It has come to my attention that many folks don’t cook much anymore. Or, at least, not according to what constitutes my definition of cooking.
My definition of cooking includes several steps. First, you go to your recipe collection. Then you decide on something — say, tuna casserole.
Then you write out a shopping list, you head to the store, and you come home and assemble your meal.
Easy peasy.
This is how mother proceeded. Ditto with my aunts and my grandmothers.
Back in my mother’s and aunts’ and grandmothers’ day, they weren’t aware of the latest in mealtime prep.
By this, I am referring to the myriad outfits that are now vying to have you order online. Place your request, and bingo! The ingredients are purchased, diced, sliced, peeled and marinated, and delivered to your door. And all you have to do is, well, put them together.
The thinking, I suppose, is that increasingly numbers of people are too busy with their jobs or their gym memberships or their social media accounts to be bothered with something as brutally pedestrian as recipe perusal. Either that, or they are completely ill equipped to navigate the aisles of a grocery store. (Produce? What’s that?)
My grandmother would never in a million years have paid someone to julienne her carrot sticks. She was not only an expert at slicing her carrots; she was also a pro at growing them.
Never in a million years would my mother have ordered our dinner via something like Skip The Plates — or whatever the heck it’s called.
I’m not exactly sure where this is headed, but it doesn’t seem to be entirely implausible that at some point, the food prep/delivery industry will not only bring me my meals, but also eat them on my behalf. (Hey, who wouldn’t love that? Why waste half an hour chowing down on dinner when you could be, oh, following folks on Twitter? Talk about liberating!)
And, quite frankly, I see no reason why such services couldn’t be expanded beyond the cooking thing. Why couldn’t also we hire people to sleep for us (Skip The Sheets?) or perform our daily ablutions (Skip The Shower?)
We are, it seems, at a crossroads in time where, well, time is hard to come by. My mother had time to cook and to shop. But sadly, she never had Twitter.
