The $5B Battle for the American Dinner Plate
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
My question is... Is this convenience catered only to those who can afford it?
My advice:
- Buy a pressure-cooker and learn to use it
- Salads are great - no cooking, healthy, tasty (for dressing use just lemon/balsamic/flavoured vinegar and olive oil)
- Eat more vegetables (healthy, and easier/quicker to cook than meat)
- Eat more fish (fish cooks in less time than meat, is easier to cook, and is healthy)
- Buy seasonal - you can get great quality products for cheap - especially if you go to the farmer's market and buy near the end of the day
What dinner looked like today - grilled halibut, rice, tomato/spinach/goat cheese salad. Total time from start to finish - 20 minutes. Probably only 10 minutes of my actual time, as I sat around watching TV while the rice cooked and the fish was on the grill.
As for the article on meal-kits, while it's an interesting idea, I don't see the 'value' in simply assembling a few raw ingredients in a box. It saves what, 5-10 minutes at most, for a decent mark-up in price. If anything, people just need to practice cooking with raw ingredients (and pay less attention to the food networks).
But I hate cooking, it's just not my thing. I actually wouldn't mind the cooking part, I like following directions and making stuff, even Ikea furniture, it's fun. But going to supermarkets and trying to find the ingredients, and having too much of one ingredient to just start with a few person-meals a week, and cleaning up all the plates and bowls needed to prepare the ingredients, and the result just not being as good as the many Chipotle-like fast-but-real food places here in Manhattan, that all sucks.
It's hard to describe this feeling ... I understand what you're saying, you can do it well yourself, it doesn't really take that much time, just put some effort into it... but when it comes to food, I just don't want to. Food is messy, I hate it.
I used to live in a place in SoCal where there wasn't the easy access to good prepared food like there is in Manhattan, and I just ate yogurt and granola for dinner most days (literally more than half of them).
If a meal kit has good quality parts and clear directions (complex is fine) I'd be up for that.
You can start simple. Pastas and a basic tomato sauce. It’s just three ingredients, pasta, tomatoes either fresh or already crushed in a tin and some olive oil. Grilling a stake will only take you ten minutes. Try salads too. You just buy three or four of your favorite vegetables, chop them and mix them. Surely it won’t taste worse than the shit they’re serving out. Recipes like these will cover the basics. From there on you decide whether you want more complicated recipes and how much time you’ll spend daily on cooking. But even if you cut in half the times you’re eating out it would make a huge difference to your well being.
As for cleaning, we all hate it that’s why we buy a dishwasher :)
I tend to be the same; a bit minimalistic about the effort involving my cooking, but research and good tools (steam/pressure cooker) and practice (you can get really good at minimizing time spent on it) pay off.
Some local organic growers have £5 boxes or £10 boxes they deliver to your house each week. These are bulk seasonable veg not prepared ingredients. I used to sort of like the 'ready steady cook' aspect of making meals out of what was in the box, but now I quite like the shopping aspect. Examples below...
http://www.farm-fresh-organics.co.uk/
http://www.morefresh.co.uk/medium-vegetable-box-3-4-people-%...
Pressure cooker: is this for beans? I've always gone for tinned beans on the basis that they are picked fresh in Turkey and industrially pressure-cooked in the tin. Am I wrong?
Yes but not necessarily. You can cook a stew in a pressure cooker in under an hour, it's incredibly useful for cooking tough cuts of meat quickly. We make beef stews and curries at home all the time in the pressure cooker, to get the meat tender would normally take 3-4 hours, in the pressure cooker takes about 25 minutes. And we do use it for legumes as well (beans, dal, chickpeas for hummous, etc...).
Rice, legumes, vegetables, meat (stews, pilafs, biryani, etc). It saves a lot of cooking time.
One thing I'd add to the list is a slow cooker. I don't use it very much in summer, but in winter it can be great (the winters here are fairly bleak. Actually, so are the summers - but let's not go there...).
Keep an eye on your local supermarket for special offers on cuts of meat - shove it in the slow cooker in the morning with some tomato/herbs/spices and when you get back in the evening it's done (and your kitchen has that lovely warm home-cooked smell that takes the winter chill off!). You can easily cook enough for several days in one go too.
