It’s Season 3 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel talk through tough topics related to family meals and parenting. Missed our first two seasons? You can check out all of our episodes here.

The NY Times reports dinner delivery is on the rise. On this episode, we’re unpacking what’s gained and what’s lost with family dinner by DoorDash.

Bri and Annie dive into a recent article, “Freedom with a Side of Guilt: How food delivery is reshaping mealtime,” to examine how the opportunity to have dinner dropped at your door is changing the face of family meals. They talk about the economic, social, and scheduling effects — both positive and negative — of outsourcing meal preparation, what’s behind this trend, and how to balance much-needed convenience with other values. The episode ends with ideas for striking a healthy balance that works for your family, plus easy meal ideas, fun, and conversation starters you can use at your dinner table tonight.

Episode highlights:

• Discussion of the cost for family meal delivery (4:45)
• Analysis of life skills vs. dinner delivery (11:10)
• Ideas for striking a balance (25:15)
• Food, fun, and conversation suggestions for easy family meals (31:00)

Related Links:

• 20 No-Fail Dinner Ideas
• Freedom with a Side of Guilt (NY Times Article)
• The Price Is…? Grocery Budget Game
• Podcast: Labor of Love?
• Podcast: Is it the Family, or the Dinner?

Full Episode Transcript:

Bri DeRosa: Hello and welcome back to The Family Dinner Project podcast. Annie, we had to jump on and make this episode today because I have been dying to talk to you about this New York Times article that just came out. So the article is called “Freedom with a Side of Guilt: How food delivery is reshaping mealtime.”

So there’s a lot to unpack here, and this is also kind of a new evolution in the family dinner landscape. And I, I feel like we have to talk about it.

Anne Fishel: I agree. And I would just put a little context here. I think the amount of food delivery has doubled since during the pandemic. So it’s, it’s new but not spanking new.

It was one of the changes that came about during the pandemic when people couldn’t go to restaurants and were ordering lots more groceries online and food online, and it’s something that stayed with us since then, although I was just reading in the Globe that at least among New Englanders, it’s now food delivery is starting to decline a little bit.

As it turns out that restaurant food is, the inflation is much higher than the inflation around grocery food. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s part and parcel of the conversation, right, is food delivery services like DoorDash or Uber Eats or any of these delivery services, there is an additional cost for most of these services over and above the restaurant food cost, and also restaurant food has gotten more expensive, even outpacing how expensive groceries have gotten.

So there’s kind of a lot to talk about here. And I, I also, Annie, I wanna like make a note really quickly for people, the title of this episode, we mentioned DoorDash, just ’cause that, it’s…DoorDash is a very recognizable, I think you said to me like it’s the one that’s become a verb, right? My kids will say like, I’m DoorDashing, and the New York Times article specifically says DoorDash, but we wanna just kind of make a statement right up front. We, we just wanna be totally transparent with our listeners that actually, Annie, on behalf of The Family Dinner Project, you had, I think a pretty good experience working with DoorDash. Right? 

Anne Fishel: I had a very good experience. They invited me to come talk to their workforce about the benefits of family dinner, and they were very responsive.

So we don’t mean to cast any shade at DoorDash. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, no, absolutely. I just wanna be really clear with people and, and I’ll, you know, say there’s a lot of food delivery services out there and we have love for all. I have used them all, right?

Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: We wanna talk about actually just the trend that is emerging, or the trends that are emerging, and how the use of food delivery services is kind of changing and impacting the face of family dinners, right?

Anne Fishel: Yes, exactly. 

Bri DeRosa: Okay, so with all of that off our chest, it’s really important to set the stage and just say dinner…dinner can be hard. Dinner can be hard. We have to find creative solutions to make it happen sometimes, and there are a lot of good reasons why you might want to use a food delivery service to get your dinner. Some people need to do that. Some people like to do that. There’s just, and we’ve always been in favor of, you know, order a pizza on Friday nights, if cooking is, is too tiring at the end of the week. So that you can focus on the time with your family. 

Anne Fishel: Yes. And one of our messages has always been family dinner is the least about the food.

