So there I was, surrounded by approximately fourteen billion individually wrapped ingredients, a 27-step recipe card that somehow required both a saucepan AND a skillet (why??), and a ticking clock reminding me I had exactly 37 minutes until my next Zoom call. The kitchen counter looked like a produce section had exploded. My recycling bin was already overflowing with tiny plastic bottles and miniature paper bags. And I had just realized the “45-minute easy weeknight dinner” I’d signed up for required me to finely mince eight cloves of garlic.
This was supposed to make my life easier.
Let me back up a bit. Three months ago, I was drowning in a sea of takeaway containers and guilt. Working from home had somehow made my eating habits worse, not better, despite literally being five steps from my kitchen all day. The problem wasn’t access to cooking facilities—it was decision fatigue. By 6 PM, after making roughly 10,000 work decisions, the thought of planning a meal made my brain short-circuit. I’d find myself staring blankly into the fridge for what felt like hours before giving up and ordering yet another sad desk dinner.
Enter meal delivery kits, those cheerfully branded boxes that promised to solve all my culinary problems. “No shopping! No planning! No waste! Just delicious home-cooked meals in minutes!” the Instagram ads chirped at me. After the fifteenth targeted ad (featuring an impossibly attractive couple laughing while chopping vegetables, because apparently meal prep is HILARIOUS), I caved.
“It’s basically outsourcing the decision-making part of cooking,” I justified to my flatmate, Emma, as I signed up for a trial. “All the benefits of home cooking without the mental load. It’s practically self-care.”
Emma, who meal preps with terrifying efficiency every Sunday, just raised an eyebrow. “If you say so. Just don’t let them pile up in the hallway like your Amazon packages.”
I ignored this completely fair criticism of my online shopping habits and eagerly awaited my first delivery, mentally calculating all the time and stress I was about to save.
My first box arrived on a Tuesday. It was enormous—significantly larger than the contents warranted, but filled with enough ice packs to survive a nuclear winter. I lugged it up three flights of stairs (the lift in my building has been “temporarily out of order” since 2019), already slightly winded before the cooking had even begun.
The unboxing experience was initially delightful. Everything was so… cute. Tiny bottles of balsamic vinegar! Adorable packets of spices! Exactly two mushrooms in their very own paper bag! I felt like a giant raiding a miniature grocery store.
But then came the sorting and storing. Each meal needed to be kept separate, with refrigerated items separated from pantry items, and God help you if you mixed up which tiny unmarked spice packet went with which recipe. By the time I’d emptied the box, broken it down for recycling, and organized all the components in my decidedly not-Instagram-worthy fridge, 45 minutes had passed.
No matter. The actual cooking would be streamlined and efficient, unlike my usual chaotic approach. I selected the meal that looked simplest—a “Quick & Easy Weeknight Pasta” that promised to be ready in 30 minutes.
Two hours later, I was eating slightly overcooked pasta with a sauce that could only be described as “aggressively mediocre.” My kitchen looked like a crime scene, I’d used every utensil I owned, and I’d had to wash my cutting board three separate times during the preparation process.
What had gone wrong? For starters, the recipe assumed I had the knife skills of a professional chef, the multitasking abilities of an air traffic controller, and a kitchen twice the size of my actual one. While I was carefully measuring out 1/16 teaspoon of some obscure spice blend, the garlic was burning, the pasta water was boiling over, and I still hadn’t managed to “finely julienne” the bell pepper.
“It gets easier,” I told myself. “There’s a learning curve.”
And to be fair, it did get marginally easier—but never actually easy. By week three, I’d developed a system and could usually complete a meal kit recipe within 15 minutes of the promised time. But the mental relief I’d been seeking remained stubbornly elusive.
Here’s what the ads don’t tell you about meal kits: they eliminate one type of mental load (deciding what to eat and shopping for it) but replace it with another (following complicated instructions under time pressure with zero room for improvisation). And don’t get me started on the packaging guilt. I’m pretty sure I single-handedly accelerated climate change with all the tiny plastic bags, bottles, and containers that came with each meal.
