A pervasive flavor of viral-worthy "good taste" dictates that tacos be authentic, pasta be perfectly Italian, and that our food choices should be highly considered. A foodie superiority complex pervades a certain side of the internet where people who have consumed enough of this food content now scoff at hard shell tacos and frozen pizzas. Millennials, especially, partake in this, even though they have done so much good in the world of food. Before hipster fixation on specialty coffee, craft beer, and mixology, we were drinking bad cups of joe, sipping flavorless lagers, and paying too much for bottom-shelf mixed drinks. Attention to these areas, as pretentious as it may seem, has raised the average quality of much of the food and beverages we consume. But our standards have become too high.
This overfixation on authenticity and quality has kept the average person from cooking at home. We rely on DoorDash instead of throwing together a crummy meal with jarred sauces, even if it would be better for our pockets and overall well-being. So much moralizing about food delivery apps happens on Twitter. It’s an aspect of modern life that’s easy to fixate on. It sums up all the supposed “decadence” and reliance on tech that’s “ruining our lives,” and there’s a lot to be upset about. Drivers and delivery people working for these apps are routinely undercompensated, put in dangerous situations, and given no benefits for their troubles. On the labor side, delivery apps should absolutely be interrogated with a critical eye. But on the consumer side, the critiques are a little bit trickier to navigate. On one hand, we shouldn’t punish ourselves for ordering food every now and again. It’s not a moral evil, and it comes in awfully handy when you’re not feeling well or you’re incredibly busy. On the other hand, it’s easy to develop a dependence on them, one that might end up hurting you. We all know they are a colossal waste of money, forcing us to spend $40 on one meal when it would have cost $20 for us to pick up. We’re willing to pay a lot for convenience. But what if we reframed what convenience looked like?
Our reliance on food delivery apps has made even the simplest kind of cooking look like a burden in comparison. When summoning up a meal is as easy as pressing a few buttons, the idea of slicing a cucumber seems monstrously inconvenient. Plus, we’re so used to seeing optimized, professionally cooked meals on our feeds that we might be embarrassed to make something sub-par. Our tolerance for annoying tasks is at an all-time low, and yet our demand for perfection is at an all-time high. It’s time to reframe before forking over a quarter of our salaries to delivery fees, and take the kitchen back for ourselves.
A recent string of this food delivery discourse brought up the idea of a “stocked pantry.” Some claim that we’ve lost sight of how to keep our pantries and fridges full so we can feed ourselves without relying on professionally-cooked food delivered to us. If you have a few pantry staples (peanut butter, soy sauce, vinegar, chili oil, dried noodles, canned beans, pasta sauce, tinned fish), then you have dinner in a few easy steps. It’s just a matter of keeping these things around, which is not hard to do, since these kinds of ingredients tend to last a long time. Not every meal needs to be a high-quality production. We don’t have to impress the hipster foodie in our heads when the real goal is to have something to fill our bellies.
via @kelita_rosita
A perfect example of this kind of cooking is kelita_rosita, a food influencer who flaunts most conventions when it comes to food. In a recent video, she makes “pineapple spaghetti” with frozen beef and canned pineapple chunks. A little gross-sounding? Yes. A fun and creative use of pantry ingredients? Also yes. A simple meal served up in a matter of minutes? You betcha. Her meal is not trendy; it doesn't photograph well, but it fulfilled its purpose, which is to fill the stomach. It’s also an exercise in innovation and creativity. You might stumble on a new favorite food combination just because you happened to have a limited selection of food on hand. Necessity is the mother of invention, especially when it comes to food, and delivery apps take away that necessity, sometimes to our detriment. We should stop demanding perfection from our food and let it be imperfect.
Many of us cook like this already. The subreddit r/sh****foodp*** is full of these types of slapped-together convenience meals. But it’s time we celebrate them instead of feeling privately embarrassed that we didn’t manage to produce restaurant-quality cacio e pepe.