So spend as little time as possible if, if, you know, that doesn’t float your boat to spend time in the kitchen. And so in that spirit ordering food delivery could be, you know, a way to really focus on the other parts of family dinner, like conversation and having a good time. It can be part of the solution for a lot of families.

I think what caught our eye with the article was how pervasive it is for some families. I mean, there was one, one anecdote of somebody who ordered food delivery seven nights a week to the tune of $700 a week, which added up to $35,000 a year. Which is just astonishing. 

Bri DeRosa: Yes, $700 a week for dinner alone is a lot of money on dinner for a family of four. This was, you know, two parents and two young children. They, I don’t know the ages of both children, but one of them they said was four. Right? So, economically speaking, I think there’s a question here about the sustainability of this as a family dinner strategy for a lot of families.

And I remember that particular family, one of the parents said in the article that he wasn’t necessarily happy about spending this amount of money. He said something to the effect of like, it’s easy to get the instant gratification, and I just defer my unhappiness until the credit card bill comes. 

Anne Fishel: I think it’s, it’s very compelling in the moment if two parents have gotten home from work, they’re exhausted, their kids are hungry, they haven’t done much planning during the week, and there’s this instant solution. It’s very easy to, to order in. I don’t know. I mean, I, I think it may not be too much more complicated than that.

Bri DeRosa: So I think there’s a few layers here, right? I think you’re right that it probably isn’t a lot more complicated than that. But I also, like, I started thinking about last night, this family, they said in the article kind of a cute little throwaway line that their 4-year-old can’t read yet, but he can use the Chick-fil-A app to place his dinner order. Right? 

And I started thinking about also the palatability of foods like Chick-fil-A, and again, not coming for anybody or saying that you shouldn’t eat certain foods or anything like that. They happen to mention this in the article and I started to think about… there is…there’s a couple of different kinds of cost here for a family.

There’s the economic cost, there’s the time cost, which they’re offsetting, right? They’re solving the time cost problem and the whole, you know, meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, cleanup problem…

Anne Fishel: Right? 

Bri DeRosa: Right. But they’re also potentially solving a palatability issue, and I was thinking, this child at the age of four, and presumably any sibling, they’re right in that sweet spot for what, you know, families would colloquially call picky eating.

We try not to call it that, but you know, they’re, they’re in the sweet spot for being a little bit selective, let’s say. 

Anne Fishel: Absolutely. 

Bri DeRosa: It occurs to me that if the kid can order his own Chick-fil-A, yes, you get around that problem pretty easily. 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. Then the parents can order what they want. 

Bri DeRosa: Mm-hmm. 

Anne Fishel: And everybody is seemingly happy.Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: And everybody is seemingly happy. Now here’s like…the question I have, which is if this family then wanted to try to reel this back in and change the habit to where they’re not ordering in seven nights a week, let’s say they, they decide to cut it in half. Now, the other half of the week they’re gonna try to cook.

What challenge are they potentially setting themselves up for? With the palatability issue for the kids right now, you’ve introduced, we’re cooking at home, we’re making healthy food, we’re, you know, so now it’s more complicated. They’re spending time and energy cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping that they weren’t spending before, and they’re possibly going to have more pushback from the kids at the table.

Anne Fishel: Yeah, I mean, you’re making a good case to just keep on using takeout. It sounds really hard once you’ve created almost restaurant conditions at home where everybody gets to order what they want. It’s a lot. It’s, it’s challenging, but I mean, I think we need to talk about what is lost. Even putting aside the financial issues, which are glaring, let’s say there were no financial issues, it was as inexpensive to do food delivery as it was to cook at home. We know that’s not true, but I’m just saying, as a thought exercise.

What would be lost or what would we say would be the reason to make that effort that you’re describing, of so much more time and having to juggle different palates and figure out maybe one meal that everybody can eat or, you know, what, what were, to put it another way, what’s gained by saying to a family, I know this is easier, I know you save a lot of time, but here’s an argument for why we think there are things you’re really missing out on by doing family dinner this way. Or mostly this way. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. And you know, it’s such an interesting question because this is like any other type of progress in the modern world. We make progress with technologies and so forth that makes certain things in our lives easier. And then, you know, there’s kind of a, a moment where you reach and you start to think, oh, maybe we’ve gone too far. You know? 

Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: And I think the article that, that we’re basing this conversation on, there were some experts in that article who talked about some concerns they had, and they talked about the potential for lower rates of critical thinking, planning, problem solving, the loss of basic life skills like shopping and meal preparation skills.

And so I think that’s one place to start. ‘Cause I did notice when we were looking into this, the rate of food delivery is much higher amongst younger people – 

Anne Fishel: Yes, than it is millennials and, and Gen Zs. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: And so…Look, in some ways you could say, well, a lot of those people are the, are the people in the trenches of parenting with younger kids at home. And so that may account for that, they’re busier or you know, they’re juggling so many things. 

But the other question that I have is we have seen kind of a decline in cooking skills and domestic life skills. I sound like Little House on the Prairie. Domestic life skills. We’re not seeing as much like, passing down of, kids are in the kitchen with you and you’re teaching them how to make food and how to make, you know, family recipes and how to grocery shop and all of these things for a number of reasons.

So I’m wondering, is that the first thing that we might stand to lose by doing too much delivery, and/or is it the first thing that we should gain back if we try to divest from as much food delivery? 

Anne Fishel: Yes. I think that’s a really good point, Bri. I mean, I would add a couple of other things. One is that the food is not as healthy when it’s food delivery service, even putting aside fast food delivery. But really any kind of restaurant food tends not to be as healthy in terms of having higher sugar, fat, and salt content. So, and there’s been some research that bears that out, that families actually report that the more they order out or order delivery, the less healthy they find their diet to be. So I think that’s another thing that, that gets lost in the shuffle.

And then, I mean, I think this is maybe not true for even a majority of people, but I, I know it’s true for you and me. We love to cook. It’s a creative act. It’s one of the few things that we can still do with our hands and our senses. We can make things together with our family members. And that to me is a, is a big loss to give that up, that kind of play, that kind of family play, or even the individual meditation of, of cooking and feeling like I get to do something during the day that has a beginning, middle, and end.

And that’s not true of any other part of my day. So for me personally, that would be something that would be a big loss. And I, I think for a lot of people who have some pleasure in cooking, 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I think that’s, that’s absolutely true for you and me. Right? Yeah. And there’s, we had talked about this because in that article there was someone who was talking about how she’s actually entertaining more because she’s able to get food delivered for herself and her friends, and it takes the pressure off cooking for people. And I said to you like, oh, I’ve done that. You know, I’ve had people over and we’ve been like, oh, let’s just order from wherever.

And it’s fun. No question. But I do personally feel differently about it because I like to cook for people. You know, it, for me, it’s not as rewarding, but I, I also, you know, I think your point about not everybody likes to cook is really valid. And I would say there’s, at the end of that New York Times article, they talked to someone who reined in his food delivery activities after analyzing his spending and realizing that he was spending like over a third of his discretionary spending on delivery.

Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: You know, feeling like that was really out of whack. And he said he’s now cooking at home much more and he feels accomplished. He said he feels more like an adult and like he’s achieved something. 

Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: And so is that, even if you don’t like to cook, is that something that we’re giving up in the quest for convenience?

Anne Fishel: Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think it is. And then I come back to, for some families, if there’s a choice between not having family dinner at all, and having family dinner with the convenience of ordering in. I would, I would pick the latter. I would say, yeah, if you can order in twice a week, three times a week, and gather around the table and have a 20 minute dinner where everybody’s talking and laughing and enjoying themselves, go for it.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. It’s so tricky. Right. 

But, so, okay. I have two sort of, I’m gonna be a little bit of a provocateur because I have two sort of thoughts around that, right? One is in a broader cultural context. If that’s really the case, if there are many, many families out there who literally cannot have a family dinner at all, if they have to cook it, because they’re so busy. Is that not, sorry, a cultural, social failure, right? Are we not, then…something’s gone awry in the workplace expectations, something’s gone awry in terms of our devotion to kid activities that maybe are, are super extra on the calendar, which I say as the parent of two very involved kids, so like I’m talking to myself. 

