Time for me is by far the limiting factor. Short of a personal chef (too expensive) all the quick options are unhealthy.
Edit:
Loads of people suggesting cooking - I know how to cook, I just don’t have the time or energy. It’s not just preparation time but also the planning aspect.
Meal prep delivery services suggestions are interesting. I have tried a few and found them expensive and low quality. Open to trying more though.
Sunday meal prep: I did this as a student but I love food and I love deciding what to eat on the day. Going back to that would remove some of the joy from life.
I think what I really want is a work canteen, but open to the public. The economies of scale could make this price competitive and there’s less delivery overhead than the meal prep subscriptions. I like the social aspect too. I would definitely pay a subscription to a canteen.
Adam Smith warned of extreme division of labor making for humans dumber than the dumbest animal (paraphrasing).
Sticking with one career forever is an outdated story; king says someone is farmer, that’s just how it is! It would be costly to upend history, they say.
Having worked in a kitchen, built houses from foundation up, helped deliver livestock, started in tech designing power switching equipment, coding professional now since 2006; having built muscle memory for numerous “professions” comes along with living in “flow state.” I can manage structured tasks across contexts without planning, without wincing at the difficulty or time being a factor; I can make way better than packaged or fast food faster than it can be picked up or delivered.
Taking time to boot strap the habit pays off in time savings down the road.
This is the real reason people have unhealthy habits, especially with food: it takes a lot of time to source, prepare, serve and clean up after a healthy home-meal made from scratch and made with care. For better or worse, past social norms dedicated an individual (usually the mother) to stay home and tend to these tasks, but now most households have the entire family working to make ends meet and in turn externalize food production (and many other "homestead-y" operations) to companies, which are not motivated by our well-being.
> especially with food: it takes a lot of time to source, prepare, serve and clean up
Absolutely! You can't just buy a slab of chicken breast, it needs to be trimmed and put away until ready to be used. Hardest of all: planning, what to do with it, what else goes with it. Pointless to buy broccoli and kale if you don't know what makes it tastes good, and when the inspiration strikes you, there's an ugly head of broccoli you need to cut up, and a bunch of unwashed kale you need to trim. 80% of cooking is peeling, cutting, dicing, shredding, skimming, straining, pounding, deboning, deveining, and waiting. All unglamorous, time-consuming, boring, manual labor. You need to speed this up to gain efficiency. Technical and planning skills gets you probably 50% efficiency. Cooking food is labor intensive and it appears to me all attempts to commercially scale is failing.
I disagree at large, but give exception to at least the US due to how cities are built.
I am not a chef by any means or even a cook, but I learned how to cook in University due to being unbelievably poor and got tired of "low budget fast meals". Quotes because I don't think that the meals that fall into this category are at all better than their "proper" counter parts.
Prepping a quick pasta with béchamel does not take long at all, and with a common pot and pan from Ikea or even Target or Walmart and a fork and knife, you have all you need. Prepping a quick pizza by hand, some general Wok style cuisine, etc, it's all quite fast once you learn a few things about how to prepare food.
I'm sure it's cliche, but watching Good Eats with Alton Brown a few times helped me understand why certain combinations work and gave me the confidence to understand how to make different things match. In particular, watching his episodes on knife skills helped me understand how to speed up a lot of prepping (an unabashed advertisement for Shun from Alton, but let's ignore that part) [0]
When I was still in the US, long and laborious kitchen exercises were glorified; the longer and more putzy the recipe, the more most people I know fawned over the idea of the meal, but I'm here to tell you that taking the time just to understand the basics of cooking, you don't need the blogpost 2 hour narrative story for cooking, it's very basic chemistry at its best. Some meals have unavoidable time and complications, and that's fine, but you can make very tasty, very healthy meals quite fast while listening to your favorite show or some music or even just enjoying the silence of the kitchen and the sound of the cooking.
> You can't just buy a slab of chicken breast, it needs to be trimmed and put away until ready to be used. Hardest of all: planning, what to do with it, what else goes with it.
