It’s very weird that we’re still expected to cook meals for ourselves regularly.

Let’s compare the way we deal with nourishing our bodies to the way we deal with hydrating them. In terms of societal norms and infrastructure, hydration is a solved problem: when you’re thirsty, you turn on the tap and clean drinkable water flows out. You can drink as much as you please, because it costs next to nothing.

Of course, there are plenty of other higher effort or higher cost options. You can make a cup of tea or coffee. You can buy a $5,000 espresso machine and import the finest geisha coffee beans money can buy. Or you can drink fruit juice, either from the store or from fresh oranges run through your $1,000 juicer. Or you can have a beer, maybe one you’ve brewed yourself. You can take a cocktail-making course and stock up your cabinets with with 47 kinds of liquor. You can put as much or as little work into it all as you like.

But unless you’re stranded in the desert, you’ve always got the option to just have a glass of water. This isn’t seen as lazy or weird; it’s healthy and admirable. If water was the only thing you ever drank, you would at most be seen as a bit eccentric.

In short: there’s a nice healthy no-effort default, and anything beyond that is just a matter of personal preference. Hydrating yourself is rarely if ever a source of stress or difficulty.

So why the hell isn’t food like that? Furthermore, why do some people get so personally affronted by the idea that it could be?

Humanity has invented all sorts of devices to lessen our domestic burdens: washing machines, dishwashers, lawnmowers, robot vacuums. These were once recognised as big steps forward for our lifestyles, particularly for women who traditionally took care of domestic tasks.

The need for this is even greater now, with couples typically both working full time. Instead of having all day to look after the house, we try to cram that work into our evenings when we’re already exhausted.

And yet, the task of feeding ourselves still looms large in our schedules. And the idea of finding ways to make food easier is met with scorn and hostility from a lot of people. Cooking enthusiasts insist that everyone should enjoy cooking as much as they do—that if you don’t like to cook, that’s an attitude problem you need to fix.

I think it’s a form of Stockholm syndrome. These people have accepted the dominant role that food plays in their lives and how much of their free time is taken up by it, and they want you to make the same sacrifice. It’s like people who are against forgiveness of student debt, because they worked hard to pay their own off. “Why should these people have it easy when I had to suffer?”

Misery loves company.

When it comes to making food as effortless as staying hydrated, I do believe there’s a solution. Or at least a partial one. But first let’s look at the existing options for having dinner after you’ve slogged through a day at work, and the problems with each.

The problem with…

1. Home cooking

Cooking for yourself is often talked about as though it’s cheap. “I feed my family healthy meals for only $3 per serving!” This is true if you value your time at zero dollars per hour. The time I spend buying ingredients, lugging them home, prepping, cooking, and cleaning everything up afterwards is expensive to me.

You can amortise the time cost by doing bulk meal-prep: cook four times as much, and the time cost per serving is quartered (except not really, because it will probably take longer if you’re cooking more). This strategy is limited by your freezer space, the size of your cookware, and your willingness to eat a lot of the same thing.

Then there’s waste: for any non-trivial recipe, you’ll almost certainly end up buying more than you need for some of the ingredients. If you want a few lettuce leaves, you have to buy a whole head of lettuce. Need a sprig of Rosemary? Tough shit, you can’t buy one sprig. You’re buying a whole pack. And unless you plan out multiple meals with overlapping ingredients, the remaining lettuce and Rosemary will then go bad and be thrown out.

Meal kit services solve the problems of planning, buying, and wastage. But then you’re paying through the nose for the ingredients.

2. Restaurants and takeaway

This is the opposite end of the spectrum: Minimal time cost, maximal financial cost. Unless you’re rolling in money, this can’t be your primary way of having dinner.

3. Frozen ready-meals

Living off frozen meals is easy, but generally they’re ultra-processed, with too much sodium, the wrong balance of macronutrients and without all the micronutrients you need. If you go for the premium options like My Muscle Chef they might be healthier, but then it starts getting more expensive (though still cheaper than takeaway).

4. Powdered meal shakes

i.e. Soylent and its various competitors. This option attracts the most virulent, knee-jerk scorn from the home-cooking true-believers. In reality it’s a nice option to have when you’ve got things to be getting on with and you just need a nutritious, cheap, and passably enjoyable meal without any fuss. But nobody wants to live entirely off liquid meals. That would be boring.

