I mentioned to Critch (Academician on LW) awhile back that I was considering learning how to cook, and he responded that it's not worth my time. I blinked, remembered approximately how much I valued my time, and more or less had to agree. This is a time/money tradeoff that many people whose time is valuable may not be navigating sensibly. There are lots of ways to pay other people to prepare food for you - restaurants, hiring a personal chef, meal delivery programs, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a social network of some kind where people offered to cook for other people, and if there isn't someone should make it.
(I currently obtain food partially through restaurants and partially through a combination of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein.)
A few words of possible dissent.
If you enjoy cooking, then time spent doing it isn't a pure cost. Many people enjoy cooking. I happen to be one. You might turn out to be one too.
If you pay money for food, all the money is gone. If you spend time cooking, you can do other things with some of the same time -- if there is someone else around, you can talk to them; you can listen to the radio or (intermittently) read; etc. So beware of simplistic time/money tradeoff analyses.
Cooking is a useful social skill as well as a way of getting edible food for yourself. (You can invite people over for meals, which is by no means socially equivalent to inviting them out for meals.)
Good restaurant food is quite expensive. (Admittedly less so in the US, where I think you live, than in the UK, where I live.) If your tastes aren't cheap, eating out a lot may not be such a great tradeoff even if you regard your time as very valuable.
The time-cost of eating out is not zero. Depending on where you eat, it may be distinctly more than the time-cost of cooking for yourself. (Though, again, you can do other things while you wait for your food.)
I am not accusing you or Academian (or anyone in par
If you enjoy cooking, then time spent doing it isn't a pure cost. Many people enjoy cooking. I happen to be one. You might turn out to be one too.
Sure, but the OP, at least, doesn't sound like one of these people, and I doubt he's alone.
Cooking is a useful social skill as well as a way of getting edible food for yourself. (You can invite people over for meals, which is by no means socially equivalent to inviting them out for meals.)
Even if I learned how to cook, it's unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle. If I want eating-at-people's-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself. If I personally want to be the cook to win friendship points with my friends, that might be a good strategy, but it's probably worth thinking about whether I have other strategies that play better to my comparative advantages for winning friendship points.
...Beware of simple-minded time/money tradeoff analysis where you assume the value of your time equals (or even is well approximated by) the amount you are paid. That's a safe assumption if you actually have the option of adjusting your working hours a
Even if I learned how to cook, it's unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle.
Most people resolve this by specializing in certain dishes. You could probably never be a better general cook than your friend's wife who really loves cooking, but you could learn to make a single night's dinner better than her with a small amount of practice. Just keep repeating the same appetizer, the same entree, the same two sides, and the same desert.
I have a friend who can only make Eggplant Parmesian, bacon-deviled-eggs, and chocolate covered strawberries. As long as he doesn't host more than twice a month, nobody notices this lack of variety because each of the dishes exceeds restaurant quality. He can't cook outside of that, but he's still considered amazing at cooking because that's how people's memory works.
If I want eating-at-people's-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself.
You know, this seems socially naive to me, in a way characteristic of ideallistic young introverts. People do not usually respond well if you offer to pay for stuff they would otherwise enjoy doing for free, under the right circumstances (such as reciprocal dinner invites).
But I may be wrong, give it a try and report on the results, one of us will probably learn something.
How are you calculating time cost?
I can cook crockpot dinners with 15 minutes total time (prep, check time, washing/cleanup), even though it takes hours to cook. This will prepare ~5 meals for both myself and my girlfriend that cost maybe 1.5 mins each to reheat later. At a total time of 30 mins input for 10 meals worth 5 dollars of saving each, that's a cost of $100/hr.
That's a ridiculously efficient use of time. Even if you're a third as efficient and take 45 minutes prep (the 15 mins to reheat should be constant), you're still running $50/hr, which is still excellent. The initial learning cost for crockpot cooking is very low as well.
Do you calculate this as 4 hours spent (fire time) or 30 minutes (your time spent)?
You can do similar things with stews, rice+stock dishes (gumbo/jambalaya/etouffee/paella), sous vide, and roasts/loafs. These are the easiest. Once you get better at cooking, you can expand and cook other dishes a similar way. As you get better, you spend a smaller and smaller fraction of time actually attending to fire.
Preparing meals in bulk definitely seems like a much better investment of time than cooking individual meals. I'll have to look into this.
What kind of food do you get at restaurants?
I've found huge pot types of food like curry/chili/soup get pretty cheap. The ingredients are usually $30 or under and they take 2-3 hours to make and last you most of the week. Although there's a weird balance between the comfort of having food and the tendency to get sick of food after eating it for a week. But I think you can freeze them also. And you'd need to figure out how much you hate chopping things, but you can listen to music or podcasts while you do it.
I'm pretty surprised by the hostility of some of the comments on this thread. This works for me only because I grew up chopping veggies and eating these types of food my whole life. There's a ton of restaurant food I wouldn't try to make.
Home cooking includes shopping and clean-up. It would be hard to figure out the exact average time costs per meal, but it isn't nothing. When you're waiting at a restaurant, you can read.
