff taste like garbage tho

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