At least, that has been my experience, though I may make more of an effort than most to use fresh ingredients rather than canned/prepared foods (based on the slow cooker recipes online, which seem to disproportionately call for canned ingredients).
That said, I love the output of the slow cooker, and I agree it is a great tool to have. It helps to mix things up and have a different meal this week than last week.
Well, you are committing the same miscalculation that books and magazine articles about "healthy meals in 30-minutes or less" make. You leave out...
1) meal planning,
2) shopping for fresh vegetables & other ingredients
3) prep work (washing, cutting vegetables, etc),
4) clean up
Healthy meals prepared by someone else saves a huge ton of time -- if one honestly accounts for all the extra time before & after the heating of the food.
Meal planning well, that takes experience. If you cook for yourself, it means you buy some vegetables, and pick up whatever looks good at the butcher/fishmonger on the way home. Rice/potatoes are something I always have at home.
Still, if one of these companies slashes prices in half and offers a wide selection of food that can be selected a la carte, I do think they're offering a service that is quite valuable. Until then, it's mainly a curiosity at best.
However, one related problem I have is the accumulation of ingredients. Something I cooked yesterday called for mustard, apple cider vinegar, and Worcestershire sauce. Now I have enough of each to last a decade, and as a college student in NYC, space is at a premium. I wonder if there is room for innovation here.
The downside of this - particularly for someone who would otherwise be interested in these services for using locally-sourced organic produce - is that it is so environmentally unfriendly. I've tried two of these services in the last week; they come in a big thermally-insulated box with plastic ice packs, and individually-wrapped plastic bags for each ingredient. One meal kit generates more trash than we would otherwise produce in a week, and most of it's in non-recyclable plastic or styrofoam that we've spent a generation getting rid of.
I always replace obscure items in recipes with more common ones I have at home. For example instead of apple cider vinegar just use the plain vinegar you likely already have and use for other things. Usually works just fine and also cuts down on the planing significantly.
There are some more tricks. The best one is to go for relatively simple recipes. Avoid the "Indian housewife" style recipes who are designed for people who have nothing else to do.
Avoid the recipes from the "foot p0rn" industry with professional chefs, which are usually also too complicated and with too exotic ingredients. I
I often start with the ingredients and then select a recipe based on that (I call that "google cooking"). Basically you google something you already have in your fridge + recipe, and then replace anything too exotic with other things that you also have or just leave them out. May not end up exactly the same as originally intended, but typically works just fine.
Sure, but this is mostly for experienced cooks who know what alternatives are feasible for a given ingredient. For everyone else, ending up with something that tastes like crap and having to order pizza is too big of a risk.
It's also about building expertise. When I learn a new recipe, I follow it as closely as possible until I can cook it without looking up the instructions. Only at that point do I feel comfortable with deviating and experimenting: because I know what the actual thing is supposed to taste like, I can try alternatives and judge whether they work well.
I cook a reasonable amount and have a cupboard full of various vinegars, oils, etc but for someone who doesn't cook often, the mixed sachets could work well to cut down wastage.
Anyway, I wouldn't have a problem chewing through a supply of bread, mustard, meat (pick your favorite), and cheese (ditto).
This hobby is just plain fun, but is also has the benefit of saving money and really appreciating and showing that appreciation to a skilled chef.
My mother is a fantastic cook, but she worked full time and in the rush to get dinner on the table by 7, she often relied on semi-prepared foods, like pre-marinated meats or curry mixes. From where I sat, cooking seemed like a drag, something that took time and effort in the midst of an already overcrowded schedule.
It also notes that these "meal-kit" companies started in Europe and were highly popular there.
If I had to guess, I'd say the reason Americans think cooking is hard is because they leave home at 7am so they can be at work by 9am. Then work until 5pm, and make it home by 7pm. And cooking, while not hard, does take time. Not much time in that schedule.
They also hold this weird notion that you can't have dinner at 9pm, which is when I usually have it at.
But really what matters most is that they just don't value it as much.
I think, as you and justwannasing already mentioned, part of the problem is really a lack of time. We went from spending a large part of our time sourcing food (hunting), to growing it (agriculture), then dramatically reduced this when we moved to mass produced and widely available food in supermarkets.
What's this led to? More free time to...work. But if work becomes more decentralized and people work from home then it could lead to more of us cooking.
