Aug 13, 2021 3 min read

Something is amiss when breakfast and dinner are identical. In my case, the symmetry meant eating Wheaties twice a day – morning and evening.

It’s one of the things I don’t like about living alone. With nobody to cook for but myself, a certain laziness has oozed into my days, an ennui about shopping and cooking that reduced my daily menu to breakfast-smoothie-breakfast – also, cookie-cookie. If it weren’t for the protein powder and kale I stuff into the blender for lunch, I might be at risk of developing scurvy or rickets.

Halfway through the summer, I was finding it challenging to cycle eight miles in my usual 40 minutes. I’m getting old, but not that old, and so it had to be the result of poor nutrition.

That’s when I saw a television commercial for a food delivery service, the kind that sends you the ingredients for meals that you then cook in your own kitchen. Some internet research unlocked an algorithm that filled my email with offers from several of the services.

I picked the one with the best coupon and went shopping. Page after page of meals rolled onto my screen. I chose meals with chicken and salmon, along with a few vegetarian options.

A week later the first box arrived, so heavy with ice packs I had to drag it into the house. Inside were six brown paper bags, each containing the makings for two servings. As I loaded the bags into the fridge, I felt a tingle of excitement that I’d found a new way to feed myself.

For dinner that night, I chose chickpea tacos. Inside the bag were all the ingredients except for salt, pepper and oil. The recipe called for a tablespoon of rice vinegar and sure enough, they’d included a bottle the size of a triple-A battery – so cute I didn’t want to open it. The tacos were tasty but took a lot of chopping and stirring. The next night was a chicken stir fry that required about 14 steps to get from bag to table.

The plan was to cook one meal every other night and eat the leftovers on the days in between – a smart plan in theory. But a few days in, things hit a snag.

Have dinner out with a friend just once and you throw the whole thing off. I didn’t want to crack open a new bag until I’d eaten the leftovers, and that created a backup. These are fresh meals, not frozen, and the clock was ticking. On day eight I opened the last bag to find “stuffed green peppers with quinoa,” a meal I never would have ordered on purpose.

There’s a sequence required for this way of eating: fall out of step and things get screwed up, like binge-watching a show by starting in season three. You can’t circle back without creating entropy.

I probably won’t order again, but the experience has taught me some things. First, tomatoes that are packed and shipped in dry ice have no taste. Second, when heated in oil, chickpeas will jump out of the pan like popcorn.

And third, these meal services are meant for people who like to cook, but don’t like to shop.

And I don’t particularly like either one.

I gave the meal with the green peppers to my neighbor, which meant my dinner options that night were either two-day-old “pasta with zucchini ribbons” – which weren’t that great on day one – or a bowl of Wheaties.

I ate the Wheaties.