Reimagining the Meal
Dinner is whatever you want it to be, and that fact can be overwhelming or freeing.
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“The thing about dinner,” Rachel Sugar wrote recently, “is that you have to deal with it every single night.” Despite the world’s many technological advancements, figuring out how to provide a household with a tasty, healthy meal day after day can feel impossible. “As it stands, dinner is a game of trade-offs,” Sugar writes: “You can labor over beautiful and wholesome meals, but it is so much work. You can heat up a Trader Joe’s frozen burrito or grab McDonald’s … but you don’t have to be a health fanatic to aspire to a more balanced diet. You could get takeout, but it’s notoriously expensive and frequently soggy, more a novelty than a regular occurrence.”
The magic solution to dinner does not exist, at least not yet. But freeing ourselves from ideas about what a meal should be can help. If you’re in a pinch, there’s always breakfast for dinner or a PB&J like the one you had yesterday. And some Americans have started to rely on hearty snacks, abandoning the traditional three-meal schedule entirely. Dinner is whatever you want it to be. That fact can feel overwhelming—or it can be freeing.
On Meals
You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill
By Rachel Sugar
There’s no such thing as an easy weeknight meal.
The People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day
By Joe Pinsker
“Variety doesn’t really matter to me. I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day.”
How Snacks Took Over American Life
By Ellen Cushing
The rhythms of our days may never be the same.
Still Curious?
- There’s no real reason to eat three meals a day: In 2021, Amanda Mull wrote about weird pandemic eating habits.
- The 12 most unforgettable descriptions of food in literature: Haruki Murakami’s stir fry, Maurice Sendak’s chicken soup with rice—only the most gifted writers have made meals on the page worth remembering, Adrienne LaFrance wrote in 2022.
Other Diversions
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