Right, but like first of all, if that’s really the case, more often than not, is there not something that has shifted and gone maybe off kilter in terms of how we value families and family time? And then the other sort of provocative thing I’m gonna ask you is if that’s the feeling, if we feel like we can’t get dinner on the table, we can wait 30 minutes for delivery, but we’re so busy during that 30 minutes that we couldn’t use that same 30 minutes to make, you know, a pot of pasta… 

Anne Fishel: Right.

Bri DeRosa: Is that not also a skill deficit? Like are we not potentially feeling that way not because we actually don’t have the time, but because we don’t know where to start, we don’t know how to adequately plan and cook? That, you know, I don’t know. But it, it’s like a chicken or the egg thing that goes around in my head.

Anne Fishel: Yeah. Well I think it’s a both/and. I mean, I think there’s these broader cultural systemic issues that individual families struggle to solve on their own, but are clearly bigger than one particular family. Work lives that are 60 hours a week. Children having multiple extracurriculars with coaches. Drama directors scheduling rehearsals and practices during the dinner hour. These are all things that are bigger than one particular family, and sometimes families can band together and go talk to that coach or talk to the director or workers can appeal to the higher ups and say, something’s gotta give here.

And yeah, I think it’s true, there’s this sort of, can be a kind of a lack of imagination or a lack of a skillset of what could we do with 30 minutes instead of just doing a little bit more work before the food arrives. What could we cook in that 30 minute timetable, and I think that’s why all our recipes on the website are 30 minutes or less.

It actually is about the time that it takes from calling up the food to it arriving at your doorstep. 

Bri DeRosa: Right? Yeah. And one caveat there, some of our recipes take longer to get to the table than that, because we have some that are more suited for Sunday dinners or like, but they’re, they’re all 30 minutes or less hands on. We’ll say that. 

Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, no, I, and, and what I, what I wonder about and worry about, as I’m staring at the ceiling at 4:00 AM trying to sleep, Annie, what I wonder about is…All right, so to give, to give an analogy: During the pandemic, non-food related analogy, but during the pandemic, I recall that my kids’ school district removed music ensembles and music classes completely for the duration of distance learning, which was like a year and a half.

And I wrote to the district asking them what they thought was going to happen to their widely well-regarded music programs down the line when they were essentially pulling out one thread of a whole fabric that if you, if you remove this one class of kids from the ability to learn and practice an instrument, when they get to high school and you want them to join your award-winning ensembles, you’re gonna have a big fall off in participation and your program is going to be under threat of collapse because sort of generationally in a, in a sense, you’ve pulled a pin that can’t be put back in. Right?

Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: And I feel like this is a little bit the same thing, that if we don’t make choices, insofar as we are able, to try to balance convenience versus how do you actually take care of yourself and survive if, you know…

Let’s say the grid goes out tomorrow and you don’t have cell service and your apps don’t work and you can’t get food delivered in an extreme situation, or let’s say, you know, much more probable for a lot of people. You go through an economic downturn of your own, you lose a job, you have trouble finding a new one. Your income changes. You can’t afford your delivery anymore. Now you have to feed yourself. 

Anne Fishel: I mean, I, I love that analogy and I’m gonna challenge that analogy a little bit. Because I think losing several years of music proficiency and practice and playing an instrument and playing it with other people is much harder to get back than for a family who does delivery for a few years when their kids are young or when, you know, when they’re working around the clock and then they have a kind of epiphany of, we can’t sustain this. It’s much easier to say, okay, we’re gonna learn some cooking skills. We’re gonna talk to our neighbors. We’re gonna look at the Family Dinner Project website, we’re gonna get some ideas and we’re gonna get this back online.

