Food Subscriptions? Sign me up!

When the first stay at home order hit, I was living in a small apartment with four other girls. We felt trapped and on the edge of mental break by the third day. It wasn’t like we hadn’t ever stayed home for three days straight before, it was just the lack of the freedom to leave that exacerbated our stir-craziness. After a while, we figured we should go grocery shopping, but the lines were so long and everything was sold out. It’s funny what the collective public does during disastrous times. It felt almost post-apocalyptic in the empty aisles of Target and Ralph’s. 

---

To minimize our interaction with the outdoors, we started receiving HelloFresh, a subscription based grocery and meal service that turned out to be pretty good. Every week, we would get two recipes and all necessary ingredients, already measured out. The food would show up in a big, insulated box each Wednesday. All the recipes we got were vegetarian, which normally would’ve been an issue for me, but I actually didn’t find myself missing meat. The meals ranged from Mediterranean cuisine, like a garbanzo bean salad with feta, to Mexican, like some really good vegetable flautas and beans. 

I was pleasantly surprised by the freshness of the produce we got and the ease with which we could transition from haphazardly putting dinners together to specified recipes with set ingredients. Cooking together brought my roommates and I closer during uncertain times and allowed us to have set times for socialization with a purpose. The purpose was to follow the recipes and to not mess up, which thankfully, we never really did. It was hard to mess up, because the recipes were laid out step by step and most ingredients were pre-measured. The only ingredient we seemed to have way too much of was green onions. Each meal package came with a bunch of them, and we had entire tupperware containers full of chopped green onions to use as leftover garnishes after every meal. 

---

One thing I did find to be quite hard, however, was actually following the recipe. I found that my mind would wander and I would get distracted, and my roommates would have to remind me of which step came next. I blame this on my inability to follow direction, even when the promised end-result is supposed to be something both nutritious and delicious. Obviously, the meal always turned out well due to our collective brain power and efforts. This experience with HelloFresh lasted for about two months before we decided to go back to a more budget-friendly way of living. It had become way too expensive and the deals we got when we signed up were expiring soon. Going back to the grocery store was hard, not even because of the pandemic and health risks, but because I felt a bit resentful that I had to plan my own meals again. Getting pre-packaged ingredients was a luxury that made cooking more fun for both myself and my roommates and allowed us to learn new recipes that we normally would not have ventured to make. 

---

I feel lucky enough to have gotten HelloFresh, even if it was just for a short period of time. I think the point I really want to make here is that cooking in luxurious settings, such as a high-end kitchen or with high-quality produce, is always going to be more fun and less stressful than cooking to survive in a small kitchen with the cheapest groceries available. It is a privilege to be able to enjoy cooking and the leisure that comes with expensive meal subscriptions such as HelloFresh. If these programs were more affordable, I’m sure they would be more popular with young people. However, this isn’t the reality we live in. More often than not, I hear of people who live on Top Ramen and sustain themselves with the most affordable and accessible food they can find. If cooking was always as fun and easy as HelloFresh makes it, I’d bet more people would be willing to make meals at home. I find myself getting takeout as a way to cope with the pandemic, justifying the spending with the idea that I’m helping local restaurants stay afloat and finding comfort in food that was cooked by someone else. With a worldwide pandemic at our doorsteps, we should all be more inclined to stay inside, but there is a gap between those who can afford to do so and those who need to go to work and also leave the house for groceries.