I Hate Food
Where is my total nutrition pill?
Trigger warning: This is a whiny, first-world, rich white people’s problems article. Read it at your peril.
I am an anti-foodie. Food is just a bother to me. Weren’t they supposed to have invented a meal-in-a-pill by now? A total nutrition pill? I would be first in line for it.
Maybe I hate food because my mother was not a good cook. But she did get dinner on the table for a family of six, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. I give her full credit for that. I guess she was just not a foodie either.
Oh, I like a good meal now and then, and doubly so if it is cooked by someone else. Like a nice restaurant, for example. It’s just that food is not high on the priority list of what is important to me.
It irks me that I need to eat three times a day, whether I want to or not. Yeah, yeah, some people live on one or two meals a day (or, sadly, even less than that), by choice or otherwise. My body demands three meals.
Time eating, time preparing food, time shopping for food, time planning menus, that is time I’d just rather spend on something else, most of the time. Even if that something else is just watching Netflix.
Ugh, I hate menu planning. I’m a reductionist. I reduce things down to their bare bones. A dinner is one of: beef, chicken, pork, seafood, or vegetarian. Probably add a veggie and a starch. Yeah, there are different ways to prepare the things from the list, but it still comes down to those basics. So why bother varying it? I lived for two years on nothing but baked chicken breast and salad with zucchini. (I had some variety: Sometimes I omitted the zucchini.)
Funny thing is, once I set aside the time for cooking, I really don’t mind doing it. It feels productive and creative, even if it is not the thing I would prefer to be doing at the moment. And I don’t mind eating the meal, once I have it in front of me and I’ve made the time for eating it. (Besides, I can watch Netflix while I eat it.) Again, it’s just not high on my priority list.
They haven’t invented that meal-in-a-pill yet, but they have invented the meal-in-a-bottle. Namely, Soylent. (“We hacked food so you don’t even have to think about it.”) I affectionately call it Slime. It’s easy to grab when I’m hungry. It doesn’t steal much of my time because I can multitask, drinking it with other activity such as coding or watching Netflix. I generally don’t replace meals with it, except sometimes breakfast, but it is my go-to between-meals snack. I drink only the chocolate, because, reductionist.
Modern technology has, however, invented the next best thing to the meal-in-a-pill, and that is the meal-in-a-box. Or, more properly, meal kits. Blue Apron, Every Plate, and the like. I’ve been through a bunch of them.
I’m using Home Chef just now. Every Tuesday, they deliver a box to my doorstep containing all of the recipes and fresh ingredients for four dinners. That totally takes care of my most loathed steps in the food process: meal planning and shopping. Cooking the meals and eating them, I don’t mind so much.
The meals do not turn out as good as Grannies’ home cooking, but they are pretty good. (Here I’m assuming that my grandmothers cooked better than my mother, but I never really knew them.) It is healthy, fresh food rather than some processed monstrosity, and it has a fair amount of variety.
When I get tired of the recipes in one service, or if their quality starts to slip, or if they go out of business (as one service I was on did), I simply switch to another.
However, I’m afraid the meal kit solution may be short lived. I think all of those services are hemorrhaging venture capital money. I doubt whether they will be a thing for long.
My diet is: Shredded Wheat for breakfast, Soylent for a snack, last night’s meal-in-a-box leftovers for lunch, and a meal-in-a-box for dinner. On Friday night we get take-out, normally Chinese or Japanese, or from the local Taqueria, and a little bit of McDonalds (which is too much McDonalds). The remaining two nights, Misha cooks or makes (e.g. sandwiches) something, usually something simple. She does have a few great recipes that she cooks when she gets the itch: a nice lamb stew, a shrimp-rice-zucchini thing that I love, and Japanese soba noodles for example.
I have recently begun to realize that being an anti-foodie is pretty much being anti-human and anti-nature. Shame on me. What can I say? This is the culture I grew up in. This is my way.
— Lannie Rose, August 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used bit for research and grammar checking
