| I know this doesn't help people who already have that notion that everything should be fast and simple, but why is it that some people just "can't find the time" to feed themselves? It's a basic premise in life. It's like not finding the time to shower, to sleep, to have sex, to brush your teeth. You make the time. Cooking doesn't take long. At all. You can prep an entire week worth of meals in 1 hour. Refrigerate them, freeze them. We have thousands of years worth of food preparation and preservation technology. Cook on Sunday, eat until Saturday. As for being expensive: again, it isn't. If cooking at home was expensive the world population would be 2 billion tops. Poor people cook at home because it's the only way they can survive. If a woman in Paraguay working two jobs can do it and feed her family, so can you. > it's about providing a convenient, nutritious, and (relatively, compared to fast food) cheap source of nutrition for those times that I don't have social obligations and I don't want to/don't have time to cook something for myself You can fix yourself a sandwich using good products that is just as nutritious. Most people don't even need to eat so much. It's very easy to have good 1500-2000 kcal a day with regular food that you prepared quickly. Soylent, to me, is simply about people who want to "hack" their bodies and be on the futurist side of things. There's nothing nutritiously advantageous about it, nor is it cheaper than cooking for yourself. But somehow people make the assumption that it's either that or eating the very worst food known to man (McDonald's or whatever). It isn't. |
I have a feeling this is leaving a lot of things out. Maybe you can do the literal cooking in 1 hour. In order to be able to do that, how much time do you need to spend shopping for ingredients and transporting them, making sure they're still fresh and haven't gone bad, washing dishes and otherwise cleaning, and getting enough experience in cooking that you can actually do everything that fast.
And once you do all that, you have a week's worth of eating the same thing for every meal you do this for, and reheated and not as fresh as when you just made it. This is starting to sound not that much better than Soylent.
It's like that great Ars article on why many people don't cook. Maybe you or I can also install Linux and build an app from source. Could your grandmother do that, or would she be so hopelessly lost as to not even know where to start? That's what the idea of cooking is like for a lot of people. You aren't helping those people by insisting that it's possible to cook a week's worth of food in an hour, if you're already an experienced cook and know what ingredients to get, where to get them from, how long they stay good for, what to do if you can't find the ones you wanted, how to actually make everything in the most efficient way. It may take an hour to do the actual cooking, but it may also take a decade of experience in cooking to be able to do it in an hour and get a week's worth of food.