Against Meal Prep

It is an oppressive thing, to cook for nutrients. 

Food can be about a lot of things – novelty, family, flavor, connecting with the land, sustainability, freshness, culture, enjoyment – and by far the most depraved category of food is “nutrition.” 

Let’s get clear on what we’re talking about here. “Meal prep” as a phenomenon is distinct from, but related to, batch cooking. If you cook a big batch of stew or chili or soup and freeze it, you’re participating in a timeless thriftiness our parents would laud. Meal Prep is a more recent thing: a social-media friendly community spread out across millennial and gen Z digital culture where people compress all of their home cooking to a single day of the week. To give you a sense of the aspiration here, the top post on that subreddit in the last year was someone preparing more than a hundred meals for $150. (Sample comment: “so impressed by your planning and organization! great job, thanks for sharing!”)

Scroll through Instagram and you might find any number of influencers – or god forbid, your friends – sharing a food prep photo. There's a definite aesthetic to it all, and the look is pretty gendered. The girlies use mason jars with overnight oats; the gym bros have rows of plastic tubs with identical portions of unseasoned chicken breast-rice-broccoli. (The lighting on this photo will invariably be terrible.)

There are a lot of good reasons to do some kind of meal prep. It saves time for people who have busy jobs or kids and want to not have to think about food during the week. Some people are old or disabled, some people have too much going on to prepare fresh food every day. Some do this for diet or fitness or budget reasons, others simply might do so to advertise their ascension to a sort of ordered, rational adulthood. 

None of these things are bad reasons on their own, nor is there anything bad about sharing food pics on social media. What I object to is all the calculation and planning and measurement of it all. It squeezes all the joy out. Food is nutritious but food is not merely instrumental; it’s a vital part of life. I hate the meal prep phenomenon because it turns what should be a fun thing – shoving delicious things into your gob – into something makes the wheel of productivity churn.

When I cook and eat, it’s a chance for me to connect and notice what I’m doing. I go all over South London to get my ingredients, so I’m thinking about all the places I’ve gone to get the produce, and where that produce came from. I’m thinking about the red pepper paste from the Turkish market, or the chili oil from Wing Tai or the peaches from Morocco. I have nutrition as a distant, cloudy idea – like, do I want rice or pasta, and what protein will I have? – but rarely does that aid my sense of how to cook for the night. Normally I think about what ingredients I’ve got or what the weather is and what’s in season, or what texture I want between my teeth and what deranged craving I've got, or which cuilnary tradition to draw from, and work backwards from there. If you catch me saying something like “I need to optimize my nutrition so that I can get my fitness metrics up” then you know that my usefulness as a farm horse has come to its natural end, and you can send me to the glue factory. Food is not for anything, it’s an end unto itself. 

My core problem I suppose is that I do not eat food that bores me. I will simply not eat instead. Or I will go buy food that is more interesting. I will never be able to stick to a diet of any sort, which I suppose gives me a sort of padded layer (of belly) protecting me from the vicissitudes of diet culture. A freezer full of prepped food makes my heart sink into my slippers. Old food makes me sad. I require a certain degree of spontaneity or I’ll go completely insane. A row of identical meals stacked 'n ready in the fridge is just so. so. boring.

But like I said, some prep is a good idea. There are definitely degrees of insanity – boiling some eggs in advance is a normal and healthy thing to do; cooking five chickens at a time is not. 

It’s not like the kind of scratch cooking I do ever lends itself to the monolith of Meal Prep, but I did think about it and come up with the few prepping techniques I have employed in the past that enable faster fresh food. 

1. Soffrito: most dishes that don’t suck use, as their base, a mixed bunch of aromatic vegetables, either chopped or diced to oblivion, and then fried in the country’s fat of choice. The selection of vegetables + the kind of fat make up each place’s distinctive flavor profile. When you taste a French stew, the bass notes come from the mirepoix – celery, onion, and carrot – softened in butter. In Puerto Rico, you have a blitzed mix of onion, garlic, parsley, serrano chili, cilantro or culantro, and carrot, fried in lard (if you’re going traditional) or olive oil (if you’re wimping out). In West Africa, you’ve got all of the above plus scotch bonnet peppers and tomatoes and fried in rich red palm oil. And so on and so on.
   
   What I like to do is put celery, onion, garlic and carrot in a food processor and then whiz it around until tiny, and then freeze it in small portions. When you get to the actual cooking part, you throw in the frozen cube of vegetables and add some oil, and then fry on medium until it smells nutty and delicious. Versatile for basically any world cuisine – pasta sauces, paellas, stews, beans, whatever. It cuts your nightly cooking time down by half.
   
2. Chicken stock: Roast chicken. Eat chicken. (Save some chicken to make sandwiches etc during the week. Bonus meal prep tip!) Save bones and other slimy bits. Put in stockpot next morning with enough water to cover. Add onion, vegetable scraps, garlic, a bay leaf or two (fresh!!) Heat to boil, and then turn heat down and simmer for two hours with lid on. Then strain and remove bones. BOIL IT until it reduces by like, half. Pour in ice cube tray and freeze. Homemade stock cubes!
   
   I don't know if this actually "reduces" your prep time. But it does make literally everything you cook that week taste 10000 times better.
   
3. Garam Masala: One time in college, I obtained a whole vanilla bean. Cannot remember how. My roommate Zoe and I got completely obsessed with the idea of making a curry that featured this flavorful bean. Alas, I had no idea what I was doing, and threw in the entire bean into a curry that I made while we were drinking. It was an adequate curry, but through my inebriation, I remember thinking “the vanilla flavor isn’t very strong. Did I screw this up?” I had. It is almost certainly because I knew very little about making curries at the time. Even though the ENTIRE LONG POD was in the bright yellow stew, I’d thrown it into the liquid rather than the hot oil, which means it just made a sort of vanilla tea rather than a unique and interesting dish. If you have a bean, please remember when using a vanilla bean, use only a tiny bit of it rather than the entire thing. This is an insane amount of vanilla.
   
   Another reason is that I probably did not cook the onions and tomato enough, and put the spices in in the wrong order. There is an order to everything in curries, and I know what it is now from curry class. But also, another reason it lacked the oomph I hoped for was because all my college-bought spices were almost certainly stale.
   
   If you are still using a powdered spice that you bought more than a month ago, THROW IT AWAY. It is dust. The flavor is gone. In a dry hot pan, toast a tablespoon of cumin, tsp fennel and coriander seends, a cardamom pod or two, half a cinnamon stick, a few fenugreek seeds. Probably no longer than a minute, or until they smell good. Put em in a coffee grinder. WAY better and fresher. And then THROW IT OUT after a month.
   
   Although this also does not actually reduce prep time overall, it does make digging around for curry spices much easier in the cabinet. (Consider getting a masala dabba.)
   
4. Podcasts: Keen readers will note this is not a food. I however find that I have trouble cooking unless there is some story being fed to me. It keeps my mind busy while my hands can unthinkingly chop vegetables or scrape stuff from the bottom of the pan. As such, the muscle memory of cooking certain dishes makes me remember the specific episodes I was listening to when I last cooked it. But I recommend prepping some radio shows for your cooking anyways. Personally, it gives me a way of structuring my time and my day, in the same way that actual meal prep might help a normal person structure their week.
   
5. Fresh Herbs: When I buy bunches of parsley or cilantro, I wash them in hot water as soon as I get home. Easiest way is to fill a bowl in the sink and then plunge them, leaf side down, with a great deal of vigor and drama. Preferably while howling. Then I store them in little cups of water as if they were flowers in a vase. Actual chefs will tell you to fold them in a paper towl and then put them in a plastic bag in the fridge. I prefer my way because I’ll forget they exist otherwise. I already forget they exist and half to throw out a wilted, yellowing bunch of herbs every once in awhile. In a plastic bag in the fridge? I’d have no hope. Green onions, however, get stored on the counter. They’re not special and deserve nothing. Does anyone remember that insane lockdown trend where people were trying to regrow green onions from their roots in a cup of water? They’re like 50 cents a bunch. Let’s all chill out here. Lockdown is over. We can return to our regular hobbies.
   

As a bonus recipe, make a chicken slider this week. Get some chicken thigh filets and marinate for like ten minutes in soy sauce, garlic, ginger, pinch of salt and sugar, and some gochujang chili paste if you've got it. Pan fry on HOT in a nice metal skillet. (I have already delivered my opinions about cookware materials.)

Make some slaw – just finely chopped cabbage and a grated carrot, plus some cilantro, with a pinch of salt and splash of vinegar.

Put on sourdough toast and add some mayo. Add pickles. I made some sweet potato fries because my mouth said to my brain "make sweet potato fries or I'll bite your cheeks." Ok mouth! Chill out! Here are your fries!!

If any of you have tips for food prep, or you think I'm wrong about everything, please send me a message or leave an angry comment.