"I Can't Cook For Myself" Is The New "I Can't Start a Family"
Just as you don't need to have a six-figure wedding, your Tuesday lunch does not need to be DoorDash sushi.
Seemingly every month or so, Twitter is overrun by “DoorDash discourse,” which nearly always goes the same way: the majority of people believe that DoorDash (or any other on-demand food delivery app) is a nice treat to have, but not a fundamental human right. Then, a smaller but very loud cohort of people insist that these apps are simply the only option for a significant number of people, and even if one could theoretically cook, it’s an indictment of America, capitalism, or the elites, that every single person in the country cannot afford a daily private chauffeur for a hoagie.
The excuses are endless for why restaurant delivery is not a luxury and is in fact a pressing necessity for the proletariat: yes, DoorDash is expensive but “groceries are too,” so what does it matter? Lots of people can’t cook because they “can’t afford all the right spices and don’t know the right recipes.” (All this screen time and yet, they are incapable of looking up a recipe.) Lots of people can’t cook because debilitating ADHD prevents them from cleaning up afterwards. Lots of people are allergic to food that was previously frozen or even refrigerated (thank goodness restaurants never use anything that was previously chilled!) Lots of people can’t cook because they work multiple shifts, have no mouth, and suffer from long hantavirus.
This conversation comes off the heels of businessman Kevin O’Leary admonishing middle class young people for regularly spending $28 on lunch, to which leftist Twitter personality Sean McCarthy retorted, “Lunch just costs $28 now.” This conversation dragged on around Twitter for several days. For the pro-DoorDash folks, any suggestion to cook your own food or bring your own sandwich to work, was the equivalent of being commanded to eat gruel on the floor of the Victorian workhouse.
Eventually, we came full circle to the point where the pro-DoorDash contingent were genuinely agreeing with the sarcastic idea that under a utopian socialist government where people were paid fairly (except, I imagine, for delivery workers and restaurant workers), everyone would have a Ferrari. (Go ahead and be a socialist if you want to, but I should remind you that socialism doesn’t mean everyone would be rich.)
On the one hand, it’s easy to laugh at these people. Anyone with a basic understanding of addition knows that cooking your own food, provided you are not making lobster truffle mac and cheese topped with ossetra caviar, is significantly less expensive than ordering out. And while a very small minority of people might be too severely disabled to prepare their own food, DoorDash has only been around for thirteen years. People survived cooking their own food, heating up frozen food, and maybe ordering the occasional pizza for most of modern history—and Gen Z spends the smallest proportion of their food budget on groceries compared to all previous generations, with a much higher percentage spent on restaurants and delivery.
A lot of the indignant rage over DoorDash being “too expensive” seemed to come from people who believed the baseline for a Tuesday lunch at work should be a seared steak salad with avocado and fresh pomegranate seeds, not a chicken sandwich. And when it comes to home cooking, anything short of something that would appear on the cover of a magazine displayed at the microlooting station—sorry, I mean the Whole Foods checkout—is Soylent Green dystopian slop.
You will never catch me blanket-condemning treats, and maybe I’m just saying this because I’m hungry right now but I would love a seared steak salad. But this is not how most people eat throughout the week, or even on the weekends. Perhaps due to constant mainlining of social media, some young people have been conditioned into believing that the baseline expectation of a meal—whether you’re cooking or ordering out—should be one of indulgence. Perhaps we should blame all those “day in the life” TikTok videos which purport to be showing what it’s like to work at a tech company, but are instead highlight reels of all the various expensive liquids and solids consumed by a woman with vocal fry.
(Before anyone yells at me for being “out of touch,” because I want the masses to eat dust sandwiches, I can confirm that my weekday lunches are far from luxurious—I usually make my own Greek yogurt cucumber soup or gazpacho which costs about $7 per serving, and basically never order out for lunch, nor did I for the thirteen years when I worked in an office. Back when I worked office jobs, I usually brought my lunch from home—usually pasta or a salad—and occasionally I’d go to Chipotle.)
Our expectation of restaurant lunches (or gourmet home cooking) is not unlike our perception of something else that has been built up to unattainable, ridiculous heights on social media to the point where people just don’t think they can: marriage and parenting. Our extremely modern high standards for what marriage and parenting look like makes people believe they can’t do it, can’t afford it, and that any compromises in this area are akin to eating a singular boiled hotdog for dinner.