Absolutely not true IMO, but I get where you might have this if you don't have a more European style city to live in. I do not pretend to guess where you are from, but usually I heard and hear this from people I know still in the US, and it's distinctly because of how US cities are built. In Europe and in quite a few Asian countries, proper grocers are a dime a dozen and every couple hundred meters. I stock the basics (flour, salt, spices, other grains, and some slow-perishing sauces like tomato paste) and buy perishables on the way home since there's a fully stocked market no bigger than a chinese takeout shop at the base of my apartment or < 200 meters from it.
The meat and produce I get are used immediately or over the next day for another meal, and it's very nice. Half of my lunch break for work is cooking, the second half eating a freshly cooked meal.
I really feel that there is a bit of a cult around cooking that wants to overcomplicate the process because complex == classy, and I need to stress that when you're first starting, it is going to be slower because you haven't developed your technique. It's the same reason you'll probably fall a lot when first learning to ice skate or why you'll sound like a drunk playing a guitar when you first learn. The good news is that even if the end result of your first few meals is ugly, likely it still tastes pretty good.
The time is very relative -- I'm monitoring a global market so I have 10+ hour days almost every day depending on how bad certain situations get, but I made cooking part of my skillset because I didn't want to be indebted always to food delivery. It absolutely is possible even for a family without a dedicated cook, and I think the first step most people need is admitting that it's not the time sink they make it out to be. Once you get a few basics, you are some sort of wizard to most people.
Having the right set of tools and prep space really is key. A good chefs knife, a cast iron pan, a fry pan, a pot, and cutting board is all you need. Learning good knife skills and having a good chef knife drastically speeds up prep time by 2-3x.
If anyone here is new to cooking and wanting to start on a budget, you can easily get away with a cheap knife, cheap set of diamond stones, a cutting board, and an enameled dutch oven. $60-$100 after shipping and tax, and you'll be able to cook basically everything. The knife being sharp is much more important than it being high quality (being sharp is also not essential, but it makes a big difference).
If you want to splurge, I also like a few bamboo spoons.
The $60-$100 counted the pot and cutting board. Totally agree that fibrox or something is plenty fine enough.
What's the argument for the pull-through sharpener? A decent enough set of stones is tiny, costs $15 after shipping, and isn't that hard to use. Are we just making sharpening as easy as possible so they don't give up?
Yes. I find the enthusiasm for wet stone sharpening to be overblown for beginners. It's so far down the list of things that will matter when cooking vs using an inexpensive knife and pull through. If you like the process that's fine, I just don't like it being turned around into a "you're doing it wrong if you use a pull through" expectation, when the root problem is 99% getting people to sharpen period.
I'm in a suburb of a large metropolitan area in the US. The grocery store is abundant, but 20 minutes away, I make one main trip to the store weekly, and a couple of side trips to other stores, eg Mexican/Asian groceries. We have different POV because of our geographic differences, I think. I do not think complicated recipes are good in and of themselves.
Pasta + bechamel is easy, you can't do this 5 nights a week. I'm moving away from carbohydrate-rich main dish, more to grains and pulses. A slow-cooked shoulder of pork, like a cassoulet, is easy, yet still takes time to roast, then the meat separated from the connective tissues, the fat, then a stock reduction, then the beans. I offer it as an example of cheap, easy, tasty, and time and labor intensive dish. You need some greens to serve with it, and you can't prep greens 5 days ahead. I also don't want to eat this 10 meals in a row.
Edited to add: I find Gordon Ramsey YouTube videos quite instructive, his menu is simple and tasty. I got a lot of mileage out of his techniques.
Get a slow cooker. This allows you to arbitrage earlier time to do prep (before work, or during a break if WFH), set it up and forget about it for a few hours. As a bonus, it tends to taste good even if you don't pre sear or saute the ingredients.
