Adam Liaw on the preparation of the makeup meal
Opinion
Of course, preparing the same meal to heat and eat night after night can make life easier, but it is also sucking joy, well, everything.
“Every day is fine,” he sighed my driver Uber with shake of resignation when I asked her how her day was going. “It’s the algorithm,” he offered. “Every day is the same.”
He explained that if he has already had many jobs, the Uber algorithm responsible for the assignment of runs sends new jobs to someone else. If it doesn’t have enough, the algorithm may send them a little more. No maximums, no minimal. Only infinite ok -ss, at the service of a computer program.
In food, a symptom of this modern malaise is the rise of “meal preparation”.
It is not entirely new. At the university, I had a friend who made a great lot of Spaghetti Bolognese Every couple of weeks, eating Bolognese spaghetti every single night for years. Then, this was not considered aspirational.
In these days, the preparation of meals is organized in individual portions of uniformity to social media. The meals themselves are often so nutritionally benign and without emotions that may have also been cooked by chatgpt. Night fine with various fruits. Dry chicken breast with roasted sweet potatoes and green beans. Full rice salads, quinoa and flaccid noodle aligned in identical jars.
Inobecoming in design, generic in execution. But as a content, it aims to mean that the manufacturer has their lives in order.
It is existentially bleak, but I understand it.
Today’s world is expensive, fast and complicated: 200 different restaurants will deliver directly to your door, work and -mail from all over the world for a long time in the night and 20 multimedia streaming services can send you more hours of content than you could ever consume in your life. However, you can never decide what to look at, so you fix your phone instead.
Modern life asks humans to operate on the rhythm of machines, so it is not surprising that people want to simplify their lives wherever they can.
A week of identical meals in the fridge might seem like a victory against the system, but could it only accept that the system has sucked in spontaneity and humanity from life?
The preparation of meals may seem like an orderly solution. A whole week that you don’t have to think about what to eat, how much it costs or if it will be good for you. Just take a single diet from the refrigerator and attach it to the microwave.
Once the food was celebrated. Google the origins of most of our holidays. They can be traced back to the opportunities of seasonal change, collection or hunting, where food was synonymous with prosperity. Before Christianity, Easter celebrated the beginning of the abundance of spring.
The abundance has been an aspirational for a long time, but its aesthetic in culture is in constant change.
For the hunters-rackers, the abundance seemed to be an artistic rock of a successful hunt. In agricultural times, they were buses of wheat or images of loaded fruit trees. Today, when most of us have never hunted our meat or collected a vegetable, the aesthetic of abundance can be an Instagram tour of a pantry of the house that looks like a supermarket or a refrigerator full of individual portions of preparation of meals.
The Greek philosopher Epicuro is often invoked to describe the epicurean “edonistic pleasures of food. In fact, Epicurus’ definition of happiness was not indulgence. It was the tranquility that derives from the removal of fear and pain. If a week of meals in the refrigerator saves money, encourages you to cook and remove the anxiety of deciding what and how to eat, where is the foul?
Well, there is not one. But where it mystulas against the preparation of meals is that if it seemed to me that my whole life was becoming automatic and mechanical (which I do), the last thing I would like to do is start eating like a car.
When I lived alone, I “prepared” every week, but instead of “meals” I just “prepared”.
On Sunday, I would make a lot of broth for soups, cut a week of vegetables and marinated meats. Every night after work I would have assembled a simple bowl of soup, a pan or a plate of pasta, and every night it was something different.
Of course, a few days I ate raw vegetables directly from the refrigerator before falling into bed, but at least it seemed to me of free will.
A week of identical meals in the fridge might seem like a victory against the system, but could it only accept that the system has sucked in spontaneity and humanity from life? And in exchange for what? Extra hours in the office and rubining?
If the meal prepares your problems and leads you to epicurean tranquility, please don’t let me stop. It is difficult out there these days and we have to get each way possible.
But you could get to Easter wondering where the first three months of the year went. Time certainly flies when every day has the same flavor.
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Adam Liaw He is an author of cookbooks and food writer, conductor of Good Food Kitchen and former Masterchef winner.
