“It’s dinner-time as the perfect family would do it, with ingredients promised to be “fresher than the supermarket,” with a range and sophistication to which your ex-wife could only vainly aspire.”
“The box opens out as a kind of introduction to the basics of idealized family life: this is what dinner is; this is what home is.”
“In its evocation of a family dinner table with no past and no future — having no leftovers is one of the key advertising promises of these services — meal-kit delivery services promise that, with the help of e-commerce, traditional family life can continue undisturbed even as the underlying structures that produced the family as we know it are undergoing extreme disruption.”
“The TV dinner sent mixed messages from the start. It was a status symbol, indicating that the lady of the house lived in an up-to-date home with all the mod cons (home freezers came on the market in the 1940s), and that her time was far too valuable to waste in preparing complicated meals from scratch.”
“A meal could now exist perfectly frozen in time in an immaculate kitchen, a set of identical crystallized moments packed three deep in a hidden chamber.”
“The meal-kit delivery is a TV dinner deconstructed.”
“Where frozen dinners erase the labor of cooking, meal kits endow this labor with value while erasing the work of planning and shopping.”
“Meal kits zero in on a telegenic fragment of the drudgery involved in running a household, framing the work of planning weekly menus and lugging grocery bags as a choice rather than a necessity.”
“For consumers who see the contents of their cupboards as signs of their virtue and proof of their empathy, the promise of eliminating food waste is tantalizing”
“I think of Blue Apron (or Chef’s Plate, or HelloFresh, or any of the many meal-kit delivery services now flooding the market) as a podcast dinner. Partly because so many meal-kit companies are advertised on popular podcasts as sponsors; and since meal kits are currently marketed to an affluent audience of young professionals, there’s a good chance they are also prepared and eaten to the accompaniment of a podcast in the background. But also, meal kits share with podcasting a self-consciously handcrafted tone.”
“The box the meal-kit arrives in becomes a self-care package, transforming the meal-as-burden into the meal-as-event, and promising to turn the customer into a more authentic version of themselves, the person you would be if you weren’t so busy”
“A much retweeted quip from comedy writer Rob Fee reads, “Relationships are just two people constantly asking each other where they want to go eat, until one of them dies.””
“The recurrent question of what to have for dinner is exhausting because hiding in its shadow is an even more unshakeable and troubling question: How and why do we keep on living?”
“The existential dread of dinner-time is real because the very purpose of food is existential.”
“By creating a family-in-a-box, carefully packaged to make us feel worthy, virtuous, and even loved, these services may be perversely highlighting the absurdity of the systems we have created”
“At a time when the cost of housing has placed home-ownership out of reach for most people living in major cities, and working overtime in precarious freelance positions has become a widespread form of labor, it’s no wonder some consumers are ready for a template, something that could teach us how to build a reassuring vision of home in an unfamiliar and quickly changing world.”
“The meal-kit assumes that you have nothing and know nothing, an act of generational profiling which happens to match how many of us see ourselves.”