If you don’t have the werewithal to buy cheese and bread then, to be honest, I’m not sure if you can really be trusted with hot implements. In fact, I’m not sure you can really be trusted with a letterbox. And yet, Dave Rotheroe, a young entrepreneur with a need to feed, has just successfully crowdfunded a new idea called Cheese Postie.
That’s right – it’s a service (and I use the word very loosely here) that ‘delivers all the components of a Gourmet Grilled Cheese Sandwich through your letterbox each week. All you have to do is toast it in the bag we provide and eat it senseless.’
Mmm hmmm. Sure. So, they post you the cheese, the butter, the condiment and the ‘artisan bread’ (of course it’s artisan bread) and you, well, you make a cheese toastie. You know. Like, a cheese toastie.
But Cheese Posties are hardly the first ‘convenience food’ that appear to save you trace elements of time and the merest morsel of effort. Inconvenient convenience food is a plague upon all our houses. Just look:
Oven chips
It is always (and I mean always) quicker and cheaper to just cook a potato. You could boil it. And then mash it. Or, hey, I don’t know – slice a potato and put it in the oven with a bit of oil and seasoning and make your own chips in exactly the same time. Or what the hell, buy some smaller potatoes and steam them. Short of trying to bake a potato in a fire in your hallway, oven chips are never the most convenient dinner option.
Prepacked hummus and carrots ‘snack packs’
This saves you approximately zero time in terms of opening tubs but does save you all of the flavour. I don’t know what they do to those snack pack carrots but it’s like eating water posing for a photo. Flavourless, cold and utterly depressing. Just eat a carrot. Buy some hummus. This isn’t rocket science.
Pre-sliced stir fry
It saves you, at the most, six minutes. And it almost always smells of pond. If your life balance is so out of whack that you don’t have time to slice a mushroom or cut a pepper then you might as well give up now. It’s more expensive, barely more convenient and reeks of sad. (And pond)
Duck pancake kits
Oh sure. Because it’s not the buying of the ingredients, the cooking, the seasoning or the rolling that takes time – it’s keeping all the ingredients within a five mile radius without a cardboard box. Thank god, we’ve got that one sorted.
Muesli and granola pots
Seriously guys. You can stir your own oats. You have the strength and the valour to spoon yoghurt into a bowl. You are able to do sprinkles. Those pots are basically half the quantity, twice the packaging, seven times the price and four times worse to try and open.
Mind you, it’s not all bad. Here are some foods that actually are quite convenient…
Vermicelli noodles
They take literally seconds to cook. Seconds. See also ramen noodles, udon noodles, any kind of noodles really. Then all you need to do is grate a carrot, slice some lettuce, sprinkle on some peanuts, boil an egg and you’ve got yourself a meal.
Oven pizza
The great moved-into-a-new-house-and-don’t-have-any-pans special. Extremely convenient in the sense that you can eat it off the lid of a bin.
Toast
Be still my beating heart. My one, my only. My love, my life. Thank god for toast.
Like this? Then you may be interested in:
How To Still Eat Healthily If You’ve Moved Back Home With Your Parents
Follow Nell on Twitter: @NellFrizzell
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.