Several people, myself included, expressed frustration with the time, cost, stress, of preparing reasonably healthy and tasty meals.
I struggled with this problem for years. A few months ago I hit upon what is, to me, the ideal solution. I pay someone to come to my place twice per week and prepare all my meals. I live in Argentina so the cost of hiring this person, which is about USD 80 per month, is unlikely to reflect what you'd have to pay for a similar service in your own country. The fact that I only eat salads (including fruit salads) also lowers the costs considerably, so you'd very likely have to pay more than I do if you are located in Europe or North America.
Several people, myself included, expressed frustration with the time, cost, stress, of preparing reasonably healthy and tasty meals.
Steaming fish and veggies is trivial and takes little time. Throw it in, wait 15-20 min and serve with a choice of dressing. And you don't have to worry about not eating "real food". Of course, for someone who is used to fast food, they won't appear tasty. You can also blend veggies (even kale) and fruits together, with or without milk, if you invest in a decent blender. You can fry mushrooms in a non-stick pan while waiting for the steamer, takes very little effort and no skill.
It's tantalizing idea, but I think cooking and eating 'regular' solid food is here to stay for the time being.
There has actually been quite a lot of research in modified food intake, because there are many conditions which cause people to need parental nutrition and TPN -- cancer, surgery, improper digestion, etc. There is even an official society -- called A.S.P.E.N. (https://www.nutritioncare.org) -- and they offer certifications, because the field is really incredibly complicated. People have survived on total parental nutrition for years, even decades...
The more restrictive your dietary preferences (kosher, paleo, vegan, low-carb, pick your food fetish) the more benefit there is to learning how to cook and spending time cooking. Almost any restaurant, and almost exclusively any restaurant that prepares food quickly, uses massive amounts of corn starch, vegetable oils, sugar, flour, grain fed meat, milk, farmed fish, Crisco, and other ingredients I no longer want to consume. If you're not averse to eating fast food, then you may well save time by eating at Wendy's, Popeyes, and Au Bon Pain.
For me, althoug...
Also please share any other strategies you have for making food less of a chore.
I don't hate cooking, but when I'm living on my own I really don't feel like spending half an hour preparing food, 10 mins eating and 20 mins washing up every night. My solution has been to make a big pot of healthy stew at the beginning of the week (eg, vegetables, lentils (or sometimes meat), tinned tomatoes, stock cube, spices). Total cooking time is about 2 hours, but after the 30 mins of preparing I can leave it on the hob/in the oven and get on with other things. I leave a portion for the next day and freeze the rest of it for later in the week.
Watch out for the phytic acid in the oats and sunflower seeds. Phytic acid chelates with zinc, magnesium, calcium and iron, making them much less bioavailable. So, looking at the spreadsheet, it looks like you'll need an alternative source of calcium and magnesium; also, eat meat at a different time from the shake to absorb the zinc and iron.
Maybe just have a daily glass of water with Concentrace or something similar to make sure you have enough of those minerals. CFAR supplies Concentrace at its office; they seem persuaded of its worth.
Redacted: Also, be ...
I've had an identical project for a few months now.
A spreadsheet (under Edward) for ingredients and supplements for my shake which is missing potassium and fiber. (which are provided for with KCl salt and oats) RDAs are also not fixed for 1.5x caloric intake.
This is designed with weightlifting, preparation time, mobility, and close to 3000 cals/day in mind.
Overall cost is $3.84/day/person.
Tastes like thicker strawberry milk.
Updated spreadsheet with price distribution and complete RDAs (except phosphorous/pantathenic acid). $4.36/day/person
I expect the pric...
Anyone have a good suggestion about what a lactose-intolerant person could potentially replace the milk with?
If you plug 'Brain aging and midlife tofu consumption' into Google Scholar, one of the little links under the first hit points to 'Cited by 176'; if you click on that, you can hit a checkbox for 'Search within citing articles'; then you can search a query like "experiment OR randomized OR blind" which yields 121 results.
The first result shows no negative effect and a trend to a benefit, the second is inaccessible, the second & third are reviews whose abstract suggests it would argue for benefits, and the fourth discusses sleep & mood benefits to soy diets.
Then I got bored and stopped reading. Really, either you or Jayson could (and maybe should) have done this.
I just made my first batch of this and it was pretty decent. Not amazing, but definitely palatable. I had one big cup in place of dinner; I expected to want more but it was surprisingly filling. I started with the base recipe and added a scoop of vanilla whey protein, plus about a quarter cup of frozen chopped spinach.
I was expecting to have more issues with storing or measuring out the frozen OJ concentrate, but I just opened it, scooped some out with a spoon, put the lid back on, and stood it up in my freezer.
I offer the following:
Approach cooking as a hobby, not a chore. Aim for deliciousness every time and take pride in your craft!
Eat with friends and/or family, often. For these ocdasions, make foods that scale well: stews, shepherd's pie, tuna pasta bake, meatloaf etc. Make those, and invite others over.