+1 for the slow cooker. You can buy a smaller 2 liter one if you are concerned about space. There's a lot of benefits:
* Prepare huge amounts of meat (in the smallest one you can prepare up to a kg of meat).
* Very simple meal prep. Plop some meat, throw some salt in, add some sauce (soy sauce, spicy or whatever you prefer), add some liquid (water usually) and turn it on. 5 minutes or less.
* It never boils, so the water level never rises, avoiding spills (or having to even worry about it). So you can leave it overnight for the 8+ hour cooking process.
* You can transform cheap, tough cuts of meat (like Gulash soup meat) into fantastic tasting dishes.
One of the best things about a slow cooker is that the meat softens up, it uniformly absorbs all seasoning, and it makes the meat release its best fatty flavour.
> I didn't want to be indebted always to food delivery
I'd also suggest to actually calculate how much food delivery costs. I live in a relatively cheap European country, but even here getting two good meals delivered (i.e. not pizza or McD's) is close to 25€. Over a month that adds up to a not insignificant amount of my take home pay. Plus I find cooking is a really good way to forget about work and de-stress.
Some of the sister comments say you need a Dutch oven, knife sharpener, etc. This is honestly nonsense (see other comment threads about American culture over complicating recipes). The main tools I use are a knife and non-stick pan I got from a supermarket a few years ago (probably 15€ each) and they are perfectly fine. You don't need anything fancy to get started.
Frozen veggies sound like a good option for you. You can stock a wide variety, and the prep work is already done. They cook from frozen just fine. Steaming in a microwave with a closed bowl is particularly fast. Combine that with a protein you can pan fry, and you've got a decent meal in 10 minutes flat.
I also batch cook using sous vide. So I'll buy a bulk package of protein, then portion it into bags with various marinades or sauce bases. These don't have to be intricate or high effort, eg, I'll sometimes do a chicken tinga for tacos that's nothing more complex than a chicken thigh and a can of El Pato. I do a lot of variations of Thai curry that are just a thigh, some premade paste, and coconut cream, and maybe some aromatics if I feel fancy.
Anyhow, these all get batch cooked in the sous vide. It takes me around 10 minutes to process 10 lbs of chicken or such into 20 portions, usually 4 or so variations. Then into the freezer they go where they last indefinitely. I generally do about 2 to 3 batches this way per month. At any given time I have around 3 to 4 weeks of food ready to go in the freezer, with a wide variety of options, and all reflecting the nutritional balance I want.
So then how I use this on a day to day basis. Say I feel one of the Mussamum curries I made a couple months back. Even though it's not thawed I can plop it back in the sous vide to handle that. I load up the rice cooker at the same time. This takes all of 30 seconds, then I just ignore stuff for about 30 minutes. When ready I come back, pull the bag, and toss the contents into a skillet along with whatever selection of frozen veg I feel like. Adjust seasoning and then just simmer until the veg are where you want, about 5 minutes. Plate up with the rice.
So again, just because of how I've organized things, I've got a whole menu in that freezer that takes less than 15 minutes active time to get on a plate.
I wouldn't underestimate just how fast and breezy things can get once you figure out the patterns that work for you. And for me now this stuff is on auto pilot, so the active time involved doesn't feel like any particular effort. Honestly it reduces my stress levels quite a bit knowing I've got plenty of good food ready to go for weeks if I need to be a hermit for whatever reason. This whole approach particularly helped during the worst of COVID.
I saw in one of your other comments you mentioned Gordon Ramsey videos. He's very savvy as far as recipe concepts and knowing what will appeal. However a lot of his specific cooking advice is off the mark, or not particularly helpful for someone cooking at home vs in a classic french brigade kitchen.
I'd suggest checking out J Kenji Lopez-Alt's youtube channel. He's got a bunch of low key videos where he cooks various things, often using a POV camera. All his advice is grounded in modern food science vs some of the older folklore, and he has a very practical and unfussy mindset overall.
Here me out: this sounds like an excuse. If you really want to solve it you could. I did.
