Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view as the best investment in my family's life. We rarely get sick, if so its a day cold when the weather changes. We sleep a solid 8 hours a day, and only go to the for our yearly health check-ups. We also highly naturally so this factors into it.
Now I do live in Louisiana and Mardi Gras is right around the corner which means King Cake. Is this healthy for me? No, not at all. But it's once a year and we buy them from the local bakeries, where each bakery has their own recipe. Does this it make anymore healthy? Probably not, but they are good.
Of course people would rather open an app and order some delicious fast food which arrives in about 20 minutes. It's not healthy but it wastes less time.
Also, sauces. 1 day making bolognese is 3 days of main courses.
Ideally you are only making 2 or 3 main courses during the week.
I was one of your early sign ups when you first announced on reddit. I came back this year and resumed my usage.
So, originally, I was a single guy looking to put on muscle. ETM works great for that! Like, super duper well. Baring a few issues.
But now, it isn't just me! And I can't get away with arguing "well the meal is nutritionally balanced."
So, from a wife acceptance factor, whole meals, more than 1 course.
Next, ETM gives wacko shopping amounts sometimes. I know that the math may work out, but 25 cups of spinach is too much. The amounts listed to buy are so far off reality that I am not going to trust the delivery option, which, well, totally sucks because that'd be nice. I think it had me buy 6 heads of lettuce one week.... I did. I ended the week with 4 heads of lettuce in my fridge.
For that matter, the entire UI around "original serving size, servings to make" is confusing as hell.
I should sign up for a new account to give a real FRE feedback, but the UI for existing users to configure meals and such is both absurdly powerful and also hard to manage in regards to "types of meals" and "meal plan". I totally get why the UI is how it is (except for why menus are where they are, separate topic) but I wouldn't ever suggest someone who isn't technically inclined, and also very dedicated, to even try to get started.
Which sort of sums up ETM: It is a power user's tool.
Oh and adding a recipe sucks. After doing one I gave up. I currently have a one note of "recipes from ETM except fixed so they taste like food." No offense (since I fit in this category) but a lot of the recipes are obviously written by gym bros to be as efficient as possible. Like, some of the recipes are easily transformed from meh to good by the addition of basic seasonings.
On the topic of recipes write some sort of import tool so I can point you at a website and you just scrap that shit. Or even let me paste it in and you parse it.
Even if I had to take the parsed results and verify each ingredient, it's be 10x better.
I need to be clear, I like ETM, it saves me a ton of money and makes meal planning easier, but if I didn't know how to cook, estimate amounts of food I need to buy, and if I wasn't able to on the fly figure out other courses for the meals, it would be far less useful to me.
But, as a tool for gym bros to meet their macros, bloody amazing. And gym bros will learn any UI if it promises gains, none of the other tools I use are exactly user friendly.
At the end of the day, if you had a slick onboarding process of "select 5 meals from NYT cooking that we legally slurped up because recipes have no copyright protection, and we'll ship you all the ingredients you need to cook them", well that's be an awesome product.
Oh and pay attention to when certain proteins are cooked. Buying $40 of fish on Sunday for Friday dinner is stupid. Either I freeze $40 of fish and hate you, or the fish goes to waste and I hate you. Both are shitty options.
I chose C, ignore the schedule and I cooked the Halibut on Monday.
Local Data Science prospects are low to non-existent. I work remotely and remote prior to Covid. Companies reach out and don't seemed concerned about my location so I don't foresee being remote an issue.
Edit -
Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view it as the best investment in my family's life. We rarely get sick, if so its a day (a cold) when the weather changes. We sleep a solid 8 hours a day, and only go to the doctor for our yearly health check-ups. We also highly active naturally so this factors into it.
If you are two or a family, cooking for the others to enjoy is a pleasure. If someone lives alone, I can see why they rather eat something quick-and-dirty.
This is a lot more common[0] than one might think, and arguably hits the worst demographic for it - university students and fresh out of university students, where the only affordable place is $2-3k for barely a hundred square feet with a microwave and minifridge.
There is a fair amount of places near tech companies where it's quite common that someone renting there pre-COVID would just have been getting meals catered at work or similar.
