You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill. “It’s not just the cooking that wears me down, but the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the soon-to-be-rotting produce sitting in my fridge.” Everything after the “but” is my daily nemesis.
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Honestly, this may be the area of my life where AI has made the biggest daily difference. I'm a trained chef but most nights I just tell it what ingredients I've got around and ask it to suggest options. Dramatically reduces the burden of meal-planning and the annoyance of mismatched leftovers.
I talked a little bit about this on local NPR a few months back.
https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2024/11/18/artificial-intelligence-everyday
I have an app where I can put the ingredients in and search my saved recipes (probably about 500 recipes at this point). And I can make a good stir fry quickly. I still chuckled while reading this article this morning. I think what's missed is a certain elemental thing: We have to eat. It kind of makes sense that we have to think about it a lot. Somehow we have to eat, as we are animals. If it weren't a core part of our lives, something would be wrong.
Related to the AI comment above, my friend Tom recently sent me this Instagram reel that was probably a TikTok... it kinda stuck with me: Using UI for meal planning
This is totally backwards. We’re humans. We cook. We evolved our tiny digestive system and our calorie-consuming brains because our ancestors learned to cook. If we don’t have time to gather food, plan our meals, and cook, then we don’t have time to be human.
Which is to say, modern expectations don’t leave time for normal human existence.
Agree 100%. Time spent eating meals is also supposed to be time to relax and connect with our families/communities. This time is being stolen from us.
Agree 100%, but until we figure out how to blow up the current system, people still need to eat (and parents still need to feed their kids). I don't love the idea of using AI for meal planning, but any other tips, hacks, or tools that make this stuff easier is very welcome.
Thank you. Came here to say this. What if *dinner* isn't the treadmill?
@Neil - my approach is to: keep a physical binder of simple, family approved recipes and rotate through them for meal planning; use a crockpot whenever possible and; join/support unions :)
I enjoy cooking but don't particularly like complex, time consuming recipes. There's a lot of teriyaki pork with misc. fillers (egg, peas, etc.) in brown rice, or burritos, or big batches of chili with a week of leftovers, etc. Various tacos with shrimp, or carnitas, or barbacoa, often with pico de gallo and rice or beans. Simple food with complex flavors, made quickly or without much effort.
There is no greater joy in my life sometimes when I realize my family was able to eat all the produce before it goes bad. Or we ate all the deli meat. I still daydream of a pill that solves my hunger on days where I don't feel like preparing a meal, but coming to terms that it's fine to eat frozen fish and frozen vegetables with instant potatoes is sometimes close enough to a pill. The next pain point is that the treadmill of dinner just leads to the Sisyphean task of washing dishes; I want to cook because I don't believe others can cook with the same efficiency of me when it comes to limiting the amount of dirty cookware.
At the risk of sounding like a podcast ad read, I feel obligated to sing the praises of Hello Fresh. We've been using it for several years, 3-4 nights a week. It really does eliminate the planning, shopping, measuring, having the wrong amounts of things and watching them rot, etc. All while reducing the daily decision-making down to "hey, which of these 3 or 4 pre-approved options sounds best tonight?" And in the case where none sounds great, or we don't feel like dealing with even modest cooking, then we eat out or order takeout. Huge quality of life improvement over the alternative. And the food is always pretty okay if not "surprisingly good!" Oh, and it's about the same price as grocery shopping, maybe cheaper when you take into account buying the wrong quantities of things leading to food waste, impulse buys you pick up because they look good while shopping, etc.
We went with Tovala. It's only two of us, so we can make it work. The size of the toaster oven is limiting, so it wouldn't work for any more than two people. We tried a Hello Fresh-style service, but I didn't like the cooking method (stovetop high heat that splashes oil everywhere) and the food prep that was still required. There is less food waste, but more packaging waste, which bothers me. Cost is probably less, since we're not impulsively eating out if we can't decide on what to eat. The best thing is it frees up brain space and I don't get that low-level anxiety in the afternoons. Oh, almost forgot--the food is tasty and there's a good amount of variety.
Would love to use them, but their vegetarian family-friend meals are really lacking. Although, I suppose that's true for most of the services, at least where I live.