I use a wok to cook and it's faster than going to McDonalds. It's slower than a frozen meal but not by much. I don't aim for perfection, rather, most of my meals I try and make healthy. I still love bacon.
In less than 10 minutes you can chop celery, broccoli, tofu, chicken, etc. If it takes longer then solve that problem: better knife, cutting board always handy? Chop faster, fingertips aren't that important.
Turn the wok up to 10,000 degrees and put a little avocado oil in there, throw it all in and stir. Put some low sodium soy sauce and monkfruit sweetener (if you want no sugar, otherwise brown sugar) and a little cornstarch+water too thicken. Ginger, whatever.
Anyway, you can make tons of variants of this dish. Curry, yakisoba, subgum chow mein. Almost all will be 90% vegetables. Do some rice or noodles with them.
Then solve salads. They are fast, easy, and can be delicious if you chop stuff up small and put a lot of variety. Keep trying different things. Watch YouTube videos about it. If you are thinking "I don't like salads" shut up. That's another excuse, there are an infinite number of ways to combine and prepare veggies.
Explore and solve the problem just like a crappy little software app that needs to be built. You just have to want it and be willing to learn.
We lived for a couple weeks in Nicaragua and we hired the sister of the guy who maintained the property to cook for us (an optional service we were quick to agree to). On the first day she cooked a big batch of black beans in a pot. She left the pot on the stove, and would briefly bring to a boil each morning and night, which eliminated the need for refrigeration. With each successive day she’d throw in a few things like green peppers, garlic, etc, and the beans also gradually broke down so the flavour just got better and better. So easy, so nutritious, super convenient…we in the developed world have forgotten so many techniques like this, to our detriment.
very much so. i used to cook a couple times a week. big expensive protein. fancy sauces, a bottle of wine, and a nice salad.
strangely, my gall bladder needed to be removed.
while I was waiting for the surgery - it was brown rice and vegetables and maybe a little chicken. now its just brown rice (takes 30 minutes on an induction plate, edible for 48 hours), kimchi, and a little bit of this and that (tinned fish, fried egg, chicken)
I haven't gotten bored of it after 2 years. takes me about 30 minutes a week for cooking and cleaning up. i'm much more fit and I just never have to worry about food anymore.
in the US we're in some kind of highly inconvenient, expensive, and unhealthy minimum. fortunately it wont take much to bump us out into someplace more sane.
I think I am misunderstanding something, how did you cut your cooking/cleaning up time down to 4 minutes a day? And, are you eating the same food every day now?
sorry, I just eat a little bit of something and cook rice once every 2 days. yes, I eat largely the same food every day. I assumed that would drive me insane, but I just don't mind it. started squeezing half an avocado into every bowl, and that has been a big upgrade.
Interesting, can you provide a source? I suspect you may be referring to calorie restricted and not nutrient deficient diets. The former may lead to a longer lifespan and a better health but the latter will lead to health issues or at least degrade your quality of life.
Do you mean that it was always on ? To prevent bacteria you need to keep it above 65c or so to prevent bacteria. Heating it up once a day does kill bacteria but does not remove the toxic byproducts of bacteria which is what actually makes you sick.
No, they bring it up to temperature once per day. This is common practice around the world and quite safe.
Every time they heat the pot, it sterilizes it. It takes bacteria a significant time to recolonize a sterile pot, and it starts from a sterile state. As long as you re-sterilize (re-heat) it regularly, the bacteria won't have to time to colonize it in a meaningful way.
The downsides of this practice are not safety but the texture of the food, since repeated heating over many days tends to break it down into mush. On the other hand, it is well-known to improve the flavor of some dishes.
If you're cooking well, almost everything is clean by the time you put food on a plate. If you immediately put leftovers away, the cleaning can be 100% done by the time you start eating
It's best to let hot foods cool a little bit before moving them to the refrigerator. They can be so hot that they'll warm up surrounding items, or in the freezer, you might end up actually thawing anything adjacent.
