Fakeaways

In the era of Masterchef, home cooking is on the decline. American Millennials spend 38% less time cooking, go way less to food stores and spend a much lower amount of their income on food-at-home compared to those born between 1965 and 1980. Italians follow the same trend, with 50% of people spending less than 30 min a day cooking and basic ingredients dramatically declining in supermarket sales.

People say they don’t have time to cook. Definitely the growth in female employment during the past half a century has played a big role. But truth is many of us are not willing to put effort into preparing food and cleaning up the dishes, even for the most basic of the recipes. Not when you such convenient alternatives, such as home food deliveries, drive-thru options, ready-made dishes at supermarkets. Cooking in the era of deliveries means not delivering. Cooking is an effort which needs to be justified.

For the privileged, not delivering is renouncing to a comfort. In a world of abundance, privation from convenience and effort is the way to signal sophistication, distinction, value. Cooking, in this sense, is cool, charming, sexy. Particularly men have the edge, heritage of a wide acceptance of men being comfortably detached from chores and hence make those who do their part appear as sexy. Often the privileged cooking involves something hearty and rather healthy. It is interesting that Hellofresh, the UK ingredients delivery service, claims on its homepage that it makes for ‘Instagram- worthy, picture-perfect meals’. If you are putting an effort, best showing it broadly.

For those who cannot afford deliveries, instead, renouncing to deliveries is a necessity. Cooking remains the cheapest option and actually most of the time the fastest way to have a meal versus home deliveries. But differently from the healthy non-delivering of the privileged, here cooking is often as unhealthy as delivering. The delivery food is the benchmark anyways, but it cannot be afforded. This is why, among the Irish and British thrifty crowd, “fakeaways” are a rising trend. The art of replicating take-out meals at home. Kebabs, pizzas, fried chicken recipes remade at a fraction of the cost. Life imitates art, when it cannot afford it. But snobs it when it can.