Thank you, Rachel and Amol, for writing this and sending it to me last week! Rachel and Amol are two of our favorite clients. They’ve been ordering several meals a week from Portable Chef for nearly four years and counting, and have been vocal supporters of what we do. After reading this, I was excited to go out and order from us myself!

 

The Hidden Cost of Cooking

By Amol Tembe and Rachel Schwartz

We are longtime customers (and fans) of Portable Chef, and if you’re considering it, I know what you’re probably thinking: the meals are too expensive.  On the surface, it may seem that way. But you’re likely not considering all the costs and how Portable Chef and cooking yourself actually compare.

I’m always interested in knowing whether what I’m doing is worth it or not. If you’re a cost-conscious person like me, you understand. One afternoon in August 2013, I sat down and thought about how much value we were actually getting. We were already sold on the deliciousness of Portable Chef. But that afternoon, the cost factor became a no-brainer. We’ve been customers ever since.

Here’s a behind the scenes look at what I put down that August afternoon, and below, are some explanations and considerations.

 

Money Value of Time

What do you make per hour, and how much is your time worth? We work approximately 2,000 hours in a year at an average of 40 hours per week (50 weeks per year). Now take your salary, and divide it by 2,000. For illustration, a $70,000 salary translates to $35 per hour. That’s the figure I used.

You Have Less than Four Hours Free Per Weekday

If there are 168 total hours a week (24×7), of which you sleep 56 (8×7) and spend 60 hours on work, including getting ready and commuting, you’re left with 52 hours per week. Thirty two of those hours are on a weekend. So you’re left with 20 hours during the work week, or four hours per day of ‘free’ time.

If you work more than 45 hours a week, there goes another one of those four free hours. A 50 hour work week gives you ONLY two truly free hours a day. Crazy world.

Value of Free Time

Your free time should be worth far more than your hourly rate, because there’s less of it. That is economics 101. But let’s leave it at $35 and be conservative.

Shopping for Meals

You have to go shopping. This is a two hour affair a week, likely, and this assumes that you’re planning perfectly, going on a weekend and getting EVERYTHING you need for the week. How many times have you said, “I’ll get it tomorrow?” What about dealing with the lines and crowds, especially in the winter? Only the dedicated can do this with such forethought. The rest of us aren’t thinking about the day ahead when it comes to food, and that forces us to make multiple trips a week to get what we need. With Portable Chef, meals are conveniently delivered Monday evenings to your door by the friendliest of folks, in the rain and snow, and on days I’m certain you would choose to avoid shopping and order pizza instead. Full disclosure: We still shop, but it’s for items like fruit, nuts, milk, cereal, eggs.

Cooking Time

The average meal takes at least 45 minutes in preparation and cooking. There goes some of that precious four hours of free time we mentioned earlier. After a long day of work, are you then going to come home and prepare a perfectly healthy meal? Good luck with that. With Portable Chef, each meal heats up in a few minutes with some oil in a pan. You go from stove top to table in less than 15 minutes.

Menu Selection

You have to think about what you’re going to eat, right? Ever get stuck in a rut, eating the same thing? And your menu is sure to be less healthy, since you’re not a professional chef. That doesn’t happen with Portable Chef. You leave the selection to them, and you can count on it being the healthiest foods sourced from small family farms from throughout upstate New York and beyond!

Health Impact 

How often do you make bad food decisions? You get home late, you didn’t shop on Sunday, and so you order delivery. I think the average person is doing that 2x per week. Can we even estimate the costs of these poor food choices? With Portable Chef, they are making good choices for you, and you can communicate with the chef on your dietary preferences.

Food Waste

How often do you throw food out? Forty percent of food purchased by American households ends up in the trash¹. This used to happen to us, but with perfectly portioned meals from Portable Chef, we never throw out food anymore.

Food Costs

I approximated your weekly cost of food as $100 for five dinners for two people.  But let’s be honest – if you’re living in NYC and buying organic groceries, you could be spending A LOT more.

You’ll Never Look Back

Take my advice. Try Portable Chef for two weeks. Order just a few meals. With Portable Chef, we eat with confidence. We know our food is locally sourced, organic, healthy, and the way food was meant to be. We don’t have to worry about meal choice or preparation at the end of a longer than usual or stressful day. Is your preference to be sweating over the stove or unwinding with loved ones? Oh, and did I mention, the food is simply delicious?!!

References:

1. Source: Gunders, Dana, Natural Resources Defense Council, Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill, August 2012.

This is a tale of deception, love, and intrigue. And breakfast.

As time goes on, I buy less and less stuff at supermarkets. In fact, the only thing I can think of that I still buy that you can only get at a conventional supermarket is the Thomas’ English Muffin.

If I’m going to have starchy white foods on the regular, they better kick some serious tush. Simply put, Thomas’ delivers the goods. Bread gives you something texturally that nothing else does, and Thomas’ English Muffins give you something texturally that few other breads do; toasted properly, no can defense.

But what the hell is that stuff they put on the bottom? I thought about it while watching Angela split a muffin in two a few days ago. Morning sunbeams illuminated a remarkably full cloud of tiny particles that were cascading onto the kitchen floor. You actually can’t handle a Thomas’ at all without these things flying off the bread; when I make two at a time, decades of experience have taught me that my first order of business has got to be to get above the sink and scrape the two together like I’m starting a fire.

The question is: why? Why bother? Why put something on the muffin that costs money and is destined to fall off, uneaten, generating untold additional broom and dustpan usage in households around the country? It just didn’t add up. I decided to launch an investigation. Preferably a short investigation; I’d hoped to get this whole thing resolved before things get too cool to butter properly.

Little did I know I’d soon be descending down a rabbit hole of deceit.

Here’s what I learned:

I learned that it’s “Thomas’ English Muffins.” That is, in and of itself, immediately raised suspicion. Why? I’ll tell you: presumably, this was meant to mean “English muffins that were made by Thomas” or “English muffins that once belonged to Thomas, and now he’s selling them to you.” So you’d want to use the possessive here. The correct way to use the possessive with a proper noun ending in an S (actually any singular noun, propriety be damned) is to put an ‘s on it. Look it up. “Thomas’s” would be the way to go, and even just “Thomas,” sans possessives, would have been fine. But Thomas’? Oy. The only way that would work if there were two people named “Thoma,” and together they were “Thomas,” and the muffins belonged to them.. Then, you could go with “Thomas’.” But that’s not what’s happening here. What was happening here, without a shadow of a doubt at this point, was foul play.

Thomas’ [sic] has this to say:

The small white particles on the bottom of Thomas’® English Muffins are farina. Farina is a cereal food, frequently described as mild-tasting, usually served warm, made from cereal grains. This is used to prevent the doughball from sticking to the oven plate and also to give the product its unique taste.

This is awesome, because the description of Farina exactly matches the first sentence of farina’s Wikipedia entry:

Farina is a cereal food, frequently described as mild-tasting, usually served warm, made from cereal grains.

So. Thomas’ is terrible at grammar and may or may not be a rampant plagiarist. What other foul play is afoot here, Thomas? Going back to the FAQ:

…used to prevent the doughball from sticking to the oven plate…

NO! I don’t believe this. While this may have been true when Thomas was making his very first English Muffin in 1880, I’m pretty sure bread technology has evolved since then, sufficiently enough that we’ve discovered other ways to skin this particular cat. I know this… well, I know this because I’m a professional chef. But I also know this because of personal experience: Thomas’ English Muffins are the only bread product I’ve ever purchased or made that leaves my kitchen floor ready for tap-dancing after I’ve prepared it. And don’t feign ignorance to the times, Thomas: you’ve got other bread products too – bagels (regular and mini), pita, loaves of bread, tortillas – and you’ve been able to prevent these from sticking top the oven plate just fine. So this explanation just won’t wash.

Let’s keep reading the FAQ:

…and also to give the product its unique taste.

Also: nonsense. Have you ever eaten farina? You probably have – it’s sold as a breakfast cereal under the name Cream of Wheat. It tastes like nothing. And even if you disagree and like the taste of farina, then even more insidious questions are raised: if it’s all about the taste, then why, Thomas, do you refuse to put farina on the top half? Why deny the eater of the top half the same taste sensation afforded eaters of the bottom? Do you want sharing a muffin to result in some sort of domestic Battle of Appomattox? It just didn’t add up.

My research on the surface had revealed nothing. But I still figured it out. I’m going to tell you why Thomas’ puts farina on the bottom of each English Muffin they make:

No matter what they say, it’s because the good people at Thomas’ would like you to believe that Thomas is in fact still out there, or perhaps his great-grandson, sweating in the English countryside in front of a wood-burning oven with one of those giant paddles, shuffling muffins in six at a time.

Is that enough to warrant an international conspiracy?

Not international. Something far more insidious. The facts are all there if you know where to look: