This began because my youngest sister asked for a recipe book for her birthday to help her with “meal prep.”
She’s in college, and the fact that she’s even thinking about cooking is a massive development. It’s something I want to encourage as much as possible.
Building healthy eating routines when you’re in college and developing cooking skills along the way — even if they’re basic — goes a long way towards building you into a well-rounded adult.
The term “meal prep,” however, nauseates me. But as I thought about it more, there’s absolutely no legitimate reason to discourage it. It’s a smart way to get ready for the week and is often borne out of a lack of time.
Time, technique, access, affordability and moral concerns are all among the many barriers towards cooking and why food can become a means to an end, or a stressor, rather than something enjoyable.
… not that you need to have a legitimate reason not to like cooking. I just find joy in it, and think more people would, too, if they could experience it in a healthy way — but that requires time, availability, reasonable costs and information.
‘Meal prep’ philosophy vs. meal prepping reality
The term “meal prep” reminds me of when I was in college with friends who would make four days worth of plain chicken breasts, brown rice and barely seasoned broccoli.
I’d do roughly half of that — two days worth of balsamic chicken with brown rice, or substitute tilapia, which is not better (and pictured, unfortunately, above).
There is absolutely nothing wrong with making food for the week and storing it away. A lot of the time, that’s crucial; it’s a mature way to make sure you’re eating well.
One of my current roommates works an odd-hours schedule that starts in the afternoon and ends in the early morning, which requires that he prep food on Sunday.
But the branding of “meal prep” bothers me. It files away cooking and eating into the same mental drawer as doing laundry.
It’s a concept that bastardizes the intimacy of cooking, turning it into a mechanical means to an end.
That attitude, I think, is best highlighted by the litany of meal delivery services — like HelloFresh, Freshly, Shef, etc. — which seem to growing exponentially in number by the day.
They promote delivered, pre-packaged meals in a way that argues cooking is outdated. In a modern world, you don’t have time to cook! And you’re an idiot if you do!
These ads are unavoidable. They seem to be targeted to the young, upwardly mobile couple that’s always on the run, too busy grinding away and working out and moving and shaking to even consider cooking a meal.
Meal is fuel. Fuel is power, etc. Gotta hit the gym after work. Gotta stay grinding. Get HelloFresh.
I’m shitting on this from a philosophical perspective. These are glorified frozen dinners being billed as as a way to keep being faster, more efficient, frictionless, insert other tech-bro buzzwords here.
Food? No time. Just gotta grind.
As a consistent way to ensure you’re eating healthy, I get it. But they can exaggerate the quality of what they’re delivering and act like they’re saving you more money than if you just cooked for yourself.
There are plenty of times when you just need to eat something, anything. I’m someone who loves leftovers as much as anyone. You could even make an argument that it’s not much different than eating pre-prepared meals.
As I mentioned in the last piece, I have to bring energy bars with me at work so I don’t get cranky. I did that a few nights ago after the Warriors game with my coworker Sam so I wouldn’t be a piece of shit when my blood sugar dropped.
Sometimes you have to shove something in your face and go.
I’ve gone through weeks of not eating well and scrounging together underwhelming meals or stretching a UberEats order to last for lunch and dinner to save money and effort.
It’s a funk I have to consciously snap myself out of.
But there are plenty of people out there — who work at well-paying jobs — for whom food is just an obstacle. An incredible meal for them will only ever be described as “really good,” delivered with a milquetoast smile and vacant eyes.
I can’t wrap my head around that worldview — though I acknowledge that certain people have unhealthy relationships with food for a variety of reasons.
But go through each day and view food as something that is just meant to be acquired and processed, is an unnervingly robotic way to approach a part of life that is present every single day.
When we have time, money, and access to good food, it feels wrong not to celebrate that. Being able to relish in a meal, however simple or complex, whether alone or for others, is a beautiful thing. It has the capacity to take you out of the stress of the day and connects you with something that is as deeply human as anything there is.
Access
The access and affordability part of that equation is something that’s tough to wrestle with. Food is a means to an end for a lot of people because good ingredients are not available or not financially feasible to buy.
