Minor Life Optimization: Consider Ordering Your Food To-Go
At some restaurants, you will be asked after ordering if you’d like to have your meal “for here” or “to go.”
As far as I can tell, the only thing that changes based on your response is how your food is served.
If it is “for here,” it’ll be served on a plate with metal utensils. If it is “to go,” it’ll be wrapped and served in a plastic or paper bag.
Personally, I don’t care much about how my food is presented. However, I have occasionally thrown out food or ate more than I’d like because I couldn’t take my food with me. I could’ve avoided this by asking for my meals “to go,” and my meals would’ve been just as appealing and nutritious.
Here are some pros and cons of ordering your meal “to go.”
Pros:
You can order more food without worrying about waste.
You will have snacks for later, saving money on food delivery.
You won’t have to waste food if you run out of time to eat. Instead, you can save your meal for later.
Cons:
The food isn’t presented as well.
Plastic cutlery might be harder to use than metal cutlery.
It might be healthier to avoid plastic cutlery and food packaging.
I estimate that ordering my meals “to go” buys me 10-20 minutes a week, and also saves me around $20 per week. Consider making it your default!
If you plan to eat at the restaurant, you can just ask them for a box if you have food left over.
Also, ordering to-go and then eating there only works at places where you can just grab a seat. In many places I’ve eaten, saying “for here” is how you get allocated a place to sit if you want to eat there.
If you want to save even more time, phone the restaurant and place your order before you begin traveling to it. That way they can prepare your food during your travel time.
A potential con is that most food needs to be refrigerated if you want to keep it safe to eat for several hours. Depending on what happens between mealtime and snacks “later”, you may need to handle additional cognitive load to store the food appropriately.
This is true at most restaurants. Unfortunately, it often takes a long time for the staff to prepare a box for you (o(5 minutes)).
One might simply get into the habit of putting whatever food they have in the refrigerator. I find that refrigerated food is usually not unpleasant to eat, even without heating.
My experience is that not all locations (work etc) have refrigerator space conveniently available, but if you have access, that’s great!
I find that asking the person at the counter to give me a box is a much quicker operation than asking wait staff to put my food into a box for me.
Good tip!
Depends on your local laws, but to-stay and to-go may be taxed differently. To-go may be slightly cheaper for this reason.
When most people order food at a restaurant in order to eat there, they want to do so because they want the experience of eating there. For restaurants that provide a plate and utensils, this experience normally includes the actual plate and utensils. Ordering food to go and eating it at the restaurant without a plate and utensils defeats the purpose of eating it at the restaurant. Of course it’s possible that you are an unusual restaurant visitor who isn’t like this and doesn’t care about a regular plate and utensils, but if so, you are so weird that your advice on this matter isn’t very useful for other people.
Also, as nim notes, all restaurants give you a to go box if you can’t finish eating.
(This post also makes me more skeptical of trivial life optimizations in general.)
Restaurants are a quick and convenient way to get food, even if you don’t sit down and eat there. Ordering my food to-go saves me a decent amount of time and food, and also makes it frictionless to leave.
But judging by votes, it seems like people don’t find this advice very helpful. That’s fine :(
It sounded like you were suggesting that people order the food to go even if they’re eating there.
Ordering it to go and then actually going makes more sense, but still has the problem of “what is your reason for going to a restaurant?” Most people who go to restaurants want to eat there a large portion of the time.
Also, ordering delivery via one of the apps usually results in food that is extremely high in salt and sugar, which reduces cognitive performance due to dehydration (excessive salt) and inflammation (sugar).
Can’t you just combat this by drinking water?
That results in too much salt and too much water, and not enough of the other stuff (e.g. electrolytes). Adding in more of the other stuff doesn’t solve the problem, it means your metabolism is going too quickly, because more is going in and therefore more has to be going out at the same time. The human metabolism has, like, a million interconnected steps, and increasing the salinity or speed of your bloodstream affects all of them at once.
Maybe it’d be good if someone compiled a list of healthy restaurants available on DoorDash/Uber Eats/GrubHub in the rationalist/EA hubs?
IMO the most obvious harm reduction strategy for “fast food delivery is expensive and terrible” is not to order different fast food, but to keep pre-made frozen meals on hand. You can buy frozen meals with the nutrition profile of your choice, make them yourself, or pay someone to make them for you. This costs less money and time than ordering delivery, and has the added benefit of leveraging that cognitive bias where you make “healthier” food choices when planning meals in advance compared to decisions that you make while hungry.
I’d postulate that people often order delivery because it’s the quickest and easiest option available to them. It seems like getting people (including oneself) to eat something healthier than their defaults is a matter of making something even quicker and easier available, rather than offering a choice between “do it your usual way” and a higher-friction option of checking a list first.
This is a reasonable point, but I have a cached belief that frozen food is substantially less healthy than non-frozen food somehow.
Updating your beliefs about the relative health impacts of frozen vs fast food seems like a low-effort, high-impact opportunity for improvement here.
There are a lot of distinct questions or comparisons that you may be casually conflating in reasoning about frozen food:
Nutrition of a fresh ingredient vs the same ingredient commercially frozen. Frozen often wins here because fresh food in grocery stores has to be harvested long before it’s ripe. Food harvested when it’s ripe then frozen can travel fine, but food harvested when it’s ripe then only refrigerated tends to degrade before it gets to the consumer.
Nutrition/quality of a given ingredient frozen at home vs commercially frozen. Home freezers will freeze items more slowly, which changes how ice crystals form and can sometimes degrade the quality of the item worse than extremely rapid commercial freezing. Plus if you buy a fresh ingredient at the store, it was picked way before it was ready, and freezing it at home isn’t going to magically have left it on the plant for longer.
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs a frozen pre-made meal. Fresh, conscientious cooking will add less salt and fat than any processed food. It may also not taste quite as delicious ;)
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs a serving of that same meal which was frozen at home and reheated. For many meals, home freezing is mildly detrimental to the food’s texture, and home cooks probably won’t test enough variables on the freezing process to really dial in the optimal technique.
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs fast food. Fresh, conscientious cooking will add less salt and fat than restaurants, but may also be less delicious. Fresh cooking will also be more variable about ingredient quality—ingredients might be much better or might be worse, depending on the cook and the pantry.
Make sure your intuitions on those fronts are consistent with each other and with available research that meets your standards, and then revisit the question of how frozen foods compare to fast food takeout in the ways that matter to you =)
The advice that I heard is to put more and more salt into your cooking, until that you feel satisfied with your cooking and become less likely to order food (which will have tons of salt anyway, way more than you would ever add).
There’s no easy fix with sugar because it’s addictive and has a withdrawal period.
I think there might be a misunderstanding. I order food because cooking is time-consuming, not because it doesn’t have enough salt or sugar.
Have you considered ordering catering for a “group” a couple times a week, and having your meals from the single catering order for several days, instead of spending the time choosing and acquiring more premade food each day? I’ve seen some folks online who have great success using catering as a meal prep option because it’s more frugal than ordering separate meals, but it also incurs less time investment as well as costing less money.
This is very interesting. My guess is that this would take a lot of time to set up, but if you have eg. recommended catering providers in SFBA, I’d be very interested!
I’m so confused how 2 weeks after the post nobody has mentioned that this increases a lot (plastic) waste generation. This is an obvious con!