That really only matters if you’re putting quite a bit of food in the fridge/freezer. Think a large pot of stew. It’s more guidance for restaurants than people at home.
Most cooking shows or recipes make things too fancy. You can make many recipes with a pan, a spatula, a knife and cutting board. Prep, cook and clean in 10 minutes. Burgers, pasta with homemade sauce, chicken salad.
I can't even walk into mcdonalds and walk out with food that quick.
I agree. The complaint I don't have time seems like a very first world, and honestly very American, problem to have. There is batch prep, online food delivery, and simple one pot meals that can be either done in a slow cooker, or under 20 minutes.
Your suggestions sound nice if you're a foodie. But as someone with zero interest in cooking it's just horrible having to think about it in the evening.
I get it. One way you can speed things up is to have hot water on tap (either installed, or a cheap, separate hot water appliance) and then use it for dried items like miso soup packets or oatmeal. Then you can add items to it, like pre-chopped vegetables or fruit.
The time it takes to prepare the chopped veggies and fruit in advance is one thing, but think about the amount of time you are now saving for soups and breakfast items.
This is how I think about things like meal plan tacos and burritos. I spend twenty minutes preparing all the items in containers, pack them in the fridge, and then I have fresh veggie tacos and burritos for four days. All I do is microwave the tortillas.
The salsa and the beans will go bad before anything else, so I make sure to use those up in higher quantities than the other ingredients.
I also like to cook a huge pot of basmati rice, Spanish rice, and rice pilaf in advance, so I can make all sorts of dishes for about three days just by adding the other items listed above. When you get in the habit of this, you’re only really cooking for one hour every four days using the same pre-made ingredients. It’s a huge time saver, so it doesn’t feel like cooking at all.
'All' is a bit of a stretch. I have a relatively healthy diet, and food preparation time is a non-issue. If you're fine with simple dishes (like chopping up vegetables in a simple salad and eating them raw), it doesn't take more than 20 minutes per day total. Growing up poor in the middle of nowhere helps here.
If you have the disposable income, you can dispose of it as you please of course. But still, there are ways to get good food prepared quickly as well. All you need is a pantry stocked with the essentials and some basic knowledge.
Mostly the issue isn't necessarily time but giving into your cravings. Junk food is designed for that. People buy junk food because they like eating it and crave it. Even if the experience isn't great, the craving still drives them to eat it. Ever felt disappointed after eating at a burger chain? That's what happened. You craved something and the marketing triggered you enough to buy a burger or whatever. In the end the food is greasy, salty, not really hot, and doesn't have a whole lot of flavor. And you munch it down and forget about it.
And particularly when people have worked a long day and just want to stuff food into their mouths. For me, going to a supermarket at the end of a working day generally leads to really bad decision making. And I actually know how to cook some food.
A good way to get into cooking is to make your own junk food but do it better. This is super easy because most junk food is absolutely terrible. If you like burgers, get some meat and make some of your own. It's hard to do worse than good old McDonald's. That stuff is just really nasty. Use that as a benchmark and strive to do better. You can't fail.
Burgers are a great example because this is historically how people made the most of their cheap and off cuts of meat. So, again, great if you are on a budget.
I enjoy cooking but it's pretty silly to suggest everyone do it.
Beyond the time commitment there's also equipment and space concerns and also some people just aren't good at it.
it's not silly; you can't take ownership of your own health without having at least basic cooking skills.
the "time commitment" is just another BS excuse. there are plenty of recipes that can be prepped, cooked, and served in the time it takes to order and pickup takeout. there are tons of youtube videos on this exact topic. search "but faster".
the equipment and space concerns I'll give you. there are some people who literally don't own a functioning heat source. that's a non-starter.
but if, like most americans, you do have a functioning oven/stove, you can made a wide range of tasty and healthy meals by adding just a couple cheap items to your collection. to get started, you just need a knife, cutting surface, and a sheetpan. cut things up, add a light drizzle of oil, and roast them in the oven. takes a couple minutes of prep followed by 20-30 minutes of doing something else while it cooks. bonus: add a meat thermometer to safely cook meats. or alternatively, try all the same combinations of meats, starches, and vegetables in a skillet if you want to put in a little more active time to get a finished meal faster.