(There are some options out there for solid nutritionally-complete meals, such as MealSquares and the Plenny Bar. But since I live in Australia most of them are either unavailable here, or the shipping cost is prohibitive. Qota is the closest available thing.)

5. Meal delivery subscription

The concept of Meals on Wheels has been around since the mid-20th century, but traditionally it’s aimed at people who are elderly or otherwise house-bound. It was assumed that everyone else had time to cook for themselves, an assumption that hasn’t caught up with reality.

When I was doing research for this post I came across a service called Nourish’d, which is the same concept except they’ve realised that able-bodied but busy people could also benefit. Once a week they publish a menu of options, and you can put in an order for whichever ones you want. On Monday morning a box arrives at your door containing your meals with an ice pack to keep them cold until you get them into the fridge.

They’re kinda like supermarket ready-meals but actually fresh, and without preservatives or any other bollocks—just normal ingredients you’d use at home. I’ve been ordering them weekly for the last month, and they’re pretty good.

It still doesn’t feel like the ideal solution though. Every meal comes in a plastic container, which I can only hope actually gets recycled when I put it in the recycling bin. Plus there’s an insulated bag and ice pack which are also single-use. And I don’t know where the meals are actually prepared and how far they need to be transported. So environmentally it’s not perfect, though it’s probably no worse than all the packaging supermarket ingredients come with.

It’s also a little more pricey than I’d like for the serving size. But that’s the cost of convenience.

There must be a way to combine the good parts of these options:

  • The comfort and nutrition of a solid home-cooked meal made with fresh ingredients
  • A reasonable price that you could realistically pay most evenings
  • Supplied by a local business
  • The ease of picking up a takeaway, hot and ready to eat

The concept: Local pre-ordered bulk-prep kitchens

Or: Nourish’d but local

Picture this: You have an app on your phone, which connects you to any of various local bulk-prep kitchens. At the start of the week, your local kitchen publishes a list of meals it will be making that week: one or two options per night.

You pick a few for nights that you know you’ll be at home: butter chicken on Monday, laksa on Tuesday, spaghetti Bolognese on Thursday. You pay up-front, and that’s dinner sorted for those nights.

The kitchen locks pre-orders for the week a couple of days in advance. Then each day, they buy the exact amount of ingredients they need; no more, no less. No waste. On Monday afternoon, they start preparing the 150 servings of butter chicken that were ordered.

You swing by on your way home from work, pick up your order, and arrive home with a piping hot dinner ready to eat. You can bring your own reusable container, or get a disposable takeaway container for a small fee.

On Tuesday you’re feeling lazy, so you go straight home and use the app to request delivery. For an extra charge, a Door Dasher brings you your laksa.

The kitchen doesn’t need waiters, or an area for dining, or a big walk-in freezer for ingredients. They have the kitchen itself, some really big pots, a stack of takeaway containers, and a pickup counter. They only buy the ingredients they need, and use them that same day. Their overheads are low. That means their prices are low.

On Thursday, your plans change and you won’t be able to pick up your spaghetti. You use the app to notify the kitchen, and they put your portion in the freezer. You can pick it up tomorrow or the next day.

If you can’t collect it in two days, let them know and they’ll give it to a homeless shelter or make it available for walk-in purchase. If your portion gets sold to a walk-in customer your money will be refunded.

Pretty good idea, hey?

The benefits here are so clear that local councils could even support such enterprises as a public service, providing free or subsidised premises for the kitchen. They could even run the thing themselves. There’s precedent for this: Meals on Wheels programs are generally supported or run by local government. Why not simply expand that and sell to the general public?

Some might argue that it would create unfair competition with nearby restaurants and takeaway shops. But I don’t think so. They’re serving different needs: restaurants provide the dine-in experience, and takeaway shops cater to the unplanned “can’t be bothered cooking tonight” situation. A pre-ordered, takeaway-only service doesn’t cover either.

This would be a slam-dunk: a way for busy people to get fed, that’s:

  • local
  • affordable
  • healthy
  • sustainable

Someone needs to do this. In particular, someone who lives in my area. Not me though—I’m too busy.