I can’t believe this is getting downvoted. I wonder how many people who downvoted cook for themselves 100% of the time. I’ve never met anybody that does that. Usually you trade cooking nights with a spouse or roommate. You occasionally go out for a nice meal. You use preprepared ingredients.
Is a ready made meal from a spouse worse than a meal cooked by yourself? Is a frozen store bought dinner worse than a pre-cooked meal that you personally cooked and froze? Is a meal made by a chef at a nice restaurant worse because you didn’t cook it yourself? This standard is ridiculous.
It’s especially funny to me, because there’s a running joke in my family that a meal cooked by somebody else always tastes better than when you cook it yourself.
For me the one thing that I can get out of a self-cooked meal that I can't out of anything premade is good browned onions. Something about preservation processes inevitably turns them unappealing in a way I haven't particularly noticed with other veggies in pre-made meals (at least the reasonably high-quality ones, like Saffron Road).
>I wonder how many people who downvoted cook for themselves 100% of the time.
I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. it's not about cooking, it's about making sure your whole life isn't "ready-made meals". Put the metaphor into every other aspect of life.
We will all take shortcuts somewhere, but shortcuts imply a destination. if your destination is just more McDonalds, I think we are missing something vital to out lives.
>a meal cooked by somebody else always tastes better than when you cook it yourself.
the "joke" implied intimacy in said meal. It's not the meal, it's who made it for you. coporate billionaire food chain pumping out "burgers" cooked by minimum wage workers with no upward mobility is about as distant as you can get.
No, the joke is literally that it tastes better because I’m not worrying about the fine details. You are your own worst critic and all that. When somebody else makes it, you can enjoy the food for what it is and don’t find yourself focusing on the flaws.
And I don’t think I’m missing the forest for the trees here. The whole argument hinges on, “things are innately better if I put more work into it”, which I don’t believe is true. In the specific example of ready made meals vs a meal being cooked personally, the quality of the food has no bearing on how much work it took you to prepare it.
And this is trivially provable. Wealthy people that have personal chefs certainly don’t have a lower quality of life even though they don’t personally prepare every meal. Of course McDonald’s everyday will lower your quality of life, but going to fine restaurants won’t. All of these have vastly different levels of effort involved, but the effort involved doesn’t correlate to quality of life.
It is damn near impossible to buy high quality frozen food. It’s like they is no market for it. If it’s frozen it’s made with the shittiest low quality low effort process.
I know high quality food can be frozen because I make it all the time but I can’t buy it
Yes, they are.