10 ms·

It's bordering on out-of-control in some U.S. cities. About six months ago, I briefly stopped while in the middle of cleaning our apartment and realized the maj

It's bordering on out-of-control in some U.S. cities. About six months ago, I briefly stopped while in the middle of cleaning our apartment and realized the majority of our 'trash' was food delivery detritus. We've been spending $500-$700 a month on food delivery this year, and I only see that increasing in the future. I can regularly obtain a $1 (sometimes less) delivery fee by selecting among Uber Eats/GrubHub/DoorDash/etc. The pricing blood-bath between restaurants (and delivery companies) combined with convenience-induced laziness has me doing nutty things like order a $6 froyo from a place ~100 meters away. Speaking of Blue Apron, I recently threw out half of an unopened meal kit of theirs that convenience-induced laziness had caused to rot away in the fridge. The delivery trend is strong. Not sure it's a net positive society-wide habit.

zanny 8y ago
Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do, and is an acquired skill that takes a lot of blunt learning of a lot of minute details about how certain ingredients interact. In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking. That being said the true optimization would be that most people be content to eat in cafeteria style settings where there are limited options and the chefs are using whatever is freshest and most affordable and availability is fixed (even if you just grab and go with the food). There is a trade off between menu diversity, the prices you pay for it, and how good it can actually be where 16+ hour open restaurants with several page menus (including fast food) are making concessions on freshness / shortcuts in preparation to provide their diversity and availability. I think a lot of this relates to how we are in a transnational period for density. In the coming decades I am almost certain we will trend globally towards packing people into apartment / condo style living in city cores because the trends of sprawl and mcmansion single families that are going to be inherited by unmarried or childless descendants without the incomes to support them falls apart. Right now trying to build up a "local" kitchen you can go to three times a day for regular, good, healthy and diverse meals isn't feasible because the density isn't there to get them to walkable convenience, but I hope rising density makes them a possibility. At those kinds of scales it becomes a technical probability we might just get short range delivery drones where the kitchens advertise via app or notification whats on the menu and you just select what you want and a lil bot brings it to you a la room service but optimized in the aforementioned ways to make it more sustainable.
- michaelmior 8y ago
  > Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do I think this is completely false and it's unfortunate that people have this perception of cooking. Yes, it's true that if you want to be able to cook all the sorts of food you're used to having delivered, a lot of skill and hardware is probably required. However, you can cook a lot of great, tasty meals with a single pot and pan and a few inexpensive utensils and limited skill required. I think some of the biggest challenges to more people cooking at home is that it will always take more time than ordering.
  - mszkoda 8y ago
    Agreed on the hardware requirements. I love to cook and have an extensive range of very expensive pots/pans/utensils with very specific uses, but in the beginning I had very few. I also still only use a few of them most of the time. You can do almost everything with a 12" skillet/frying pan, a large sauce pan (4 qt maybe since you probably want to cook pasta in it), and one of those sets of 3-6 utensils (you don't even need that many) if you are cooking for 1-4.
    - namdnay 8y ago
      And a kitchen/kitchen corner. I think what the parent is suggesting is that apartments wouldn't have kitchens at all, and you would eat at communal cafeteria. I believe this is what the vast majority of city dwellers in imperial rome would do?
      - bunderbunder 8y ago
        Or in places like the USA, not that long ago. Y'know how, in old movies, single people would live in single-room apartments, often with a Murphy bed that played a part in some amount of slapstick humor? They weren't cooking in there - dinner was served downstairs.
        jhbadger 8y ago

zanny 8y ago

Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do, and is an acquired skill that takes a lot of blunt learning of a lot of minute details about how certain ingredients interact. In the same way you don't ask everyone to learn to repair car engines or diagnose medical issues modern society puts a lot of pressure on specialization of hard work like cooking. That being said the true optimization would be that most people be content to eat in cafeteria style settings where there are limited options and the chefs are using whatever is freshest and most affordable and availability is fixed (even if you just grab and go with the food). There is a trade off between menu diversity, the prices you pay for it, and how good it can actually be where 16+ hour open restaurants with several page menus (including fast food) are making concessions on freshness / shortcuts in preparation to provide their diversity and availability. I think a lot of this relates to how we are in a transnational period for density. In the coming decades I am almost certain we will trend globally towards packing people into apartment / condo style living in city cores because the trends of sprawl and mcmansion single families that are going to be inherited by unmarried or childless descendants without the incomes to support them falls apart. Right now trying to build up a "local" kitchen you can go to three times a day for regular, good, healthy and diverse meals isn't feasible because the density isn't there to get them to walkable convenience, but I hope rising density makes them a possibility. At those kinds of scales it becomes a technical probability we might just get short range delivery drones where the kitchens advertise via app or notification whats on the menu and you just select what you want and a lil bot brings it to you a la room service but optimized in the aforementioned ways to make it more sustainable.

michaelmior 8y ago
> Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do I think this is completely false and it's unfortunate that people have this perception of cooking. Yes, it's true that if you want to be able to cook all the sorts of food you're used to having delivered, a lot of skill and hardware is probably required. However, you can cook a lot of great, tasty meals with a single pot and pan and a few inexpensive utensils and limited skill required. I think some of the biggest challenges to more people cooking at home is that it will always take more time than ordering.
- mszkoda 8y ago
  Agreed on the hardware requirements. I love to cook and have an extensive range of very expensive pots/pans/utensils with very specific uses, but in the beginning I had very few. I also still only use a few of them most of the time. You can do almost everything with a 12" skillet/frying pan, a large sauce pan (4 qt maybe since you probably want to cook pasta in it), and one of those sets of 3-6 utensils (you don't even need that many) if you are cooking for 1-4.
  - namdnay 8y ago
    And a kitchen/kitchen corner. I think what the parent is suggesting is that apartments wouldn't have kitchens at all, and you would eat at communal cafeteria. I believe this is what the vast majority of city dwellers in imperial rome would do?
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      Or in places like the USA, not that long ago. Y'know how, in old movies, single people would live in single-room apartments, often with a Murphy bed that played a part in some amount of slapstick humor? They weren't cooking in there - dinner was served downstairs.
      - jhbadger 8y ago