That said, it's crazy expensive to eat out all the time. We probably cut our yearly budget by a healthy $2500 just by cutting down on takeout. And there is some true joy that comes from knowing that you are the reason your wife and child have smiles on their faces at the dinner table. Even if you did it with a meal kit rather than shopping for ingredients yourself, who am I to pooh pooh that.
That's why on non-special days I have a limited set of things that I will cook. Or a limited set of combinations, if you will. I don't come home thinking "Oh what do I have, what can I make with this, let's find a recipe". I look at the fridge and it's like "Ah, I have ingredients for X, I'll make X". Then on another day it's "Ah yes, today it's going to be Y" and I just cook the same things all the time.
Helps with a lot of things. I always know what groceries to buy, I know how much nutrients my meals will have in advance, I know which of my staple meals fits a particular day's type of activities etc. Limiting your choices makes life a lot easier.
Think like a line cook, not a chef. Leave the chef stuff for weekends and special occasions.
By this I mean, a home cooked meal should be meat and potatoes and it shouldn't be expected to be boeuf bourguignon. That you get at a restaurant.
Expectations are also a problem. People think gourmet cooking is just too much but, if you take the time to actually read recipes, you'll find that it's not hard at all. There may be technique involve, and there may be ingredients you don't normally keep, but if you love that previously mentioned boeuf, you'll enjoy making it every week, so those ingredients won't go to waste.
Gonna provide a contrarian view since people seem to be surprised at eating out: some times you just want to outsource the thinking and execution of food to others while you focus on winding down, hanging out with friends, connecting, or what not.
Let's use the example of an SF techie: makes around 100k ($50/hr-ish, or let's say $40 take-home pay). Would you rather work 1hr and explore good foodie options around the City or cook for an hour ($40 for 3 meals)? And what if you enjoyed your work?
Now let's use 50k income, the value prop becomes a little more compelling for cooking, and the lower that income goes the more interesting cooking becomes. But food not just a necessity but a recurring entertainment expense...
PS -- I love cooking for fun, but I only want to cook when I'm inspired and when I can share with friends. Sous viding some steak or salmon, 36-hour prep some pork belly, or making pasta noodles and spicy meatballs from raw ingredients. Eating alone... I'll just grab a to-go box, thanks.
This is marketing bullshit at its finest. Not only is our product convenient, no, it's essential to the health and well-being of your children!
It's easy to eat healthy if you have $140 per week for four dinners (Blue Apron) prices. We order fresh fish delivered to our house once or twice a week, along with seasonal vegetables. Oily fish like salmon or steelhead trout can be cooked easily with just a few minutes under the broiler, and while the oven is hot you can bake some root veggies or green beans. If you're smart and use foil to protect the baking sheets, it's a 5-minute prep/cleanup operation. If you've got 10-15 minutes, marinating some chicken thighs overnight then grilling is tasty and healthy.
I'll plug the vendor since I think it's a much better deal than meal services: https://www.relayfoods.com.
Plated results in way too much waste for me as well as sometimes sending me ingredients/recipes that I don't like/want which is why I've gone back to just buying all of my ingredients directly (when I can find them).
Soups and stews, lasagne, salads, even meat dishes can be prepared ahead of time and enjoyed over the course of days (or if you use a freezer) a week or two.
Someone "married" and especially if children are involved, would do well to learn basics and do food prep and rudiments of cooking. Work is not everything.
For me, the kitchen is zen. I'm probably the other extreme, but my coding breaks when I need to just relax and let go, I cook. That said, making dishes for my wife and I during the week don't take that much time (in the aggregate).
Each meal is, as you say, zen to prepare. I make it perfect every time because I've made the same few meals dozens of times+. All are made with food from the organic market for << 10 per meal. Bonus: there's excellent food in SF, and if you eat at home 4 days per week the others don't hurt the budget so bad.
As someone who subscribed to Blue Apron for a few months last year, the value to me was less about convenience and more about entertainment and education. For the cost of a movie ticket you get a shared experience cooking with someone else, you learn a new cooking technique, maybe discover a new recipe and get a darn tasty meal at the end. That's a pretty good deal.
These services don't replace grocery shopping, they're a fun way to spend time with people. If they can convince Americans that cooking can be fun, that's an extra bonus.