Food Is Hard

3436 words | ~ 17 min read | Oct 21, 2020 | last modified Oct 21, 2020 |

The buying, making, and consuming of food is a very complex cognitive task. To my unrelenting annoyance, I still have to eat multiple times, per day, if I want to continue being alive and functional. For those of you who have brains that work and don’t make every mildly complex task a major siege, I wanted to break down the whole food process.

First, of course, there is grocery shopping. Siderea has discussed this in the past. (Sidenote: it is so annoying to text-search Dreamwidth blogs. I’m considering writing a scraper just so I can grep for Siderea Posts more easily.) This post discusses the complexity problem of trying to make grocery lists when you’re trying to cook some amount of meals, and recipes require more than one food item, and a grocery store may be out of stock or have various sales that make this difficult, but doesn’t even get into one major problem I’ve had in the past: grocery stores shutting down.

From January of 2017 until March of this year, I lived on MIT’s campus and cooked for myself. In that time I had five different go-to grocery stores. At first, I went to an enormous Star Market, which was (together with the Central Square H-Mart) the place where every MIT student got groceries. When it shut down, the next-nearest grocery stores were all in Central. I briefly tried schlepping to Central on a regular basis to shop at the Whole Foods a few blocks from the T stop (because H-Mart is not long on gluten-free options), but that used up a huge amount of energy, and I could only feasibly carry four grocery bags max (to say nothing of fridge space), so I couldn’t physically go grocery shopping frequently enough to keep myself fed. So I started getting my groceries online from Whole Foods through Instacart, which worked so well that I bought a year of Instacart Premium for about $150 shortly before Instacart announced that since Amazon bought Whole Foods, Whole Foods would no longer be available on Instacart. (If I could kill people psychically through the power of pure hatred, Jeff Bezos would no longer be with us.)

As a result, I was forced to switch to Prime Now to get stuff from Whole Foods. (I can’t now recall why Star Market/Instacart wasn’t an option, but there was some arbitrary food item I relied on at the time that they didn’t carry. More on this later.) Prime Now, however, was a much worse experience than Instacart, because (a) the groceries were split across a large quantity of grocery bags which never came with handles for some reason (???) and (b) apparently none of their exploited gig delivery workers understood street addresses well enough to reliably find me. (I typically instructed them to deliver to Building 66, which has the address 25 Ames St. I had one driver deliver to Building 25, another deliver to Building 14 for no reason I could figure out, and yet another attempt to drive through the campus' facilities-only service roads.) I was delighted when Brothers Marketplace opened up in Kendall Square, because it meant I could go physically grocery shopping again without having to wait for a day when I felt physically energetic yet could afford to wipe myself out.

This may seem pretty obvious, but shopping at a different grocery store means you have a different set of available foods. Probably for someone who can cook from scratch more reliably than me, and who can eat normal foods instead of gluten-and-soy-free concoctions, and who doesn’t have massive sensory aversions to an apparently random set of common food ingredients, this is less of an issue. But my brain works such that I depend on a small set of somewhat-rare items (goat cheese, a specific brand of microwave dinner, a specific brand of gluten-free crackers, etc), and whenever I switch to a grocery store that doesn’t have one of the items in the set, it materially restricts the variety of foods I can eat. However, once an item disappears from my regular grocery rotation due to unavailability, I’m not very likely to remember it and look for it in a new grocery store. Particularly if my new grocery store is online shopping, instead of going to the physical store.

(As an example: I used to like getting gluten free frozen pizzas from Star Market way back in freshman year. Then I switched grocery stores, and at some point in this process the only gluten free frozen pizzas I could find were either also soy cheese (gah) or were slimy/inedible for some other reason (cauliflower crusts seem to live on a spectrum from inedibly slimy to inedibly crumbly, and I’m not sure there is a point where they become edible). After a certain amount of time, energy, and money spent on bad frozen pizzas I gave up on the whole concept, and unthinkingly internalized that if I wanted to have a decent gluten free pizza I had to order from Domino’s or spend an hour in the kitchen making a pizza using a Chebe box mix crust. Last week I spent a while going through every gluten free frozen meal available from Star Market on Instacart and ordered one of anything that looked good. I accidentally bought some tofu curry which I can’t eat, but also I found a decent brand of gluten free frozen pizza again, so this week I pissed off my roommates by ordering six of them to cram into our freezer.)

Online grocery shopping sites are designed kind of like regular Amazon, except that I don’t really want to buy groceries in the same way that I buy soap and drinking glasses. I can browse a physical grocery store much more easily, to see if there’s anything interesting I might want to pick up – or if I remember that I got some chips I really liked last time, and I don’t remember the brand name but I do remember vaguely what the package looked like, I can find it again by wandering down the snack aisle. Instacart (for example, although Prime Now is similar) is much less dense; it’s exhausting to scroll through a number of options that I’d be just fine with glancing past in a physical store. In a physical store, it’s also pretty easy for me to pick up a different salsa in the salsa aisle on a momentary whim. Online grocery shopping makes it super easy to just re-order the same stuff, but it’s much higher friction to try new things.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Instacart would take advantage of the Internet as a medium for cool UX, instead of being a place where I scroll through endless pictures of groceries? What if it OCR’d the nutrition facts on all the items and never even showed me anything containing soy? What if I could look at items and click either “Add to cart” or “Try something new” – which would show me other similar items, similar to the replacement recommendation engine? What if the search results page crammed way, way more pictures of items on the screen, and didn’t show the name of the item until you hovered over it?

Oh man, and I almost forgot the most annoying thing about online grocery shopping which is that you have to carefully select replacements for everything, and if enough stuff is out of stock and you’re not paying attention, the shopper will still end up buying you cookies ‘n cream ice cream, which, if you’re not aware, typically has gluten in it. Multiple times since quarantine started, I’ve attempted to order 6 goat cheese logs and taken delivery for an equal quantity of mozzarella logs. The whole point of goat cheese logs is that I can eat goat cheese on a cracker. Experimentally, because I wasn’t sure what else to do with 6 mozzarella logs, I tried eating a big chunk of mozzarella on a cracker. It was not a good experience. I spent probably $100 on mozzarella logs that mainly ended up going moldy in the fridge before I thought to write “don’t replace with mozzarella” in the Special Instructions section. (Similar solution for the ice cream.)

But this is beside the point. There’s one other reason I was so excited about having Brothers Marketplace in Kendall, which I was able to enjoy for maybe three months. (It opened in November of 2019. I left for winter break in December, was gone for all of January of 2020, and returned to campus in February, then moved out of my room for good in mid-March.) When you order groceries once a week from Instacart, or buy them once every two-to-four weeks when you can summon the energy to walk 20 minutes to Central, grocery shopping is a major siege that requires major planning. When you can bop down to Brothers twice a week after class with a couple of career fair bags, you just need to buy what you feel like cooking and eating over the next three days. I’m chronically incapable of meal-planning – or rather, I can plan just fine, but I can’t follow the plan for shit, because my energy levels and food tastes are so variable. When I started shopping at Brothers, I wasted so much less food – I’d just buy what I needed to cook three meals’ worth of something. I stopped buying salmon filets to rot in my fridge and started buying them only when I immediately intended to make baked salmon. Forgetting something on the grocery list wasn’t an issue, either, because I could just go back. As many times as I needed. It’s like the programming thing where your workflow materially changes when your build takes 2 seconds, as opposed to 10 minutes.

Anyway, I’m back to ordering from Star Market via Instacart, because we all live in COVID hell and at any rate now I live in Somerville.1

So I think we’ve adequately explored the many ways that grocery shopping sucks. However, this is only half the battle; doing something with the food once you have it also sucks.

