Quote Originally Posted by gbaji View Post
I kinda put it in the same category as the Hello Fresh style meals. I get it. Folks who want to cook, but aren't sure how to manage their own grocery shopping so they basically pay for someone else to do it for them. It's a great step towards learning to cook for yourself. But it's ridiculously expensive, so maybe good for the learning period, but one should really just learn how to shop at some point. You're paying takeout prices for home cooked meals, which eliminates one of the main advantages to home cooking. I guess it's a step in the right direction to getting cooked food delivered, but only a small step.
For me a big part of the attraction of the Hello Fresh kind of plan is not having to source and then commit to buying large amounts of odd ingredients, most of which I am going to end up wasting because I don't regularly cook a (Korean/Indian/Chinese/Sicilian/whatever) meal - if Hello Fresh or whatever meal plan company can split out the appropriate portion of kaffir lime leaves or lemongrass or asafoetida or Sichuan peppercorns or that one particular variety of cabbage that I could buy but then I'd have half to 3/4 of a chunk of cabbage that I had no plan for, and then do the same thing for another dozen people and send each of us just what we need to make that dish.. that seems reasonable to me.