I do my best to cook traditional Northern Spanish food for myself (well, as close as I can given the available ingredients). There's very little food waste, precisely because so many recipes either use long lived ingredients, or just reuse them. Some are built using another dish's leftovers as an ingredient. This makes it very easy to just have an idea of the stock we need for certain kinds of ingredients, and make a high percentage of the shopping list just an exercise of comparing what we have with our ideal stock.
This only works, however, because we aren't really looking at dishes individually, and we cook almost every meal. Someone that cooks once a week, and isn't thinking about efficiency, in either ingredients or time spent preparing, will end up spending a whole lot more and eat less. Unfortunately, there's no money in teaching people how to understand a kitchen like this, and how to add recipes that will both add variety while minimizing waste.
Old standbys: One jar tomato sauce, one pound ground turkey, some peas, cook it all together and pour over pasta. One large yellow onion, bit more than a pound of chicken, three or four bell peppers, stir-fry and serve on rice.
Each of those makes about half a week of meals (not counting breakfast) using exact multiples of the unit size of the ingredients in the grocery store, so nothing gets a chance to go bad.
I too would be quite interested in how to design a recipe structure for less waste without that sort of restriction, though.
That said, the one point I agree with you on is Blue Apron's generation of trash. It's wildly wasteful in that sense because so many of their ingredients are individually wrapped and packaged.
"You don't have to think or plan anything."
And that is where your one paragraph about how easy it is to cook for yourself falls down. You have to think up a menu. You have to find a menu (and hope it is good), plan, get ingredients, get the right odds and ends and figure out portions.
That is all fairly easy to do (and I do it myself), but not cost-free. If you have more money than emotional energy and time, the Blue Apron value proposition may appeal to you.
I hate the amount of waste it produces too, but "waste for wastes' sake" is not what is going on there.
Yeah, and you lose a lot of what makes cooking cooking.
You put effort into something, your satisfaction goes up. Extend this to how you live your life, and learn the secrets of being happy.
Some people really enjoy the meal planning part. Some people really enjoy picking out fruits and vegetables at the store. But others don't like planning out meals for the whole week and find grocery store trips stressful and frustrating (maybe their local store is incredibly busy). Blue Apron has a value proposition for those in the latter category who also enjoy the part of cooking that starts once you've got the grocery bags in your kitchen.
Where one draws the line at doing it all on your own depends on time available, motivation, and opportunity cost. I'm not going to judge people whose utility function is different than mine.
I enjoy menu planning, shopping, and cooking more than most people.
OTOH, I also enjoy ballroom dancing, and a variety of other non-cooking hobbies. Sometimes, I want to devote lots of time to cooking. Sometime, I want good food at home with the care I (or my wife) puts into cooking without the rest of the organizational and planning overhead. Blue Apron excels at the latter case. It's more packaging than I'd prefer, and than I need for the use case because I have a pantry well stocked with basic essentials (which is where the worst of Blue Apron's packaging excess tends to be), but for something that works in a diverse market and without gotchas, I see why they do it.
We still eat almost all of our meals at home, with or without Blue Apron, but it substantially improved the quality of the average meal.
The problem with Blue Apron is that they made meals complicated for the sake of being complicated. Way too many sauces to make, things to reduce, things to mix, etc. Every meal took at least 2x what they claimed it would take, and it seemed to take tons of dishes just because of how needlessly complex they made them.
We're using Gobble now, which is billed more as 15min meals and usually only dirty a couple of dishes. I vastly prefer it.
I don't like the trash aspect of it, I'll give you that.
I'm sure with a bit of culinary expertise and experience I could probably do it all on my own, but I don't have that experience, and I don't really have the time to acquire it, but I sure don't want to order out every night.
I haven't tried it, but Blue Apron sounds pretty great to me. I can cook but I don't need to worry about having no real idea what I'm doing? Good deal. That is way more approachable than doing a bunch of independent learning.
What am I supposed to do with 90% of the smallest bunch of scallions the supermarket will sell me after I use the 10% the recipe calls for? I know, I know, I'm supposed to have 5 other recipes that I either know or can invent at the drop of a hat that just happen to use all the same ingredients. But how realistic is that for those of us that aren't amateur chefs and don't really want to become one?
If you ignore time costs, sure; pre-measured ingredients in the quantity necessary for the recipe provided is a huge time saver.
Yes, it creates waste, but it's not without utility.
That being said now that I don't get free food from work, I'll be buying groceries and cooking often enough to use the larger portions.
I also think getting ingredients at your doorstep from some VC backed startup with YouTube recipes on how to cook them is one of the most privileged things you can do, but at least people are cooking. Anything to get more americans cooking is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.
Instead I use a service called plantoeat which lets me import my own recipes and optimize my grocery store runs. Once you get a good rotation going it helps with the problem of over buying certain ingredients.
It's different because making fresh juice is more time and labor intensive than "just buying a juicer" (try it... I did). Want bananas in your orange juice like Dole sells? Now you need to combine that juicer with a blender, etc. Peeling a bunch of oranges by hand takes time. Making fresh juice by hand is completely not worth it.
If you already have access to a kitchen, a decent set of cooking equipment (which you need regardless of whether you go for Blue Apron or not) is only a few hundred bucks, and the "basics" (pasta, rice, potatoes, onions, garlic, spices, veggie oil, olive oil, vinegar, flour, sugar, salt) are maybe 50 bucks more. Then, for less than a months' worth of meals from Blue Apron, you're set to start cooking for life.
My fiancee and I spend a grand total of 100 bucks a week, give or take, on groceries. This is in southern California, and usually including a cheap bottle of wine. We could spend even less if we wanted, but we're cooking some gourmet shit at home and constantly have leftovers, while generating 1/2 the trash of any of our neighbors thanks both to reusable containers for everything and composting. You can do SO MUCH better than Blue Apron, both in health and in environmental impact.
The same thing applies to Juicero: If I really want to start making fruit juice, I'll buy myself a decent juicer and get fresh, local fruit because it will always be cheaper than whatever they're sending out in their little pouches. I'd rather spend a couple hundred bucks on a quality machine (or better, just make smoothies since they're better for you and use the money I saved not buying a Juicero to buy a Vitamix) than buy into some cult hype bullshit.