Make America Home Economics Again

Plaidimir Lenin
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

There are yuppies in my neighborhood. I know where they live. On my way home from work I walk by their condos and new modern constructions and there are boxes on the steps. Blue Apron. Hello Fresh. Daily Harvest. Soylent with a Smile. I think that if I was still a delinquent teenager I’d be stealing them, probably rolling blunts and roasting the ingredients over a campfire in some old sand pit. Now I just keep walking.

I hate these paint by numbers dinners so much. Partly out of pure spite. I’m in the kitchen for a living and perhaps I’m simply jealous that the very necessary task of feeding each other has been so streamlined. If you have enough money and have no compunction about the gargantuan amount of waste it creates, you can have every meal delivered right to your door. You could probably log on to Task Rabbit and pay someone to spoon feed it to you. Nutritional paste (energizing! beautifying ! revitalizing!) leaking out of the corners of a feed bag, strapped to your face as your answer emails.

Purity is our Promise!

It’s deeper than spite. Aesthetically, the presentation is so clean and pure it feels like an Identity Europa pamphlet. All the dishes are white, the backgrounds white, the pork white, the cheese white. All the comments are white; Kourtney says it’s easy and delicious, Rachel added some chopped turkey, Aimee was full for 5 whole hours. It has all the sterility of a heavily produced cooking show without any of the crumbs.

Target Demographics

I don’t want to sound like Tyler Durden, but this indulgence in conveinence culture is rotting our minds. Amazon buys Whole Foods to do away with the under performing produce section. In the future, all fresh vegetable choices will be made for us based on market futures, shipped directly to your desk at work. Trader Joe’s has 100 kinds of cookies but you can’t buy baking powder or chocolate chips outside of a small holiday window. Merry Christmas peasants. I go to the farmer’s market and hear people reducing the bountiful harvest to modular meal planning, “we need 3.5 tomatoes, 2 oz of parsley and a single carrot.” My father told me recently that he loves whatever box he gets because they send single cloves of garlic. He doesn’t know what to do with a whole bulb.

But garlic comes in bulbs, and seasons are measured in bushels. With our meals in boxes, every last snack accounted for, the units of our life become ever more quantized. They fit in nicely between productivities. A smoothie is what you do between meetings and spice-crusting a salmon is what you do after work, with no fear of failure or chance to experiment, glancing every minute at the instructions. There’s a Planck Length down there somewhere, and its a nutrient cube you dissolve in raw water three times a day, and they just passed their third round of VC funding.

Blur your eyes like a Magic Eye poster. It’s the same meal.

The TV dinner was not innovation, it was longer hours made to the look like Salisbury steak. 80’s office culture spawned every manner of Lean Cuisine abomination and Carnation Instant Breakfast. Today it is our beige technocracy that lowers the bar to a few notches above nourishment so that we can spend more time at work, more time contemplating productivity. Food, like nearly everything else, has been made into a game so that we won’t notice what we need all this extra time for.

Plaidimir Lenin
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade