Some of us have jobs and kids and exactly 0 spare minutes to lovingly freestyle a meal on a Tuesday night, and a prepped lunch is the difference between eating something real or not eating at all. That's not a ruined relationship, that's survival.
There's zero evidence that efficiency in the kitchen kills food joy — professional chefs do mise en place literally every single service and they're not out here weeping into their ramekins about losing their passion.
My therapist actually suggested meal prepping to help with my disordered eating because having food ready reduced the anxiety spirals around 'what do I eat now' — so this take feels pretty out of touch.
The people most disconnected from food are the ones stress-eating takeout at midnight, not the ones who spent ten minutes chopping vegetables. Let's not romanticize chaos as some kind of culinary authenticity.
I meal prep every Sunday and honestly it's the first time in my adult life I've felt calm about eating instead of scrambling for whatever's closest to the checkout line. Hard to call that a ruined relationship.
Honestly it breaks my heart when people brag about how fast they eat now, like that's an achievement. You optimized yourself straight out of one of the most human pleasures there is.
The whole point of a 10-minute routine is that it requires zero thought, but thoughtlessness is exactly what disconnects you from food — you're just executing a protocol, not nourishing yourself.
There's actual research on how time pressure increases cortisol, and associating that stress response with cooking every single day is basically conditioning yourself to dread mealtimes.
I did the meal prep thing for a year and by the end I had zero desire to cook for anyone, including myself. Efficiency culture absolutely gutted whatever joy I used to get from being in the kitchen.
When you treat every meal like a logistics problem to solve in under ten minutes, you stop actually tasting anything — food becomes fuel and nothing more, and that's a genuinely sad way to live.