Exciting News!

Meet our new chef de cuisine,
a random man with a beard in an apron.

With years of experience cooking for <insert restaurant name here>, <Mack> loves creating simple dishes packed with flavor for <insert your service here>.

I’ve been itching to use this template since the beginning.
Finally, I have an excuse.

Because I’m going to talk about meal kits.

Surely, you’ve heard of them.

Hello Fresh? Lite n Easy? Marley Spoon?
As of August 2021, there’re 21 home delivery meal kits available in Australia. Twenty and one.

You create an account and link your credit card, they show you a schedule and a menu of 20-30 dishes, you choose from the purrty food photography and the number of meals you’re after, and they deliver the necessary ingredients in a box with insulated bags accompanied with recipes.

’But why?’

I’ve seen that face a few times now.

’You can cook! You wrote a cookbook! You don’t need a company to tell you how to cook!’

I suspect the reason I’m in this is the same as everyone else:

I’m Asian and I love free stuff.

For each new subscriber, they give out 4-5 promo codes to send out to friends: the first box is usually free.

Or at the very least, a 40% discount.
Which translates to roughly $15 for a meal for two.

And once the promotion is over you cancel your subscription and jump to the other company with their 40% promotion, and then you jump to the other, and the other …

And I wondered why my salad bowl client went bust.

Do you remember Burger King’s 'Subservient Chicken' from 2004? You go to a website, and there’s a man in a chicken suit in a living room with a dialogue box saying: Get chicken the way you want it, type in your command here.

And you type in: dance, sing, strip, eat, read, fly, scratch your nose, cry, do the macarena, end your own life, … and the chicken would obey. Users were in shock as if there’s really a chicken at the other end of the screen.

In reality, marketing research and psychologists predicted what the average person would ask the chicken to do and recorded over 100+ clips of the chicken. It’s all algorithm.

We are not as creative as we think.

We think we have free will and choices, but it is all algorithm.

Meal kits are just Tinder but cooking.

Taste-wise, there’s nothing to complain about.

Since it’s not something we usually eat (protein, salad, root vegetables, spices), we find the dishes refreshing.

That’s probably also due to the lack of surprise.

We always choose chicken, fish, or beef, leaning towards middle eastern flavour, and the default burgers and hotdogs kind of thing.
(Hana gets to choose the dishes sometimes so she feels in control and therefore and more willing to eat.)

I think it’s kinda like wedding food.
My friend said it’s like airplane food. Oof.
A chef friend said it’s ‘bitch cooking’. Double oof.

I actually learned many things from the meal kits.

For example the oven.

The recipes always call for some carrots, onions or potatoes to be roasted in the oven. It’s ‘bleh’ basic, but it also shows how easy it is to incorporate some vegetables into your meal.

Once, I had oven cauliflowers and I’m not going back to boiling cauliflowers ever again. Especially when you throw in some nuts towards the end. Whoo.

A crumbed fish recipe instructed to use mayonnaise as the batter rather than the traditional flour and egg. That was very ‘Harvard’-like, I slow-clapped.

Cooking rice on a stovetop was ridiculous, but I humored them, adding butter and garlic. I have to say, it’s pretty good.

Herbs. I like all the single-serving herbs. Chopped mint, thyme, coriander, basil. Makes me feel fancy and loved.

Stock cubes.
Stock cubes save the day, always.
Making gravy, sauces, couscous.

Do people know stock cubes are MSG?

I do get triggered imagining millions of white people poo-pooing Chinese takeaway but feeling safe adding stock cubes into their ‘homemade’ meals.

Do you know what else triggered me hard?
Bad recipes / instructions.

The companies let users rate and comment on the recipes.
Bad idea.

To be fair, that was the one and the only recipe I commented on.

Once I realised I was actually helping them, I stopped. The Joker taught me if you’re good at something, never do it for free.

Nowadays I just ignore the instructions.
It made me a happier person.

The other caveat with meal kits is the quality of the ingredients.

Sometimes the broccoli came yellow like chrysanthemum, and there’s nothing you can do about it. (What, write an angry letter to demand ONE broccoli to be delivered?) Sometimes, the barramundi came from Vietnam.

But here’s another pro: it’s so good for beginners.
Or someone who just likes to cook but not to think.

It’s actually training people to be a really good line cook.
Follow the instructions, follow the picture, plate up.

It is also threatening cookbooks and online recipes in general.
Meal kits are basically interactive VR cookbooks. I’m telling you, the robots are already here, they just don’t look like tin men from 80s sci-fi movies.

Ok let’s get back to the pro again: meal kits do produce less food wastage, as advertised.

How many times have we rushed to the store to buy a jar of nutmeg, only to use a fingernail worth of it and let it rot in the pantry?

(But I don’t know man, food is biodegradable and compostable. The plastic wrappers and containers are not.)

Have you also heard of that famous marketing story, about General Mills launching Better Crocker cake mixes in the 1950s, and it tanked because it was too easy?

Housewives were feeling guilty, therefore market research and psychologists (again!) suggested adding an egg to make them feel better about themselves.

You made ‘some’ effort, you’re not a complete hack.

Well, apparently it was a debunked myth.
It’s not the egg.
It’s the egg AND the instant icing on the cake.

So I guess the thought process behind meal kits is quite similar here.

I love my family to not let them eat takeaway; but not enough to cook everything from scratch.

Hi there! If you’re new here, thanks for buying my book.
You can access all the previous newsletters here.

Recently I’m writing a lot more on Instagram promoting local businesses. So if you’re into travel guides you can find them here (I don’t think you have to be in Melbourne to enjoy them).

I also started reminiscing about my 10 years being a wedding photographer here.

Eat well, stay safe.