You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill
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A quiet monologue runs through my head at all times. It is this: dinner dinner dinner dinner. The thing about dinner is that you have to deal with it every single night. Figuring out what to eat is a pleasure until it becomes a constant low-grade grind. 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. It is the time it sucks up during the week. It is the endless mental energy. Huh, I think, at 6 p.m., dicing onions. So we’re still doing this?
I can compromise on breakfast. It is absolutely normal to eat the same breakfast every single day for years, and equally normal to eat nothing. Lunch: Eat it, skip it, have some carrot sticks, who cares. Lunch is a meal of convenience. But dinner is special. Dinner isn’t just the largest meal in the standard American diet; it is the most important, the most nourishing, the most freighted with moral weight. The mythical dream of dinner is that after a hard but wholesome day at school or work, the family unit is reunited over a hot meal, freshly prepared. Even if you’re dining solo, dinner tends to be eaten in a state of relative leisure, signaling a transition into the time of day when you are no longer beholden to your job. “You could eat a full bag of Doritos,” Margot Finn, a food-studies scholar at the University of Michigan, told me, but that doesn’t quite cut it for dinner: “There’s some paucity there. There’s some lack.”
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The Dinner Problem might be especially acute for working parents like me—children are unrelenting in their demand to eat at regular intervals—but it spares almost no one. Disposable income helps mitigate the issue (disposable income helps mitigate most issues), but short of a paid staff, money does not solve it. I could accept this as the price of being human, if everywhere I looked there was not someone promising a way out. The sheer number of hacks and services and appliances and start-ups suggests that some kind of dinner resolution is forthcoming: How could it not be solvable, with this many options? We are living in what might be the world-historic peak of dinner solutions: A whole canon of cookbooks is devoted to quick-and-easy weeknight dinners for busy families and entire freezer cases dedicated to microwavable meals. There is takeout and prepared food and DoorDash and a staggering number of prep guides outlining how to cook in bulk one day a week. And yet, none of it has managed to solve the problem: Dinner exists, daunting and ominous.
As it stands, dinner is a game of trade-offs: You can labor over beautiful and wholesome meals, but it is so much work. You can heat up a Trader Joe’s frozen burrito or grab McDonald’s—there is a reason that as of 2016, the last time the government counted, one-third of American adults ate fast food on any given day—but you don’t have to be a health fanatic to aspire to a more balanced diet. You could get takeout, but it’s notoriously expensive and frequently soggy, more a novelty than a regular occurrence. Delivery apps, at least, offer the promise of extreme convenience, except that they are even more expensive, and the food is often even soggier.
In spite of all these options, if you cannot free yourself from dinner, you’re not alone. The many attempts to make dinner painless have not lived up to their promise. Remember Soylent? One of the bolder possibilities, for a while, was a shake that pledged to make “things a lot less complicated” by replacing conventional food with a deconstructed slurry of nutrients. I do want things to be less complicated, but I also want variety. I want to chew. A lot of other people seemed to want these things too, which is presumably one reason food-based dinner persists and Soylent has mellowed into a “nutritional supplement lifestyle brand.”
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Given the general enthusiasm for eating, most proposed innovations have focused on easing the labor of making dinner. Grocery stores offer pre-chopped produce; Whole Foods briefly experimented with an on-site “produce butcher” who would slice or dice or julienne your vegetables. Meal kits that ship portioned ingredients to your doorstep ought to be an obvious solution, and for a minute, it seemed like maybe they were. In 2015, Blue Apron was valued at $2 billion and, according to TechCrunch, was poised to reach “99 percent of potential home cooks.” It did not, in fact, reach 99 percent of potential home cooks, nor did any of its competitors. “There are still people who really love meal kits,” Jeff Wells, the lead editor of Grocery Dive, a trade publication, told me. “There just aren’t that many of them relative to the overall food-shopping population.” The problem is the cost, or the menu, or the quality, or the lack of leftovers, or the prep time.
When one dinner solution fizzles, there is always another, and another, which will be superseded by still more. Lately, Wells said, grocery stores have been investing in their prepared to-go options, with in-store pizza counters and plastic clamshells of deli salads and ready-to-heat containers of spaghetti. Everywhere I look, I seem to be inundated with new and somehow improved solutions. On Instagram, I learned about a new delivery service that is in the process of expanding to my area. While streaming a movie, I was introduced, repeatedly, to a company that sells healthy meals I could have ready in two minutes. Every time I turn on a podcast, I am informed about a meal-kit company that, if I use the promo code, will give me free dessert for life. They all promise the same thing: that dinner could be painless, if I let it. I could have it all, my dinner and my sanity.
Of course, all of these options still require divesting from the Norman Rockwell dream of home-cooked dinner. The ideal of dinner has made me resentful and occasionally unpleasant, and at the same time, I viscerally do not want to eat a vat of precooked spaghetti. I can make spaghetti, I thought. But then I was back where I began. Most of us have two basic choices: You can make the necessary compromises and accept something less than optimal, or you can surrender to a wholesome trap of your own making. You can buy the pre-chopped onions, or you can suck it up and chop your own onions. Those are the choices. The notion that there is a permanent way out—a hack, a kit, a service that gives you all the benefits of dinner cooked from scratch without the labor—is an illusion. You cannot have a meal that both is and is not homemade: Schrödinger’s salmon over couscous with broccoli rabe.
Dinner resists optimization. It can be creative, and it can be pleasurable. None of this negates the fact that it is a grind. It will always be a grind. You will always have to think about it, unless you have someone else to think about it for you, and it will always require too much time or too much energy or too much money or some combination of the three. It is unrelenting, in the way that breathing is unrelenting. There is freedom in surrendering to this, that even in this golden age of technological progress, dinner refuses to be solved.