We’re gonna get, we’re gonna start cooking again. I mean, I think fortunately cooking, um, is much more forgiving as a life skill that you can pick it back up or you can learn it really at any stage of life. So it may be kind of a rocky period making the transition, but I don’t think it’ll be as rocky as it was for the students at your kid’s school to lose that time with musical instruments.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, no, and it’s a, it’s a totally valid point, right? You can learn to cook at any point in time and you know, certainly a lot of us, at some point in our young adulthood, turned on the food network and watched some shows and went, oh, knife skills. Oh, and now I guess the equivalent is cooking stuff on YouTube, as long as you can identify the AI recipes that don’t work versus the real people showing you what to do, which is a very, very real and sometimes, sorry guys, hilarious issue when people don’t know enough to realize, oh, that’s never gonna come out. 

But, but I think, you know, it’s a question of always being mindful, right? Because you’re right, you can learn these things at any point in time. But I think two things. One, we don’t ever wanna be learning something crucial to our survival in the, in, in a moment of emergency, right? 

Anne Fishel: Yep. 

Bri DeRosa: So you kind of always wanna be thinking like, Hey, if this is a potentially life, usable life skill that could make a big difference, we probably wanna keep up with it and model it to our kids to whatever extent is reasonable for us at this moment in time. We don’t wanna, like, lose it for a while and then try to get it back. 

And then the other thing is, if you’ve got these younger generations who are coming up in households that are mostly food delivery based, and then they go out into the world and they start using food delivery, you’re starting to set up almost like a whole new generational pattern. 

Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: Where what you learned in your childhood becomes the patterning of your adulthood. And we know that about family dinners specifically, right? That how you eat as a child has a long-term impact on how you eat as an adult. 

Anne Fishel: Right. And there are second chances. You might have had disastrous family dinners as a child and reinvent them as an adult. So yes, I think both things are true. I do keep coming back, I guess this is kinda my personal connection to cooking, that it just seems like such a loss of play and pleasure and enjoyment to outsource that, that yes, it’s very timely.

I mean, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort, but there is something so fun and satisfying and creative.

Bri DeRosa: And I would argue, even if it’s not fun and creative and play for you, that that sense of the sense of accomplishment, the sense of I did a thing and it’s concrete and I followed the steps and I completed it and it was edible. There is a sense of like, we don’t get a lot of, is that like a dopamine hit? Right? That’s almost what I wanna say. Like we don’t get a lot of that in our society. 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: There’s not a lot of, I set out to do a thing concretely, this task, and it was hard and it was challenging, but I, I did it. I worked at it and I did it, and now I have the reward of my labors. We don’t do a lot of that in daily life and we’ve made things easier and easier, so it’s harder and harder to get there. So I think even if it’s not play for you, it’s maybe challenge for you, in a potentially satisfying way. 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. Yep. I think that’s right. I mean, that may seem very abstract in the moment. It’s six o’clock and everybody’s tired and hungry. But I think it’s definitely something that’s lost that sense of achievement and that sense of completing something to share with, with people you love. 

Bri DeRosa: So then how do we reel it back?

Because again, we are not in any way suggesting that people should never do food delivery service or that, you know…Look, you solve things in the way that you have to solve them. 

Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: Absolutely. And I, I DoorDashed recently myself. It just, sometimes you do, you do what you need to do. So all that said though, if people did want to start to reel this back in for economic reasons, for social reasons, like, Hey, I’m not even going out anymore because I don’t ever have to even go to a restaurant. Just if you wanna like, get out in the world a little bit more, or if you want to have that, Hey, yeah, you’re right, I should learn how to cook, or I should remember to teach my kids how to cook. Any of these reasons, whatever it is. 

Anne Fishel: Or I want the food to be healthier. I wanna have more control over how much salt and sugar and fat my kids eat and my – Yeah.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I want to know that 20 years down the line, the nutritional patterning that we have created for our 4-year-old is not fully delivery food. And that, you know, they, they know what broccoli is. Right?

Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: Whatever. Right. Whatever the thing is, how can we help people reel this back in, what would we recommend?

Particularly because to your point, like, nobody wants to be climbing the mountain at six o’clock with hungry kids. 

