You Don’t Need Blue Apron to Teach You to Turn On Your Oven

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/opinion/blue-apron-amazon-delivery-cooking.html

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If you’re a professional chef for long enough, a journalist will eventually call and say she has a great idea for a story. Her publication is going to come photograph the inside of your refrigerator. That’s when you’ll do what I did: Load up your fridge with groceries you’ll never have time to cook and pretend you’re a normal person.

The truth is, chefs aren’t normal people. After a long week working in my restaurant, I find the idea of cooking a meal at home perverse. You want tomato cakes for Table 304? I’m your girl. You want a home-cooked meal? I’ll order on Seamless.

This should make me a perfect candidate for meal kit delivery services like Purple Carrot, GreenBlender or perhaps the most prominent of the bunch, Blue Apron, a company that had what analysts are calling an underwhelming initial public offering on Thursday.

The company started out with pretty high hopes for its share price, but lowered expectations not long after Amazon announced it was buying Whole Foods, and everyone began speculating that it was also about to enter the meal kit business — that is, the business of delivering perfectly portioned ingredients and recipe cards to home cooks in need of training wheels.

To me, meal kits sound like cheating, not cooking. Yes, I have to admit that they do some good. They bring us closer to how a lot of the rest of the world shops. In Hong Kong, many people swing by a “wet market” on their way home from work and pick up the vegetables, fish or beef they’re going to eat that night. Same thing in France, Latin America, South Korea or pretty much everywhere people don’t load up their giant S.U.V.s with giant quantities of groceries to store in their giant fridges once a week. The meal kit model of keeping some staples in the cupboard and getting the fresh stuff as you need it is the market way of doing things, only there’s less walking involved.

Still, while meal kits do eliminate food waste, which is admirable, they also generate enormous amounts of paper and plastic waste. Every ingredient is packaged separately, resulting in absurdities like a single scallion arriving in its own plastic bag.

My deepest problem with meal kits, however, is that I worry they’re not teaching people how to cook, but are instead teaching them how to prepare meal kits. The recipe cards that came with some meal kit boxes sounded like word problems, full of measurements, times and temperatures, and if there’s anything I hate it’s this insistence on turning cooking into math.

It’s not just Blue Apron and others like it, though. Whenever I write a recipe for a magazine or newspaper my editors demand more measurements and cooking times. This phony precision undermines the heart, and joy, of cooking. Chefs sample their dishes multiple times as they cook because cooking happens by taste and by eye, not by time and temperature. Baking is the fussy one where you need measurements, while cooking is for slobs like me.

Does that look like enough pasta? Does this taste as salty as you like? That sauce looks thin — let’s throw in some more tomatoes. People become dependent on cooking times and temperatures because they don’t understand how cooking works, they know only how to follow a recipe.

But when I spoke to people who used these meal kits regularly, I discovered that I was wrong. All of them said that following the recipe cards that the kits provided gave them the confidence they needed to start cooking more. Meal kits had them using spices they’d never tried, experimenting with formerly intimidating techniques, using vegetables they’d previously found baffling. Their question was, “How many tomatoes go in this pasta?” And the reassuring answer was, “Exactly however many came in the box.”

There was a time when recipes were passed from parent to child to grandchild, written by hand on index cards. You had a basic understanding of how the recipe worked because you’d probably helped make it a few times. That doesn’t happen much anymore, and in a way meal kits bridge that gap.

For people who didn’t grow up cooking, or seeing food cooked, even buying a cookbook is intimidating. They don’t want “The Big Giant Book of How to Cook Absolutely Everything.” They want to know how to cook this one thing. Meal kits give them the index cards, with pictures, and even the ingredients for the recipe, all in one place.

Everyone I spoke to who used meal kits eventually stopped. The kits gave these new or very occasional cooks the courage to turn on the oven more, so now they’ve moved on. That is the weakness of the meal kit business model, and something that might give the new Blue Apron investors pause: The whole point of training wheels is that eventually you don’t need them anymore.

Eventually, you’ll leave meal kits behind and salt and sauté on your own, according to your own tastes, not Blue Apron’s. Meal kits take nervous chefs by the hand and lead them toward real recipes.

It will always make me sad that many people stop there, clinging to the times and temperatures the way Dumbo holds on to his feather, not realizing he doesn’t need it to fly. But maybe that’s what normal people do. I wouldn’t know. And as long as they’re cooking, what do I care?