Healthy Premade Meals For When You Can’t Cook

We’ve all been in a situation where we simply can’t cook. Maybe your kids’ little league schedules leave you with no time at all for days at a time or you simply can’t tear yourself away from work to do anything more than just order in. Fortunately, there are more options than ever before to get a healthy meal without the stress of having to cook.

So it’s okay. Don’t preheat the oven. Don’t divert from your evening commute to hit up that exit with all of the fast food restaurants. Today, there are plenty of services offering healthy and specialized meals for the needs of customers, and the worst you have to do is toss them in the oven for 20 minutes.

An Alternative for a Changing World

The romance of the “nuclear family” that dominated the 20th century is changing. It was a notion predicated on stringent expectations of gender roles – a woman who stays home and prepares meals and a man who goes out and works.

But modern economic expectations ensure that most people have to work a full work week regardless of whether they’re married – and women (at least hypothetically) have as many opportunities as men do for building a professional reputation.

If you pine for the days when you can come home to a roast in the oven, premade delivery services offer that. It’s just that instead of June Cleaver delivering your meal, it’s a designated courier.

The Perks of a Personal Chef

You may not be able to list all the premade meal delivery services you know using all the fingers on a single hand, but it’s likely that many meal delivery services will close over the course of a week. That doesn’t mean that the industry is dying. Anything but!

More and more people are trading takeout dinners and meal prep and replacing them with pre-made meal delivery services. In large part, that’s because these services are offering the sort of specialized nutritional options that you’d only find in large cities (and which will still likely require crossing town to find them).

And if you stick to a vegan or vegetarian diet, you’ll have the pick of the litter. California is one of the biggest hubs of these meal delivery services, and many of them are explicitly designed with non-meat eaters in mind. That doesn’t mean that carnivores don’t have options to choose from too. Whether you’re practicing the keto diet or an avid advocate of Crossfit, you’re sure to find a nutritional option that’s catered to your specific needs.

A Model For the Future

We can largely thank personal chefs for the pre-made dinner revolution. For decades, celebrities and other wealthy individuals have had access to professional chefs who can provide them with highly specialized diets. Many of these chefs have gone on to found their own premade meal delivery companies – essentially scaling up the nutritionist techniques they spread to celebrities and making them accessible to the common man.

It’s a transition that we’ll likely see more of moving forward. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many restaurants to adapt to changing needs, and many have seen the premade meal delivery model as a pathway to the future – or at least a life preserver in this time of chaos.

It’s likely that we’ll see more and more restaurants offering meal prep delivery, but that doesn’t mean that the meal delivery services offered today are going anywhere. They have a model in place already, alone with rich and varied menus.

If it’s a venue that restaurants pursue in any major way, they can plan to face fierce competition from chefs who have already perfected their techniques.