Anne Fishel: Well, I mean, I think we have some, some resources to share. Some very easy recipes. The no fail recipes, which maybe you’ll talk a little bit more about. 

I sometimes play a little game with myself. I used to think, what cookies can I make that take me less time to drive to the store than to bake at home? And I was thinking, could I play a game like that with other families, of what meal can you make that takes less time than calling for food delivery and having it arrive at your doorstep? Like, what are those 30 minute meals that you’ve got all the food in the pantry ready to go and you could make it just as easily, or maybe not just as easily, but almost as easily.

Bri DeRosa: Almost as easily. Yeah. No, I, I think, yes. And I also think there’s a couple of other things that, you know, people might wanna consider.

I mean, one is, I think anytime that you’re trying to change a behavior, you wanna set some sort of goal and, and keep some sort of reason in mind. Right. You know, maybe for some families they might need to come at this from a standpoint of our, our goal is to shave 25% off of our food delivery budget over the next six months. Let’s see how we do. And we’re gonna maybe, maybe we’re gonna set that money aside in a different account that’s gonna be used to reward us with something else. You know, maybe it’s our vacation fund or you know, a small renovation, remodel, new something for the family, right?

Whatever. But like, maybe that’s one way. If you have the discretionary income and you need to figure out how to wean yourself away from the food delivery, divert that to something else, right? 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great idea, Bri. Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: I also think, you know, you could, you could say we’re gonna start with one night a week where we are not going to do food delivery. It’s gonna be our line in the sand that, you know, Monday nights we’re never gonna do food delivery. Although, personally I think that would be a terrible choice. Mondays are not a good day to not, right? 

But whatever. It’s, pick a day that’s, we’re gonna hold ourselves and each other accountable.We’re not getting food delivered. So we have, you know, all week to figure out how to make that dinner happen. And then I also think, thinking about having to come up with or make the dinner right in that moment where you’re hungry and everything’s falling apart and you would ordinarily be doing the delivery, is maybe the wrong way to come at it.

If we’re trying to change a habit, you might wanna go more towards like, Hey, you know, we’re gonna wean down baby steps. First of all, we’re gonna have some stuff that we get from the grocery store, maybe even like the prepared foods bar at the grocery store, right? Start with a rotisserie chicken and some already made soup, and like some stuff from the salad bar and have it in the fridge. So it’s very easy and you’re not cooking, and that’s kind of like the first baby step. 

Or take the time on a weekend to make chili and have that, right, for later. Or I saw, the other day, and I thought this was brilliant. You know, this one woman said, I forget where – Threads maybe – said like, the worst time of day for me to get anything done is six o’clock when my kids are hungry and climbing all over me and I’m tired. I get everything chopped for dinner before the kids get up in the morning. And then, you know, she’s like, I actually do a lot of cooking in the morning. 

Now again, maybe that’s not for you, but we’re just trying to, you know, start to break the pattern of like, everything pushes to the end of a day. You’re exhausted. Everybody’s overwhelmed. It’s the witching hour for kids. We all know that. And so you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta get ahead of the pattern where you’re gonna hit that button on your phone, I think. 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. Yeah, that’s very wise, I think. Very sensible and yeah, that making a double batch of something on the weekend when you have a little extra time, getting your kids to help you freezing some of it so you’ve got something just to pull out on one of the nights that you’re not gonna order food delivery. And then you have some ideas of really easy meals that maybe we’ll share in the, in the notes. 

Bri DeRosa: Oh yeah. We’ve got our, you know, we’ve got our 20 no fail dinners we share, I share these around on social media actually relatively frequently because they’re the kind of thing people are always looking for. Right. And it’s, you know, very simple stuff where, you know, this is how you can turn a rotisserie chicken into like a couple of different things tonight, really quickly. You know, here’s, you’re gonna make scrambled eggs and toast and not feel bad about it. 

