No time to cook? Get a week’s worth of frozen
meals delivered courtesy of Home Chef, Freshly
or a host of other local and national services:
It’s the modern version of a TV dinner, but it
tastes better. And if hunger strikes and you need
immediate gratification, you’re no longer stuck
ordering a pizza or a few containers of takeout
Chinese: Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub
stand ready to deliver anything you crave.
But as people increasingly limit their involvement
in meal prep, the question of how that affects
our personal connection to food is debatable.
“As we exist at a greater distance from where
these foods originated, we tend to forget — or
now, perhaps not even learn — where things
come from,” says Jason Seacat, a professor of
psychology at Western New England University,
who studies the relationship between people
and food. “This growing disconnect not only
contributes to a loss for humans, but also for our
natural world because greater disconnect often
equals less concern for the natural environments
that produce the food.”
Dana White, an associate professor and sports
dietitian at Quinnipiac University, doesn’t see
the situation as black and white: “It depends on
what the baseline was before.”
If you’re someone who never cooks and eats
out at fast food places all the time, ordering
groceries or meal kits could be a step in the
right direction
But “if it’s taking you away from the farmer’s
market and you stop putting the basil plant in
your backyard,” White says, these services may
do more harm than good.