Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
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.
Yeah. I get that as as concept. Just not sure it really pans out if you do the math. You're also paying for salt and pepper and other common spices by the quarter/half teespoonful. Some stuff, like various herb and veggies make a lot more sense. But even then. I can throw out a heck of a lot of cabbage and lemongrass for the price difference and still come out ahead.

And yeah, as someone who grew up poor and hungry, I *hate* the idea of throwing out food, so I will actively plan meals based on using a set of the same ingredients if they come in sizes larger than what is needed for what I'm cooking if at all possible. But if you are looking at cost, I think you would be surprised to find that you could probably make that exact same recipe, even tossing out 3/4ths of the spoilable ingredients you overbuy at the grocery store, and still come in somewhere around half the cost you are paying through something like Hello Fresh. You are paying for someone to separate those items into quarters or halfs or whatever, then package them, and ship them to you in a box.

Additionally, a lot of the spoilable ingredients you may run into can often be put into salads. Some more than others, of course, but still. And there are some really nice health benefits to eating a leafy green salad regularly with dinner, doubly so for those of us a bit on the older side. So a lot of this comes down to meal planning, and it's not that tricky. Once you start doing this all the time, it kinda gains its own inertia and becomes easy. It's starting the process, from scratch, without really knowing what you are doing, that can be a bit overwhelming at first.

On the flip side, I will say that one of the benefits of these food services is that you can eat a wider variety of food. Most home cooks will tend to develop a dozen or so "go to" recipes for meals they make all the time. So you always have the spices for them, and probably make sure to reuse the more spoilable ingredients for other things. But yeah, probably not going to be hitting some of the more exotic stuff very often, so there is that. And hey. You can always make larger portions, then fridge or freeze and use as leftovers.