Then there were the weirdly specific ingredients that seemed designed solely to create waste. One recipe required exactly 1.5 tablespoons of coconut milk. The kit provided a tiny can containing about 3 tablespoons—leaving me with exactly 1.5 tablespoons of leftover coconut milk, an amount too small to use for anything else but large enough to make me feel guilty about throwing it away. It sat in my fridge for two weeks, silently judging me, before growing something fuzzy and finding its way to the bin.
By month two, I’d developed a love-hate relationship with my meal kit subscription. I loved not having to think about what to cook or shop for ingredients. I hated the pressure of knowing those ingredients were slowly wilting in my fridge, their imminent expiration dates a ticking clock of potential food waste. The meals had to be cooked in a specific order based on ingredient perishability, creating a rigid dinner schedule that didn’t account for the day I got stuck in an emergency meeting or the night I just really wanted to order a pizza.
“You know you can just… skip a week, right?” Emma pointed out after finding me panic-cooking at 11 PM because I’d remembered I had a fish dish that absolutely had to be made that day.
“Then what would I eat next week?” I asked, slightly hysterical, as if grocery stores had been outlawed and my meal kit was my only food source.
She gave me the look that roommates reserve for when they’re questioning all their life choices. “The… supermarket? Like you did for the entire rest of your life before this started?”
But that was precisely what I was trying to avoid. I’d become dependent on having my meals decided for me, and the thought of going back to the dreaded “what should I make for dinner?” question filled me with inexplicable dread.
The breaking point came during week ten. I’d had a particularly grueling day of back-to-back Zoom meetings, my eyes were burning from screen time, and all I wanted was something quick and comforting. What awaited me was a recipe card for “Deconstructed Wellington with Micro Greens and Hand-Whipped Shallot Reduction.”
I stared at the pile of ingredients, at the 32-step recipe card, at the note specifying that this gourmet masterpiece would take “just 65 short minutes!” to prepare… and I broke. I physically couldn’t do it. Not that day. Not when my brain was already mush and my patience was thinner than the “hand-rolled pastry” I was somehow supposed to create.
I ordered a takeaway, shoved all the Wellington ingredients into the fridge, and had a minor existential crisis at my kitchen table.
The next day, with the clarity that only comes from MSG and a good night’s sleep, I realized something: these meal kits weren’t reducing my stress. They were just replacing one kind of stress (decision-making) with another (performance anxiety). Instead of the simple question “what do I want to eat?”, I was now dealing with “can I follow these precise instructions to create an Instagram-worthy result or am I a culinary failure?”
It was cooking as performance rather than nourishment or pleasure. And the audience was… who, exactly? The meal kit company? My social media followers? Some imaginary cooking show judge living in my head?
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d signed up for these kits to make my life easier, to remove decisions and reduce waste. Instead, I was spending more time cooking, creating more waste with all the packaging, and feeling more stressed about mealtimes than ever before.
I canceled my subscription that afternoon.
For a week, I went back to takeaway meals, but something had shifted. The meal kits had failed me, but they’d also reminded me that I actually do enjoy cooking when it’s on my own terms. I just needed a middle ground between “decide every aspect of every meal from scratch” and “follow this 40-step recipe for a Tuesday night dinner.”
My solution turned out to be embarrassingly simple: I made a list of ten easy meals I enjoy cooking and eating. Meals with flexible ingredients that could be swapped based on what’s available or what needs using up. I do one proper shop a week, and I decide each morning which of those meals I’ll make that night, based on time available and energy levels.
Some nights it’s just pasta with butter and cheese. Other nights I might tackle something more complex if I feel like it. The key difference is that it’s my choice, not a obligation set by a recipe card that seems to be judging me from the counter.
Look, I’m not saying meal kits are the devil. For some people, they’re probably brilliant. If you love following precise instructions, have ample counter space, and enjoy the treasure hunt aspect of finding 17 different components for a single meal, go for it. They might be exactly what you need.
But for me—someone who was looking to reduce mental load rather than redirect it—they created more stress than they solved. I wanted convenience but found constraint. I wanted simplicity but got complexity packaged as simplicity, which is somehow even worse.
The greatest irony? I actually cook more now than I did during my meal kit phase. Because when cooking feels like a choice rather than an assignment, it transforms from obligation back into something that can actually be enjoyable. Even if sometimes that “cooking” is just scrambled eggs on toast.
And I haven’t finely minced a single clove of garlic since.
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