There’s a lot of leeway with family dinner, and I think if people can get out of the mindset of what a meal is supposed to look like and start to think like, Hey, you know what, if we make grilled cheese sandwiches and carrot sticks and applesauce tonight, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There’s a lot right with that. And the kids aren’t probably gonna be upset about it and everybody wins. That’s faster. That is definitely faster than waiting for delivery. 

And then I think also, you know, if you wanna get a little fancier look, we’ve got stuff like the two ingredient pesto salmon. Literally get a thing of pesto, smear it on some salmon and bake it. It’s, you know, I mean there’s a lot of very, very quick and easy things that we can do. And Annie, you even have like, you did that whole experiment with, we were kind of calling them savory mug cakes, but they’re, they’re omelets in a mug.

Anne Fishel: right, right. 

Bri DeRosa: And those take 90 seconds, I think. 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: You know, let everybody mix up their own little mug omelet and–

Anne Fishel: –Yeah. Put some vegetables in it. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. Throw it in the microwave and, you know, so there’s a lot of different ways to solve for food that are not necessarily, you know, onerous in terms of getting your cooking skills up to par.

Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: And then, so for the fun, I think you just said you used to play a game like what cookies can I make that take less time than getting in the car? What dinner can we make that takes less time than food delivery? Are there variations on that type of like, time challenge game or, or grocery challenge game?

Anne Fishel: Right, right. Putting different ingredients on the table or ones that have gone into the meal that we’re eating and people, and actually put the amount that you paid for that ingredient and ask people to guess how much they think it cost. 

Bri DeRosa: Right. Yeah. You, you know how much it costs. 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: Everybody else has to guess and then see how close you are.

And I think, you know, you could even, you could vary that in this instance, if you wanted to, you could try to make a meal that’s similar to something you get from delivery. You know, if you order Chick-fil-A sandwiches frequently, you know, could you make some sort of chicken cutlet sandwich at home and see how much do we think that this costs us versus how much does it cost us when we get it from food delivery?

It’d be especially good to do this type of thing with teens to figure out where potentially, where is delivery more economical and where is it not? Right? 

Anne Fishel: Yes. You could also see how fast you could make it. That could be part of the game. 

Bri DeRosa: I love that. Yeah. How fast could you, almost like an Iron Chef challenge, right?

A little, little timer challenge. And that’s another thing, right? If you, if you don’t abjectly hate cooking and you’re trying to reincorporate it into your life, making it fun and gamifying it. You know, Iron Chef, Chopped, those types of, you can do those things at home. Or, you know, be held accountable by, by somebody, a friend who can zoom with you and have, you know, cook the same recipe at the same time, interactively, and talk and make that a social experience.

You know, that’s another way to kind of hold yourself accountable that you’re gonna actually make dinner. 

Anne Fishel: Right. So in terms of a conversation starter, that sort of in keeping with what this, this recent flow of conversation we’re having. One conversation starter could be what food that we’ve ordered would you like to be able to make at home? And how could we do that? 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I love that question. And I think you could also, you could expand that to, you know, what food that we’ve ordered would you bring to a desert island with you? Right? What would be your desert island DoorDash order? If one could DoorDash on a desert island. I feel like they could have done that on Gilligan’s Island and you’d be yelling at the TV. Why can’t the delivery driver just take you back home with him? No, the Professor’s still like, noodling around with coconuts in the background. But you guys, you got your, you got your pasta, so that’s good. 

Anne Fishel: Well, this was a very fun conversation, Bri. I thank you for it.

Bri DeRosa: Thank you, Annie. Yeah, I feel like, you know, lots of kind of questions and quandaries, maybe not a lot of concrete answers, but you know, I think we just need to encourage people, again, do what’s right for your family, always, in the realm of family dinner, but also be thinking about the longer term questions, impacts, what is it that you are, are hoping to accomplish with your family meals? And that might shed some light on how you wanna handle these questions. 

All right, well, we’ll see you next time on the Family Dinner Project Podcast. Annie, thanks for joining me as always. 

Anne Fishel: Thank you, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: And don’t forget, you can find us at thefamilydinnerproject.org. You can find us on social media, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.

Always feel free to reach out with questions at any point in time. We are happy to help.