Like most major problems in this world, much of this is objectively solvable. It won’t be. But it could be.
One of the most prominent issues affecting food insecurity is the presence of food deserts, a problem that’s stunningly pervasive, but hard to see unless you live in it.
Food deserts — as defined by the USDA — are, “areas where people have limited access to a variety of healthy and affordable food… further than 1 mile from a large grocery store or supermarket.”
It is problem borne out of a misdirection of resources, paired with racist histories of bad governance; a combination of redlining and building highways, stadiums and other infrastructure through promising, affluent neighborhoods of non-white populations.
That process happened all over this country and executed financial devastation that communities never recovered from and largely created food deserts.
There’s some extremely helpful data here, from New York Law School, which details the issue far more eloquently and accurately than I will do here. Among the findings, which detail how this process played out:
African Americans are half as likely to have access to chain supermarkets and Hispanics are a third less likely to have access to chain supermarkets.
During the 1940s, low-interest home loans offered to middle-class white families through the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration enabled them to move from cities to suburbs. Supermarkets, along with many other types of businesses, followed white middle-class incomes to the suburbs.
African American families were unable to access the same low-interest home loans as white families due to government sanctioned redlining, restrictive housing covenants, and discrimination, and were left stranded in the cities.
By 1970, the demographics of the country had drastically changed, and the typical northern African American was “more likely to live with other blacks than with whites” and “suburbanites constituted a majority within metropolitan America.” Cities continued to lose supermarkets in the 1980s while, nationally, supermarket openings surpassed closings.
Some of the most famous places in America were built by destroying non-white neighborhoods. See: Central Park destroying Seneca Village, Dodger Stadium being built by evicting Hispanic residents of Chavez Ravine and countless other accounts.
A 2012 report using 2000 census and 2006 data found that 23.5 million people live in food deserts, and “11.5 million of these people have low incomes themselves.”
In the Bay Area alone, there are more than 900 neighborhoods considered food deserts. 600 of those are in San Francisco.
San Francisco is a city where every neighborhood is distinct. They change block to block, and recognizably so. You can see the makeup up of the city by the types of stores in each neighborhood. One of the more nausea-inducing parts of living here that the Tenderloin is just seen as some lost cause.
You can see the reality when you look at a map.
In the greater Tenderloin area, there are corners stores and small grocery stores — some of which are bodegas that are literally called supermarkets — but there aren’t any major supermarkets embedded in the neighborhood.
There are Trader Joe’s at the fringes, if you walk down towards Moscone Center on Market Street, or up towards California Street. There’s a Whole Foods there, too, which might only be out-priced by the comically expensive, nearby Mollie Stones.
Unless there’s a financial incentive provided by local and federal governments, major supermarket companies won’t be convinced to build in low-income areas.
There are, luckily, people and programs out there that are seeking to remedy this issue, which, again, could be solved.
Services like Imperfect Foods, founded in San Francisco, deliver quality, affordable, funny-looking produce — with “cosmetic quirks, irregular sizes, or are just surplus” — because they generally don’t look quite right, but are safe to eat.
Per ReFED.com, 35 percent of food that is grown goes uneaten, making up 130 billion meals worth of food, wasted. There is enough food. It’s just not distributed.
Signing up for online delivery isn’t always a reasonable option, though, and isn’t quite as directed towards communities that need food resources.
Urban Tilth is a farm and operation founded in 2005 and based in Richmond — an area with multiple food deserts — that “hires, and trains local residents to cultivate agriculture, feed our community, and restore relationships to land to build a more sustainable food system, within a just and healthier community.”
They work to distribute a massive amount of food in the area — 128,239 pounds of food in 2021 — through a variety of means including free plant and food stands, and a Farm to Table CSA (community supported agriculture) that “looks to close the food insecurity gap for people living in West Contra Costa by delivering boxes of veggies, fruits, and herbs directly to people’s homes.”
It shouldn’t take good samaritans with innovative, grassroots ideas to amend issues like food security, but that’s often the way it works.