Cooking can take a lot of time, but there are some tricks to make it more efficient.
1) Buy a large freezer. Then you can cook larger amounts, divide them into small boxes, and freeze them. That means you can have a cooked meal every day, without having to cook every day, or having to eat the same meal two days in a row.
A large freezer also allows you to buy ingredients when they are cheap, without having to consume them immediately. Peel them, cut them, freeze them. Later, take them out of the freezer and put them into boling water.
2) Be selective about the recipes. Some of them require 2 hours of work. Some of them only require 30 minutes, and 20 minutes of that is literally waiting. You can decide to only do the latter. And the waiting time can be spent doing something else.
3) While you cook, you can listen to a podcast or an audio book. Download some good stuff to your smartphone, or buy a wireless headset. Cooking for 2 hours can be fun, if you simultaneously listen to Joe Rogan.
An alternative is having someone to talk to. This may depend on how your house is organized. Sometimes the kitchen is at the opposite side from the living room; sometimes the two are connected. In the latter case, you can chat with someone while cooking.
>I think what I really want is a work canteen, but open to the public
I think what I want is an ordinary, a set meal at a local tavern "ordained" at a time and price. I think restaurants evolved to serve a variety of dishes, where the ordinary (sometimes a bed and board place) served only one meal, but different meals on different days. I'd buy a subscription to a canteen style Bouchon, one meal a day, 30 different meals in a month, community table, water or BYOB.
By far the aspect of college life (USA) that I miss the most is this. The communal meal tables and optional community canteen subscription. I wish these kind of establishments were common across the USA.
Here in Spain this is a bit of a thing. You can get a three course meal for a fixed price of around 12 euro. Usually about 3-4 choices for each course that change each day. Pretty much every restaurant does this.
Problem is it's only for lunch time and eating the big meal of the day at lunch doesn't work for me :( I end up being hungry at night and having 2 big meals. Whereas a small lunch doesn't bother me.
> I think what I really want is a work canteen, but open to the public. The economies of scale could make this price competitive and there’s less delivery overhead than the meal prep subscriptions. I like the social aspect too. I would definitely pay a subscription to a canteen.
This would be amazing yes. I don't know why it's not a thing.
It's normal not to do your own books. To fix your own heater. To milk your own cow. In fact I don't even do my own laundry, because there's a shop around the corner that washes, dries and folds a whole bag for 10 bucks. Nobody frowns at that. But not wanting to cook is viewed as really weird.
I just really hate cooking and when I do I do it irritated and in a hurry so it turns out crap.
I have been doing meal prep sunday for a few years, I found several recipes that keep well in the freezer and heat up pretty well.
Also modern cooking styles like Air Fryers, and Water Bath (sous vide) can also help some with the timing. As these are often ways to cook with out having to actively monitor the cooking like you would using pans and skillets
On the weekend I will prep most of my meals even if I do not cook them right then, then through out the week I drop something in the sous vide, air fyer or if it already cooked the micro.
I’m lazy and try to minimize food preparation time, and I don’t find it difficult. I don’t know how you define healthy, but I often just fry some steak or piece of fish in the pan with a side of frozen ready-made pre-seasoned vegetables in the microwave. It takes like ten minutes. Or a curry using a good curry paste with coconut milk and vegetables and/or meat, optionally some rice from the rice cooker, doesn’t take more than 20 minutes actual preparation time.
(I've subscribed to Factor75 and am generally pleased with them)
Yes, the food seems a bit pricy... until I head out and eat at a restaurant. Its certainly more costly than raw ingredients and making it yourself - but in terms of "the cost vs eating out" it is rather competitive.