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/rent-...
When I was a student, I did a fair amount of cooking in shared kitchens in dorms, mainly because I enjoyed it and it helped me relieve stress. My goto strategy was to pick an unpopular time (middle of the week during the day, ideally) and meal prep for 2-3 hours, then mix those meals in with restaurant/cafeteria meals for the next week. I was able to make that work reasonably well.
Restaurant code and permits are notoriously difficult and in San Francisco expensive ..a nightmare actually. If restaurants can do without a stove..cooking in a dorm is easy peasy.
Our neighbor who moved to the East coast sent me a bag of wild rice from her state. I made a wild rice and mushroom soup in less than half an hour. The same would have been a production earlier as wild rice takes longer to cook than regular rice. I was also able to make it a larger batch and freeze it for later.
I am used to flash freezing having worked in restaurants and I am not a fan of freezing left overs in a home freezer and probably won’t be doing this again if this fails the texture test.
The smaller instant pot was perfect to make a nice roux for thickening and it doesn’t burn. And clean up is a breeze.
One advantage of intermittent fasting is that it's much less burdensome to make a single, large healthy than it is to make three healthy meals plus snacks.
(Though this can be a double-edge sword. If you wind up eating junk food, like pizza, for your large meal, then it becomes the equivalent of eating junk food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.)
If I'm in a hurry, there are lots of things I can make in 30 min or less. More often if I'm busy I'll make something that doesn't require much interaction; e.g. 10-15 min prep and 60 nearly untouched in a 500 degree oven for a roast chicken with root veg in one pan. I do other things in that hour.
Honestly, I've been doing this long enough I'm pretty efficient. I could save a little time buying more prepared food, but my meal quality would go way down so I don't mind. Shopping is pretty efficient too, as I mostly don't shop by recipe.
To be fair though, I find cooking relaxing as a way to wind down after work, so sometimes I'll do something more involved just for the hell of it on a random Wednesday.
I mostly cook German stuff, some French, a little Chinese and a fair few BBQs in the summer. I have quick and easy things I make, and more elaborate stuff that tastes unlike anything you can buy ready-made.
I shop at local markets where you get to know the farmers, smallholders who sell what they grow. Food is way too important to me to not put the effort into it that I do.
Lastly, I'm not a health nut. I don't go to the gym. I see my GP once a year and age usually tells me to try get more sunlight in the winter but otherwise gives me a clean bill of health. I'm approaching 50 and sleep 8 hours most nights.
As I was until recently working in a food startup, producing "ready to cook" products (organic fair trade delicious mixes of grain, dried vegetables and spices), I can testify of a strong society injonction towards healthier food AND at the same time a rejection of this pressure.
The 2 bulk ingredients are kale and tomato. To save time, you can use canned tomatoes (half can of diced tomatoes). Then add for flavor... basil, olive oil, lemon/lime juice. I sometimes add spoonfuls of ground flax seed and hemp. The purpose of olive oil is to add some fat to satiate the appetite and also give it a buttery flavor. The purpose of lemon/lime juice is to mask the bitterness of raw greens.
If you prefer sweet smoothies, there are lots of youtube videos showing recipes with bananas/apples/blueberries/cherries/yogurt, etc.
EDIT ADD: you can try spinach instead of kale or mix kale+spinach. To add even more flavor, you can try sun-dried tomatoes (in jar of oil) but that ingredient makes it more expensive to drink every day.
I'm a strict health food eater but I have to be realistic and concede that preparing healthy meals is more work.
For example, I have a green smoothie drink made from raw vegetables every day for breakfast for more than 10 years. I'm pretty efficient at it but it still takes more work (and time) than just putting an unhealthy Pop Tart in the toaster.
And my dinners of lentil soup or tofu are more prep work than tossing a frozen pizza into the oven. I have a diabetic friend who often "cheats" with junk food (McDonald's burger) because cooking supposedly "simple" healthy meals is still too much of a hassle even for him.
Yes, cooking healthy may be "easy" but it's still more work than junk food. Convenience junk foods are just... more convenient.