Operations like theirs will only continue to grow, especially as awareness of food insecurity, and its root causes, becomes more well known.
Vegans are right, they’re just terrible at marketing
I realize this is a bit of an abrupt transition. In my head, these topics are all connected through the theme of barriers to cooking. Grassroots, sustainable farming feels like a decent segue into veganism.
Maybe the main long-term consideration for high-quality cooking is sustainability. The sheer quantity of food we produce in this country is worrying.
I mentioned the tonnage of waste above, but let’s look at it another way: with chicken.
Every time I think about chicken wings places, and the math that goes into being a business based entirely around chicken wings, I get a little nauseous.
Every chicken has two arms that break down into four chicken wings.
Unless there is a massive, underground operation to genetically modify chickens to have multiple wings, that’s a fucking harrowing thought.
According to an old, now-inaccessible PDF — that you can still find, secretly, here —Buffalo Wild Wings, the largest purveyor of wings in the U.S., sold 768 million chicken wings in 2014… and a billion “boneless” wings. Sorry, let me write that out.
768,000,000 chicken wings.
That comes out to… 44,200,000 chickens. 44.2 million chickens. For traditional wings alone.
How is that even possible? It’s possible because there are… more than 33 billion chickens on the planet at any one time.
That’s three times as many chickens as people on this planet. They could overthrow governments!
I know our brains are notoriously bad with big numbers, so just take the first three digits. 768 chicken wings.
Go digit by digit.
Eight chicken wings. That’s two chickens.
68 wings. That’s 17 chickens and enough wings to sustain, what, six guys watching at a bar?
768 wings. That’s 192 chickens. It’s starting to get to the point where it’s hard to visualize that.
Now, multiply those last two number by 1,000,000. That’s how much one restaurant chain used in one year, nearly a decade ago, solely for traditional wings.
This SNL sketch is a decent way to visualize that:
This isn’t a math experiment to get you to become a vegan, though it probably feels like it.
It’s just a nice, “hmm, vegans have a point,” thought before eating wings.
I don’t know why some vegans think shouting at you to go vegan is a convincing strategy.
Their argument is presented in either the most passive aggressive guilt trip you’ve ever experienced, or some sort of outrageous display accusing you of chicken genocide.
My girlfriend and I were walking in the city a couple weeks ago and a woman came out of her apartment with a dog. After we said hi, she responded with a smile and said, “Go vegan, if you’re not already,” followed by an unnerving stare.
It took a good 30 seconds to register what she said.
She came out of her house with that locked and loaded. Imagine telling someone good morning and they respond with “stop killing animals.”
Her energy:
I’m not vegan, though my grandpa is after converting a few years ago. When I visited him in the suburbs of Las Vegas a while back, he made me a vegan burger.
It was one of those pea plant protein burgers that’s got a beet-like pink coloring to it. As I was eating, he looked at me smiling to himself and said, “notice anything?” as if he thought he had hoodwinked me into not noticing it wasn’t red meat.
But you don’t need to compete with burgers, and it’s hard to imagine a vegan burger will ever taste exactly teh same. Few people are making the vegan switch because it tastes as good or like a burger. It just has to be decent in its own right, and it usually is.
Here’s the thing. Veganism is a pretty admirable philosophy. It just seems to be paired with a bizarre, PETA-like militancy.
What I don’t understand is that they have facts on their side. And vegan food, at this point, is really damn good. You can get incredibly creative with the way you cook by limiting yourself to non-animal products.
I cooked dinner a couple years ago in Tahoe for a few family friends, including our friend Shelly, who’s a vegan and firm supporter of the blog (and who guilt tripped me successfully over Passover to get this going again. Shout out Shelly).
While I made fish for everyone else, I also made a cauliflower rosemary soup, and a vegan risotto with vegetable stock and vegan butter. I’m not saying this to pat myself on the back. It was excellent. The fish was the worst part of the dinner.
