deliveroo etc

[sufi]

do you mean the food bank round your way?

yeh

 

[sufi]

we get lots of fancy stuff from Felix project - sourdough bread, plant based milkshakes, pret soups, lots of healthy type stuff and "vegetables" as well as any tinned item you can possibly think of

 

[woops]

Deliveroo and Just Eat clearly provide a service people want, but they also seem like an example of what Mark talked about re: capitalist bloating as they've just inserted themselves between the people buying the food and the people selling it. You can still get stuff delivered direct from pizza shops and whatnot, but these companies have managed to hijack the communication lines.

yes, someone i know is trying to set himself up as a middleman who buys newly realised technology instantly and sells it at a mark-up, since it's otherwise unavailable, which is capitalism. you may have read about this practice. one problem is that you can incur a lot of violent threats making money this way

 

[luka]

sort of a merchant middle man situation ferrying goods across the seas.

 

[boxedjoy]

before lockdown I was the classic problem eater - I lived off ready meals, the Greggs menus, lots of beige frozen food that took eighteen minutes in an oven at 220 degrees. I still love all that food. On Xmas day it's a long-standing tradition that I have a turkey dinner - turkey dinosaurs, Mother's Pride bread, lots of tomato sauce. There's an Instagram account called Dinner Police which has shamed some of my dinners I've sent people.

But I realised that in lockdown I wasn't doing any exercise. I live too far from a park for it to be easy to go to, the area has a poor reputation, and my boyfriend struggled with lockdown as they'd already been isolating for a year prior due to a significant injury and then some mental health issues. So I was going to get fatter. And I decided that if I was going to get fatter, I was going to at least enjoy it. I bought some cheap cookbooks and practiced. Now I make curries from scratch and sophisticated pastas and I use the aubergine emoji for its actual purpose. Don't get me wrong, it's been hard - I once managed to accidentally make a lasagne with no pasta sheets - but it's been worthwhile because I now I can invite people over and cook something and not be embarassed and the goodwill it generates goes a long way.

I can tell you why I never cooked before. I didn't have confidence. My mother was clueless around the kitchen, and worked til 6pm when I was in school, so she had no interest in standing in a kitchen chopping veg or going round supermarkets buying herbs and spices. We went to the off-licence in the scheme and got whatever was there. I remember the first time I went to a friend's house and they had potatoes in rosemary and I was blown away, it was so different to how we prepared and ate food. When we had cooking classes in school I would disintegrate - it wasn't something I knew anything about, especially compared to other people, and I just wasn't interested in something I couldn't do well. Our Home Ec teacher was a vile nasty woman who barked at the class and had no time for the working class kids who didn't have palettes. I think there's definitely an element of "men don't cook" but I also think it's bound up in class and culture for people like me.

 

[boxedjoy]

anyway I'm a regular Just-Eat and Uber Eats user, easily twice a week at my worst during lockdown. I might be better at cooking but I don't necessarily always enjoy it. My boyfriend is still ill so I do all the cleaning and cooking and housework and everything else, and some days it gets to 7pm and I can't face a sink full of dishes after an hour cooking and a trip to the shop. I don't feel bad about it, given that pre-lockdown I would think nothing of spending £20 on two rounds in the pub or whatever. It's a little luxury, it's not like I'm spending big sums of drugs and prostitutes, it's a pick-me-up to enable me to lift my spirits during some tougher days.

 

[luka]

my dad had worked for years as a chef in big posh hotel kitchens so food was a big part of my upbringing. i never had sweets or anything. cooking was basically his way of expressing love. he'd go into a rage if you went into the kitchen while he was cooking or didnt respect the ritual or whatever

 

[luka]

he never taught me to cook though which was typical of him. did teach me how to cut an onion once but that was it.

 

[boxedjoy]

I love sweets. Not a single sweet in the world I dislike. If you could get nutrition from them I would probably abandon all savouries.

 

[WashYourHands]

I love Rusks

 

[luka]

I love sweets. Not a single sweet in the world I dislike. If you could get nutrition from them I would probably abandon all savouries.

 

[luka]

My dad's quite a good cook, but he's also a weirdo. He eats stuff out of the bin and makes soup out of bones and carcasses and stuff. You mention a chicken to him and he'll start going on about how you can throw it in a slow cooker and make a few day's worth of soup out of the leftovers.

 

[boxedjoy]

my brother became a chef. He started out as a KP when he was 16. The job was arranged by a family friend and was meant to scare him into wanting to go to school and do his studies instead of doing hard graft work in hot kitchens. But as anyone who has worked in the industry knows, they're all constantly drunk and high, and my brother loved that culture.

 

[john eden]

I use the aubergine emoji for its actual purpose. Don't get me wrong, it's been hard

I feel really bad for laughing at this bit - but I am. sorry.

Great couple of posts @boxedjoy and you’re spot on about the confidence angle. I still have to follow a recipe and can find cooking a bit stressful myself.

 

[luka]

pathological

 

[boxedjoy]

on Saturday I cooked a three course dinner for four people and I'm not gonna lie it was quite a buzz. We don't really go out and probably won't for a while, between lockdown in Scotland, the situation at home and my redundancy situation, so I feel like if people are going out their way to get dressed up and head out just to come sit in our flat then it's nice to make an effort for them. It's nice to see people realise that I've made a change to my lifestyle and approach, and have them be impressed in a way that they can enjoy themselves.

 

[luka]

I'm feeling hungry after all this talk of food.

if im drinking a lot i end up making really nice things for myself like maccains hashbrowns and a cheese omlette in a buttered white bread roll

 

[boxedjoy]

I love Rusks

washed down with a glass of milk! People think I am a psychopath for this but it's such a treat.

 

[WashYourHands]

Ruskcoin

 

[martin]

So what's happened to directly employed takeaway drivers, like the ones on Dominos mopeds...are they being laid off by these new go-betweens?

I haven't used Ubereats or Deliveroo, just in case the driver decided to gob some Covid into the food. Which I might have done, if I'd spent three hours suffering near-death experiences with shit motorists, or having someone wave a KFC bucket in my face and scream "Where's my fucking dips? I ordered dips, you cunt...give me my fucking money back!" Someone on Twitter said the nice thing about the lockdowns was that the driver would leave the food outside your door, so they wouldn't suss that they'd just delivered a 15" pizza, two batons of garlic bread and two dozen chicken wings to a greedy bloke in his boxer shorts, and might think it was to a moderately large family instead...

Burnt Oak had a place that delivered kebabs and chips, it was ace, though I used it so much the bloke would say "Yes, my friend!" and then reel off my order to me over the phone once my number came up. Sometimes they'd include a free can of lager, which was a nice way of saying "Thanks for being too lazy to cook".