When you eat on your own: salads and stir-fry dishes are quick, healthy and yummy. A sandwich press (cafe style with flat top and bottom), is great for crispy bacon, fast steak/hamburgers (and toasted sandwiches).
RDA is based on a 2000 calorie diet, and since the recipe in it's current proportions has only 1156 calories, it might be easier to interpret if you calculated the total nutrient values by (total % of RDA)*(2000 calories)/(number of calories in recipe), to give sort of a "nutrients per calorie" measure.
Wikipedia says plant iron is harder to absorb than meat iron ("heme" iron), so your percentages for iron may be an underestimate.
When someone says "I hate doing X", they can either a) stop doing X, or b) learn to like X. In this case, I suggest option b).
For me, learning how to cook a few simple, healthy, tasty meals has been one of the most useful skills I've acquired. I suppose it depends on your income, lifestyle and taste, but I prefer to know exactly what I'm putting in my body rather than taking my chances with restaurant food. At this point, I like my own cooking better than almost any restaurant, and it actually saves me time and trouble (and lots of money). Besides, there is an art and a Zen pleasure to cooking that I highly recommend. I see no downside to learning how to cook.
This probably doesn't apply to RomeoStevens, but I know one person who hated cooking, and it turned that at least part of the problem was that she got backaches. She was tall, and the solution was raising her work surfaces.
Sometimes it isn't a matter of learning to like something, it takes rearranging matters so that it's more likable.
I see no downside to learning how to cook.
I'm very surprised if you see no downsides at all, especially for someone with RomeoStevens' revealed preferences.
Anyone have the old version of the recipe? It contained Marmite, OJ, sunflower seeds, and a bunch of other things. RomeoStevens doesn't have time to dig it up, so this is a final plea directed at any archivists out there.
Good idea, I thought about trying something similar. But I already need very little time to prepare my meals because I just eat "simple" food.
Regarding the ingredients: I would take flaxseeds instead of sunflower since they have way more omega 3.
You probably know this, but for those who don't, the person who made Soylent wants to start a Kickstarter for his project in the near future to make it a real product. I have high hopes and only slightly less high expectations that he'll succeed.
Can you go into more detail on your third and fourth points for not copying Soylent?
While I'm intrigued by these and similar attempts and want people to do them so I can see what hapens, I would be leery of trying this on myself because I suspect nutrition goes beyond the micro/macro nutrients we currently understand. In particular, I'm not sure we can treat "carbs", "proteins" and "fats" as wholesale categories. Not that I know enough about the topic yet to make that statement...that's just the assumption my priors are telling me to go with until I educate myself further.
I'm not good at planning ahead of tim...
Doesn't the orange juice curdle the milk?
Update: John Maxwell and I have a startup making nutritionally complete food, MealSquares (which is likely better for weightloss see below)
This came up at a meetup a while back. Several people, myself included, expressed frustration with the time, cost, stress, of preparing reasonably healthy and tasty meals. I suspect this frustration is widespread among people who do work that requires a lot of focus. Leaving flow because your body needs maintenance is annoying. So I'm sharing a strategy that has helped me.
I was encouraged by the success of Soylent. I had been playing around with ingredients for post workout shakes for months. But reading the Soylent blog posts inspired me to do a full micronutrient breakdown of what I had been drinking and optimize in a more rigorous fashion. Why not copy the soylent recipe?
1. I'm not realistically going to source all of those ingredients
2. He risks (and has already had problems with) misdosing himself to deleterious effect, this problem doesn't exist with whole foods
3. The absorption of powders vs whole foods is contentious
4. I don't agree with his criteria for inclusion
In comparison, my recipe is extremely easy and cheap to source, due to the small number of ingredients.
There is an immediate problem with meal replacement shakes in that liquid calories tend to have a significantly smaller satiety effect than solid foods. So this will probably not be a good solution for you if have difficulties keeping your overall caloric intake down.
[EDIT: Removed the link to the recipe, John and I are planning to commercialize this in addition to MealSquares at some point. Get in touch with me if you really need the recipe and won't spread it around.]
This is a work in progress and I am looking for further ideas for improvement. Subjectively I can say I find this recipe delicious, and hugely prefer it post-workout to even the best junk food (pizza, etc.). The combination of milk, vanilla, banana, and orange juice tastes kind of like an orange julius. It has also been a major stress relief and time saver. I don't worry so much about nutrient deficiencies anymore as this shake in addition to a meat or egg based meal has me pretty well covered.
I am due for another blood panel and will report any anomalies as I've been drinking a similar concoction for around 6-8 months.
I am open to debating the merits of my ingredient choices (as well as the overall wisdom of this scheme) in the comments. Also please share any other strategies you have for making food less of a chore.
Edit: I finally got my blood panel back and everything is looking good. Triglycerides unchanged, HDL up, LDL slightly down. All other numbers within the healthy range. I'm a little concerned about my iron level (what is considered normal may not be optimal for longevity), and plan on giving blood to lower it, but this is orthogonal to the use of a dietary shake I believe.
Edit: Kefir is expensive but highly recommended for lactose intolerant individuals. It is also delicious.