I'd rather rent forever than do batch cooking on a Sunday

Telegraph

18-05-2025

It's Sunday morning and light is streaming through the curtains, gently mottling your duvet with the promise of a new day. Your favourite newspaper awaits you on the doormat, a coffee (or tea) is moments from your lips and there is a robin offering its sweet song not far from your window.
In this moment of bliss, a brief, idyllic respite from the vagaries of life, I offer a simple question: do you know what you're going to eat for dinner on Thursday?
Have you already earmarked salmon, potatoes and peas? Is it casserole night? Are you the custodian of a freezer packed with fastidiously labelled boxes to provide the next month's nutrition?
For your sake, I hope not.
To have sucked the joy from food, one of life's great pleasures, in the name of efficiency, is to be grieved, not lauded.
And yet, I'm urged more often than ever to give up that simple daily pleasure in the pursuit of saving time and money.
Once the preserve of students and interminably focused gym goers, 'meal prepping' has broken ranks and forced its way to almost fashionable status. Shifting from economic necessity or protein-enforced drudgery, the soul-destroying act has become de rigueur, with social media accounts dedicated to boxing up your sustenance clocking millions of subscribers.
Neatly arranged tubs are laid out across a kitchen surface and diligently filled with some combination of protein, greenery and carbohydrate, while victory is declared against having to think about food for the next seven, or even 30 days.
But never has a victory been more pyrrhic – what benefit is there to be gained from working to make your life more miserable?
Food is magnificent and joyful, and unlike most good things, which are by their nature scarce, expensive or damaging, we are forced each and every day to sustain ourselves, so we should embrace it.
It has never been simpler to find quick and easy recipes – the 'easy dinners' portion of the Telegraph's recipe section alone runs to more than 600 ideas. There are a wealth of pasta sauces that can be rustled up in the time it takes to boil your spaghetti, with the simplest requiring only olive oil and garlic.
But while I hate meal prepping or (shudder) 'batch cooking', it is only one miserable symptom of a wider, more pervasive trend that deserves even greater ire – the steady redefining of life as one in which efficiency is valued over joy.
It is this school of thought that leads a millionaire to take his son's blood in order to live forever, or our government to insist we never take a risk lest we use the NHS.
It is the theory espoused by the very people who bang on about their air fryer, never once telling you that their meals are made more enjoyable, only easier, quicker or cheaper.
But what am I to do with the 10 minutes of time that the air fryer saves me, or the 6p per use saving over a conventional oven? Sure, I don't have to think about what Tuesday's meal is, but what if I don't want chicken and rice that night?
Call me a snob, but there's more pleasure to be had from both cooking and eating than simple efficiency. The time and money we save from other activities must eventually be spent on something, else we'll rattle through our lives at a remarkably effective pace, never having gone to the pub, splurged on the superfluous or eaten what we wanted.
If removing the joy from eating is the price of owning a home, I'll happily rent forever.
When they bury me, at least my epitaph will read something other than: 'Here lies an efficient man'.