Recalling All The Time We Had Before Modern Lives

Still lots of crows downtown. They weren’t around yesterday but back at about half-force this morning.

The NYT Dining section seems to be in an endless race to out-stupid itself. A couple of weeks ago there was an article about people who seriously injure themselves when putting their fingers into the sharp bits of their immersion blenders.

Then there was an article about the overweight chef who likes to eat a lot including a pizza and bucket of wings when he gets home from work. He goes to the extreme step of hiring a ‘food strategist’ who churns out so many ludicrous quotes I’m going to go ahead and link to the article so you can read it yourself. (Sneak preview: “Let me put you on the Concorde to thin.”)

Then there was the article this week about dinner kits. All the various ingredients are measured out and packaged together. You cook it yourself. Let me point out that I am not mocking the idea. There will always be a need for simplified meal preparation. Why not this? It seems like it would be especially valuable for people who eat away from home often because of travel and work obligations and don’t have a well-stocked kitchen.

But this is a quote from one entrepreneur who runs such a service, “When we started jobs in New York, we realized that cooking dinner is really, really hard.” He goes on to say, “There’s not enough time in modern lives to recipe-select or grocery-shop.”

Why not say, this is a great alternative for folks who don’t prioritize cooking or find themselves bringing home a pizza and bucket of wings because they’re too tired at the end of the day. But “really, really hard?” He sounds like a second grader. I’ve got a bazillion activities that I’m juggling and I manage to recipe-select and grocery-shop. Is it that my life isn’t modern?

Let’s think of some articles to pitch to the NYT. They’ve already covered kitchen danger, food makes you fat and cooking and shopping are hard. What else? Washing dishes is no fun! Ethnic foods have weird ingredients! Sometimes couples don’t like the same foods!

Leave your ideas in the comments.

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One Response to Recalling All The Time We Had Before Modern Lives

  1. Kira Walsh says:

    I’ve had really hit and miss luck with their recipes, too. Their eating healthy recipes always drive me crazy because a lot of them aren’t really healthy or else they’re tasteless. They also tend to offer up calorie information that is fairly useless like saying that it’s for 10 servings of something but giving no sense of what the serving measurement is for, say, a pot of soup. Maybe other people can estimate better and I’m just whiny?

    Probably a nice article on how stoves are hot? Or does that fall under “kitchen danger”?

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