We tried Hello Fresh a couple of years ago, and I know it works for some people, like the neighbour who gave me a free trial. I had a lot of trouble with their deliveries -- they left the first in front of a house down the street, and the second delivery had someone else's order which didn't fit what our household eats. I gave up after that, because they also didn't have much variety if you're restricted in any part of your diet. I can see where it's a time saver for people who just want to get a dinner on the table, though.
Apparently I'm weird, because I look forward to cooking dinner every night. I make a weekly menu and plan meals to use up ingredients that come in packages larger than two people need. I enjoy the time I spend browsing through my cookbooks and past weekly lists deciding what to cook this week. I don't have to expend any more mental energy deciding what to make when I'm tired and hungry, because the list is on the fridge and the ingredients are to hand. After a long day "data sciencing", spending time preparing food that I like is relaxing. And yes, spreadsheets are involved.
I'm not as disciplined as you are, but a meal planning app or spreadsheet really does help with using up ingredients. I just need to plan further out more often. :)
Cooking is simple. Cooking to please a modern palate is hard.
My wife and I have been using cooksmarts (cooksmarts.com) for years, and it has made meal planning much more fun and varied. They don't send you any packets of food - just a meal plan each week, and a huge collection of recipes in case their plan isn't totally appealing to you that week. It's $5/month, but I feel like we eat a lot more different stuff, and the weekend meal planning is much-less fraught than before.
i remember when I was in grad school the Martha Stewart Cooking magazines (yes this was in the stone ages) were popular for having both a week's meal plan worked out ALONG with the shopping list. For someone working 60 hour weeks it was a god-send.
My 2 out of 3 rule...I try to meet 2 out of 3 of these rules for a family that has the usual crazy schedule with kids in school. 1. Make your food from ingredients, 2. Eat together, 3. Eat healthy. Eating together is the hardest thing, but these have been my rules since the kids were born. It has been worth it as I think we all have healthier eating habits and value the effort it takes.
I found that living within walking distance of grocery stores really helped with this. I wouldn't have to plan out a whole week, just the next few days. I'd only buy what I knew we would eat. Plus, the walk got me outside and moving which is always welcome.
Of course, in America, being within walking distance of anything is a privilege.
I second this - living a 10-minute walk from a grocery store means that I can combine a daily walk with a daily shopping trip. I need to take a walk every day; I might as well head to the store and see what I'm in the mood for. Having a partner who is a reliable cook is a great help too. We alternate dinner days: the person whose turn it is acquires the food, cooks, and cleans up, so every other day I don't have to think about dinner at all. But yeah, that's luck and privilege.
This is one of my retirement requirements.
This post RESONATES. Dinner and laundry are the two endless tasks of motherhood for me. What's not really addressed is when you have picky eaters! I would love AI to tell me what I could cook for my husband and I who eat anything/everything but the kids... that's a whole other story.
Yes, the picky eaters thing adds a whole other dimension. And it is annoying hearing feedback from others about how you just feed kids what you eat - it works for a bit but each kid is different. You don't want to turn dinner every night into a stressful event that everyone loathes. My mom was over recently as I put together a chicken casserole and I was saying, "Oh, this is so easy. I should have been looking at casserole recipes earlier." And my mom, humorously exasperated, was like, "Oh, I'd have loved to make more casseroles, but you kids wouldn't eat them!" Soooo, you know, it's just my time in the mines now.
Nearly the only good use of ChatGPT I've found has been suggesting meals. I'm a pretty decent home cook, so I don't need full recipes, just some ideas. I'd never trust a recipe from an AI model. But if I tell it what ingredients I have and ask it throw out some ideas I get some pretty good responses.
I'm grateful for my experience as a professional cook. people assume that we eat gourmet meals everyday and are often surprised when I tell them that I eat popcorn for dinner sometimes because it's what I want. These days, I'm not cooking pro anymore and it irritates me when I find myself just throwing things in a skillet and scarfing them down because I'm too busy to think about what I'm doing. I feel like I should do better given my experience and skills, but sometime I just don't have much time. Like others have commented, I'm very privileged that I have several options for fresh healthy food in walking distance and I really do try to take advantage of that. Yet, sometimes, popcorn is on the menu.
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