Like most Americans, I was brought up thinking of food as fuel: something that should be prepared and consumed as quickly as possible – an unfortunate distraction from the hard work of living.
Now I demand much more of my meals – but I have even less time to cook them. As a single parent, part-time commuter and full-time wage slave, my dinner options on the average workday are limited: we can have leftovers or we can have cereal. Every weekend, I cook up a big pot of something that keeps well (curry, or tuna-noodle casserole) and we eat that as long as we can stand it. By Friday, Cheerios and red wine sounds more appealing.
After a few years of suffering such culinary indignities, I was more than ready for a new approach to the food-for-fuel problem. I found it tucked away behind an eight-lane motorway cluttered with strip malls and superstores, a mere speck in the vast suburban wasteland where I live. It is called a “meal assembly” centre and is one of more than 1,200 sprinkled through upper-middle-class America (there are even three in Britain).
This is cooking, Henry Ford-style: an assembly line for food, where busy homemakers can put together a month’s worth of meals in less than two hours. The time-starved, guilt-stricken, over-scheduled mum gets to mass-produce her family’s meals – while amassing life credits for “cooking”.
It works like this: the “chef” stands before a compact kitchen module, where every ingredient for her meal is arranged from left to right in the order the recipe demands. Measuring spoons are preselected and placed in the right container, where ingredients are pre-chopped, pre-grated or pre-blended for her convenience. If the beef carbonara needs a tablespoon of garlic, the garlic bin will have a tablespoon already stuck in it.
The fixings are then packaged in a Ziploc bag, labelled with cooking instructions and stacked in the freezer – where they stay until the cook is ready to grill, braise or bake them for a faux-fresh repast.
Nothing is left to chance and that suits me fine. I love the efficiency, the neatness, the industriousness of it all. I lived like this once before – as FT correspondent in South Africa, where I had a maid to do the shopping, the mincing and the cleaning. Meal assembly lets me live beyond my means once again – without apartheid.
On my first visit to such an establishment – Dream Dinners in Rockville, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb near where I live – I had a mental image of what I would find: over-stressed hyper-achiever females, fitting in a bit of pseudo-cookery while negotiating deals on the mobile phone and yelling at the nanny to pick up the dry cleaning.
Kathleen Wilks, of Thyme Out, a meal-assembly store in Gaithersburg, Maryland, calls this person “Sally Striver”: “She wants to be thin, she wants to be hip, she wants to care about her family but there’s no time.” She wants to make home-cooked meals like her grandmother did – but also wants that M&A deal.
For such women, meal assembly is a dream solution, says Ruth Lundquist, one of the founders of Let’s Dish, a nationwide meal- assembly chain. “The food industry has been trying to solve this problem for years,” she says. “Ten years ago, it was the ‘home replacement meal’ ” – a fully cooked home-style meal (chicken, mash and two sides; cosy and comforting). Next, grocery stores started selling “short-cut” meals: precooked chicken for stir-fry and other time savers.
“Where this solution differs is that there is ownership in this, it’s not cheating, you really cooked it,” she says. This is not just lasagne, this is mom’s lasagne – or pork chops, or seafood cioppino, or jambalaya. Pitiful as it may sound, that really makes a difference.
And apparently, not just to me. Over the past few months of shamefacedly frequenting such establishments, I have found an unlikely cast of meal assemblers alongside me. One evening, there was a portly grandma, an elderly couple, a teenaged boy; a large number of stay-at-home mums, too busy over-scheduling their kids, presumably, to stay at home cooking; and a Hispanic nanny.
The economics is unexpectedly appealing. Jennifer Thorp Hemann, who owns two Dream Dinners franchises in Maryland, promises I can save $200-$300 a month making her meals. That assumes I would otherwise be eating restaurant meals but, even so, she has a point. Her honey-pecan pork roast with cranberry-apple sauce costs a little over $3 a serving – but a grocery store bag of pecans costs $5 alone. I could not buy a pizza for the cost of her French country chicken or prawn and scallop skewers. I could not order the pizza and get it delivered in the time it takes to prepare this 21st-century excuse for a home-cooked meal.
Dream Dinners even lets the kids do the cooking: my six- and seven-year-old girls love making meals there. At home I hate cooking with them but at Dream Dinners, other people clean up the mess.
American women spent 50 years trying to emancipate themselves from meal slavery but now they want their kitchens back. This may not be what grandma called cooking but it beats Cheerios and red wine.
The dinner line
Dream Dinners
1701 Rockville Pike, Space B-7
Rockville, MD 20852
tel: +1 301-770 9555
www.dreamdinners.com
Let’s Dish
11401 Woodglen Drive
Rockville MD 20852
tel: +1 301-770 4440
www.letsdish.com
Thyme Out
341 Main Street
North Potomac, MD 20878
tel: +1 301-990 6440
www.thymeout.com
Patti Waldmeir is the FT’s US legal columnist
