Ideally, you want food with one ingredient (e.g. “cherries” or “peas” or “olive oil” or “oregano”) and then you assemble it into multi-ingredient food yourself at home (or in the case of the cherries you can eat the one ingredient by itself). If you need to buy multi-ingredient things, then the fewer ingredients they have, the less likely they are to contain weird pseudo-food like coloring agents, the distressingly vague “natural flavors”, more preservatives than you really want in your lunch, etc.
This being a heuristic, not a comprehensive meal plan, it has to be simple and easy, so “fewer than five ingredients” is what I said instead of “avoid the following evil food additives”. I go into a little more detail in this post of Improv Soup, 2a.
Mostly, I simply have no patience for it. Any minute spent on food preparation is a wasted minute I’ll never get back. Even frying an egg is too much trouble for me to bother with, when I could just have a bowl of cold cereal instead. I do like good-tasting food, but not nearly enough to make it myself when I could just grab a slice of cheese or something and continue surfing the Internet instead.
Two years later: This is a good heuristic for cooking!
Edit: it doesn’t always work, especially when trying new atomic ingredients. I’d say stick to things you’ve at least kind of done before if you’re feeding other people.
Ideally, you want food with one ingredient (e.g. “cherries” or “peas” or “olive oil” or “oregano”) and then you assemble it into multi-ingredient food yourself at home (or in the case of the cherries you can eat the one ingredient by itself). If you need to buy multi-ingredient things, then the fewer ingredients they have, the less likely they are to contain weird pseudo-food like coloring agents, the distressingly vague “natural flavors”, more preservatives than you really want in your lunch, etc.
This being a heuristic, not a comprehensive meal plan, it has to be simple and easy, so “fewer than five ingredients” is what I said instead of “avoid the following evil food additives”. I go into a little more detail in this post of Improv Soup, 2a.
I absolutely cannot stand cooking. :(
Just um… think of it as deck construction? Get your land balance right and you’ll have an excellent aggro dish.
It sounded like a better suggestion in my head...
Mostly, I simply have no patience for it. Any minute spent on food preparation is a wasted minute I’ll never get back. Even frying an egg is too much trouble for me to bother with, when I could just have a bowl of cold cereal instead. I do like good-tasting food, but not nearly enough to make it myself when I could just grab a slice of cheese or something and continue surfing the Internet instead.
This is a problem I often have myself. I will note that cooking for two ameliorates much of the pain, and cooking with two is even better.
Why not?
Two years later: This is a good heuristic for cooking!
Edit: it doesn’t always work, especially when trying new atomic ingredients. I’d say stick to things you’ve at least kind of done before if you’re feeding other people.