First of all, cooking is actually a really complex problem. That post breaks it down into 36 (!) steps starting with the assumption that you have already gotten groceries. And note how many of those 36 steps involve further planning and breaking down into steps, depending on the recipe and the amount of space and equipment you have (for example, “If your appliances will need to be deployed from storage, pull them now and figure out where they will go in your cooking space. If they will not all fit at once, figure out what you will be doing for staging.") If you have executive dysfunction, every task needs to be broken down into at least this level of detail – and even the simplest 36-step process, which this definitely isn’t, is not something I can be relied upon to do on any kind of regular basis.

The other reason I can’t be relied upon to cook on a regular basis is because cooking is an enormous energy sap, and (say it with me) my day-to-day energy levels are deeply unpredictable. Processing ingredients always seems to put weird strain on my back muscles. Being in a hot room makes me tired incredibly quickly – so much for preheating the oven. Let’s not even discuss the specially-crafted hell of doing dishes when both dish noises and touching wet food bits are massive sensory triggers. So I’ve never once in my life been able to successfully make and then execute a meal-plan. Unfortunately, it seems like the only alternative is to buy a bunch of food ingredients on speculation that you might be able to do something with them eventually and then watch them turn to mush in your fridge. Also, if something has been in the fridge too long, I will stop seeing it as an item I could potentially use and start seeing it as just another piece of furniture (right up until the time I wonder why my fridge has started smelling so bad). I never really have any idea what food is or is not available if it’s not immediately visible when I open up the fridge. This applies also to the food that I cook for myself; I don’t know how to describe to you the feeling of impotent rage at my own incompetence I get when I realize that, of the three tupperwares full of food I sacrificed all my energy to generate two Saturdays ago, one of them is still in the fridge and has grown mold.

My great smart fridge idea, which anyone reading this is welcome to steal, is this: It’s not connected to the internet at all. It just lets you scan barcodes or take pictures of all the food you put in, and all the food you take out, and maintains a list of what you have and how long it’s been in there. Maybe it even lets you know what stuff is about to expire. I literally don’t need my fridge to order food for me, or suggest recipes, but I would desperately love to have a fridge that maintains its own inventory. I’ve strongly considered buying a raspberry pi and duct-taping a webcam to the side of the fridge and rolling my own.

Since I don’t have that, I mostly try not to get any food that needs to be cooked, particularly in a timely fashion. (I love making baked salmon, because it’s delicious and pretty easy to cook – but I hardly ever manage to cook a piece of salmon before it goes bad.) I mostly eat microwave dinners and cheese-and-crackers and yogurt and scrambled eggs (and ice cream whenever I notice I’m not getting a lot of calories), and whenever I order delivery food I get another meal worth of leftovers. And sometimes I try to cook myself a few meals of food in advance.

The many, many restrictions on my food intake tend to lead me towards eating the same foods a lot. On one level, I like this. Less decision fatigue is good. On another level, it gets really boring sometimes. On a third level, sometimes if I eat a food too many times it suddenly and arbitrarily becomes a sensory trigger and I can no longer even think about eating it without getting a little nauseous (typically this happens the moment I realize it’s a great food that should be one of my staples and stock up). This is why I can no longer eat Mealsquares or liquid eggs or canned refried beans or tuna salad or peanut butter or smoked salmon.

Oh, it occurs to me that you may not know what a sensory trigger is! It’s not the same as being a picky eater. Imagine, if you will, that you are in the hospital for three months, and the only things you are allowed to eat during this time are Jell-O and chicken broth. Now imagine your reaction if, after this, someone tried to make you eat Jell-O. Now imagine that you’re me, and this is just how you feel about a wide range of random food including potatoes and hamburgers and pork chops, for no readily apparent reason. And I keep accidentally sensitizing myself to more and more food because the range of food that I can reliably acquire and eat is too small.

Now imagine that every time you try to explain the depth of this problem to someone, they get angry after you shoot down 1-3 of their “why don’t you just"s.

