Cooking “Home Cooking” outside of the home

TIME magazine has an article about the growth of “meal-assembly” kitchens, where harried moms can go to prepare a week’s worth of “home-cooked” meals in an hour or so. While the article covers the growth of these “meal assembly” kitchens (278 Dream Dinners locations and some 60 other meal-assembly kitchen chains serving about 350,000 customers a month), it also attempts to discover why people patronize these kinds of services.

The article’s conclusion of “the appeal of the meal-assembly approach isn’t that it saves you time; it’s that it saves you having to think” is a conclusion which also questions whether this approach away from TV Dinners is a step towards the old-fashioned family dinner around the table. While still mass produced (in a sense), the fact that preparation of some kind went into the meals seems to help tie the service back to the family and food as a communal event. In contrast, the microwaveable meals and TV dinners stand for alienation and isolation: watching TV while consuming perfect portions of reheated cardboard.