I'm also become a fan of Tovala ( https://www.tovala.com ). Their thing is that its a "smart toaster oven" which scans a barcode or QR code and can do a complex set of instructions at programmed times. The oven is substantially discounted, the menu is competitive with other prepared meals but its cooked rather than microwaved which provides a different set of food options. The preparation is "cut bag into aluminum tin" and "add sauce or seasoning". You then scan the QR code on the recipe and it does its thing for 15 to 20 minutes.
The primary advantage for me with both Factor and Tovala is that they have single serving sizes. Blue Apron appears to have added microwave meals to its menu... but its not quite the range of Factor and its non-microwave is still 2 or 4 with more meal prep than Tovala.
> I'm also become a fan of Tovala ( https://www.tovala.com ). Their thing is that its a "smart toaster oven" which scans a barcode or QR code and can do a complex set of instructions at programmed times.
Looks interesting, but for some unfathomable reason it requires WiFi access. So I assume it never disconnects and builds a giant database of everything you've ever cooked.
> So I assume it never disconnects and builds a giant database of everything you've ever cooked.
Possibly - and in today's world I'd even go with "probably." The "scan a UPC and get the 'how to cook'" needs some external access. I haven't decoded the QR code to determine if the recipe instructions is encoded in there, or if that's a lookup - I suspect its encoded rather than a lookup (and the QR code based meals appear to work without wifi).
The database, however, would only be useful/of the UPCs and raw ingredient based that you scan rather than the meal plan since with a meal subscription service, they've already got that data. And as a regular toaster oven, doing "bake 375°" isn't leaking any data about what you are eating.
I was huge fan of Factor but at least at the time (before the pandemic) their packaging was iffy and I'd often get a delivery where more than half of the meal trays where busted. I did Trifecta for a bit after, they've got robust packaging but the food wasn't nearly as good as Factor's.
Some (most) of this, I believe, is the issue of the delivery company.
As an anecdote, a few weeks ago, it was unseasonably warm (88°F at 8pm when I contacted Factor support) because the package hadn't been delivered yet. When it was delivered the next day (hadn't dropped below 80°F), and I opened it, the cold packs were completely depleted and I contacted support again and I was fully reimbursed for the meal. I haven't been disappointed by Factor, though I have been disappointed by the delivery company.
I have found an air fryer is good to prepare meat that's juicy and doesn't take much work/skill to get it right beyond learning temperature & timing (and a bit about seasoning). Wish I had more freezer space/room for a chest freezer. I really feel you on the time/energy thing, though. It's just too damn easy to click an app and check out instead of planning a meal.
The canteens you mention already exist... in Brazil. It's called almoço por kilo (lunch by the kilogram). It's essentially a buffet where they weigh your plate. Almost everyone seems to eat lunch at a place like that.
I wish they were more common in the USA. I guess there are some things that are close, but it's just not common.
Meal Prep and Cooking can be a huge time sink, but it doesn't need to be. At the most basic level a meal kit service will save you substantial time.
Or just get a list of recipes you like and stick to them. Sure less meal diversity, but you can optimize your meals. For me it's generic salad (Lettuce, Tomato, Cucumber, Dressing, Cheese, Seeds), Rice Dish (Chicken, Beef, etc + Frozen Veggies), Smoothies w/Frozen Veggie and Fruit, ..etc.
Edit:
Loads of people suggesting cooking - I know how to cook, I just don’t have the time or energy. It’s not just preparation time but also the planning aspect.
Meal prep delivery services suggestions are interesting. I have tried a few and found them expensive and low quality. Open to trying more though.
Sunday meal prep: I did this as a student but I love food and I love deciding what to eat on the day. Going back to that would remove some of the joy from life.
I think what I really want is a work canteen, but open to the public. The economies of scale could make this price competitive and there’s less delivery overhead than the meal prep subscriptions. I like the social aspect too. I would definitely pay a subscription to a canteen.
I think this is how Roman cities operated.