Which… is why you don’t need to scream insane things like “meat is murder” or “dairy is rape” (an actual thing painted on an SF sidewalk) to convince people not to eat animals. There are more convincing arguments on the side of veganism than against it.
My philosophy is somewhere in the middle. I can’t see myself ever fully giving up meat, but I also rarely eat read meat as it is. I’ll get one aggressive craving for a steak a year.
And yeah man, I’m aware cows are cute as shit. I love them. I love watching those videos of highland cows with bangs jump around like giant dogs. But I still need to go to In-N-Out a few times a year.
I am also aware of the data, which is why I cannot wrap my head around veganism’s all-or-nothing branding — instead of encouraging incremental diet changes.
The data says that producing animal products at the rate we currently do is and will only continue to be more catastrophic for the environment, raising temperatures to climate nightmare levels.
A 2021 study found global greenhouse emissions from animal-based foods are twice that of plant-based foods.
The use of cows, pigs and other animals for food, as well as livestock feed, is responsible for 57 percent of all food production emission. Beef is by far the most deleterious.
Alright alright, we get it. Beef is bad for the environment. You just said you eat it. You eat chicken all the time.
True. But I think having a heightened awareness of just how much we consume is important. The more I think about it, the more open I am to consciously eat non-meat products — even if I’m not going to fully give up burgers.
What the future holds (and what to do with a whole chicken)
Awareness about food is crucial because there’s an invisibility in the process of purchasing something at the grocery store and how it gets there.
How is there so much? How are they always stocked?
It’s the sort of thing that boggles my mind and has landed me at a realization that it cannot be and is not sustainable.
Making conscious decisions shouldn’t all rely on the consumer, even though it’s how corporations love to frame these issues.
A few outrageously wealthy people have the power to amend the most pressing issues we have.
But they don’t want to change what they’re doing, so they tell us to “go recycle, lil guy,” and guilt us by letting us know what our emissions are for flights while whipping around the world on PJs.
A lot of this feels overwhelming, especially when food costs go up and you’re tired from work and just need to make something for dinner.
When I can, though, I try and be more intentional about what I’m buying.
As an example, I like to buy a whole chicken; there are a lot of ways to cook it, but spatchcocking it, rubbing it with lime or lemon, garlic, ginger, plenty of kosher salt, black pepper and red pepper, and putting one or multiple of rosemary, thyme and tarragon is pretty reliable.
I’ll cook the fatty scraps and give them to my dog, and save the bones for chicken stock.
You can also save the skin and make a Jewish version of ghee, called schmaltz (of course it’s called schmaltz), by rendering fat and chicken skin, sometimes adding onion, then letting it turn into little fried bits called gribenes, which is basically chicken bacon concoctions.
As for the bones?
Put them in cold water and let it simmer for a few hours.
Skim the fat off the top after it gets to a light boil, then add whatever you want: whole garlic, chunks of carrots, leeks, onions, the same herbs you used for the chicken, and maybe some whole cloves. Make sure it’s at the lightest of boils, never rolling.
After a few hours, drain and stash the liquid gold in some tupperware in the freezer for whenever you need it. Give the leftover carrots to your pup.
This is, as much as anything, a reminder to myself to be conscious about what and how I’m cooking. I intend to relish the final days of cooking over a gas stove before we inevitably (and rightfully, I guess) get forced over to electric. I’m not ready for that yet.
You could make a pretty compelling argument that oversupply and climate change concerns are above our pay grade, so why not enjoy this while it lasts?
I don’t necessarily think either argument — that we should be conscious and conservation focused, or enjoy all there is to experience in gastronomy while we still can — is inherently wrong.
Life needs to be lived with joy, and who’s to say eating red meat is gluttonous or morally corrupt when we’ve been surviving on it since we grew limbs and climbed out of the water however many millions of years ago?
Red meat sycophants like the Liver King are definitely doing it wrong. But finding a balance of treating ourselves to things that are not sustainable on occasion, while generally being conscious of our impact, might be the right approach.
Either way, it’s hard to be a person. Just make sure to — as my favorite food YouTuber and brilliant home Italian cook says — “Go feed yourself.”