It’s worth noting that despite the ADHD and the chronic fatigue and the dietary restrictions due to my chronic illness and the dietary restrictions due to my sensory issues, I do still have one important form of privilege here: I don’t have to worry too much about my food budget. I’m a programmer, which means that I can semi-afford to live off gluten-free microwave dinners and delivery food and gluten-free frozen pizzas and fancy-ass yogurt/goat cheese. (According to YNAB, my average monthly grocery spend is around $500, plus $200 for delivery food.) If I had to live off disability, I’d quite likely starve.

As it is, I’m always kind of on the knife’s edge of giving myself an eating disorder. I try to stay fairly vigilant to this tendency because it’s not like I really need another mental health issue, but… *gestures exhaustedly at above post*. It’s easy, and in fact incredibly tempting, for me to skip meals, because unless I eat at consistent times my hunger response doesn’t fully work right. Sometimes it does nothing, and I just forget to eat. Sometimes it makes me feel tired and sad, which is not exactly conducive to summoning the energy to cook. Sometimes it makes me nauseous; it’s as if it wasn’t paying attention at ALL in “how to run a digestive system” class. Accidentally failing to eat is my natural state of existence. Also, wow, turns out our culture really values skinniness, and since I’m trans and already not a huge fan of my body, you can start to see why the mindset where instead of pathetically failing at a basic human activity I’m being Virtuous by not eating is so attractive. (And I recently started Adderall, which is notoriously appetite-suppressing.) Fortunately, turns out you kind of need to eat food to have any energy whatsoever, and I do need energy to do other things, so I’ve been able to stay out of the eating disorder zone thus far.

Unfortunately, that’s about the best I can say for my own ability to eat. Very slowly and gradually, I’m getting better at food. I’m figuring out more and more meals that I can actually make regularly. One of my roommates does the dishes (before this, I measured every meal by how many dirty dishes it generated), and the other one contributed an Instant Pot to our lineup of kitchen equipment. I also bought a wok, which I think of as essentially a big frying pan for making big batches of sludge. (I eat a lot of sludge. You can make one of my favorite sludges by following this meatballs recipe, except don’t form the meat into balls, just dump it all in the frying pan and dump pasta sauce over it once it’s browned.) There are some interesting-looking grocery stores near my new apartment that I’m excited to try out, once the pandemic has died down enough that I feel safe going to a grocery store again. Maybe one day I’ll build the smart fridge; for now, one of my roommates goes through our fridge to toss old food and make an inventory every couple weeks.

If I keep iterating, I’m pretty confident that at some point I’ll get this shit figured out.

If this topic interests you, you should also read this unitofcaring post.

Obviously I have more issues with food than just dietary restrictions, but dietary restrictions alone (your classic allergies, lactose/gluten intolerance, etc.) still significantly increase the cognitive load of getting food in a way that I would classify as a microdisability. (Another example here that links to some great but not-super-relevant posts.) A surprising amount of stuff has soy in it – and if you’re at a restaurant or something that doesn’t provide an ingredient list, you have to either have all those things memorized or ask your waiter, who might fuck with you if they don’t believe you “really” have a dietary restriction. If you don’t have any dietary restrictions yourself, you might find it interesting to try avoiding one or two of the top 8 allergens for a week.

It has just now occurred to me that this is part of why I get so angry when people try to feed me salad at food events because it’s the only everything-free option. I mean, I also don’t like salad, but the main problem is that it’s not food. It is not filling. It will not appreciably decrease the amount of other food I need to eat. It is not an appropriate substitute for an actual meal. It does not contain enough calories to be worth the trouble to choke down. New rule: a gluten-free alternative meal is not an actual alternative unless it actually provides roughly the same number of calories as the original meal.

  1. Somerville has the best demonym I’ve ever heard, which is “Somervillain”. Sucks to suck, Michiganders. ↩︎