My Food Bag
My Food Bag is a great idea – as far as it goes.
What makes living in the first world so awesome (apart from the free prostate examinations) is that we don’t have to do everything. Ask a peasant in Laos or Zaire “how’s life” and you are likely to be greeted with a wide perky toothless grin. They will enthusiastically shake your hand and invite you back to meet their fourteen children, grandparents, and dog named Bones, followed by a hearty goat supper. You will relay the adventure to your friends telling them that the the peasants were “so friendly, living a simple life free of crass materialism”.
However, don’t be fooled. While you return to your marble walled hotel and relax with wifi and a wall-banger, your friendly peasant family have returned to 18 hours of relentless grinding hard work. Their friendly interlude with you and your Bermuda shorts merely a brief respite from arduous unrelenting third world hard labour.
Don’t get me wrong, the way the world’s peasantry live with positivity is admirable – seemingly happy in the face of unimaginable adversity. But, offer any third world poor family a 40 hour work week and an automatic washing machine, and they would forgo their simple agrarian life faster than a Monsoon through a banana farm.
The point is, it’s the division of labour that frees us from a life of unrelenting poverty. It’s simply a more efficient way to run things. You do what you do, I’ll do what I do, and we’ll buy the rest. For those of us in the west, this works a treat. I know nothing about plumbing, law, medicine, cropping, or animal slaughter – and I don’t need to. All I know is landscape architecture and so long as I can sell my wares I can be part of the system.
Which brings me to My Food Bag. For those of you who live in a dark padded room or have no foodie friends, My Food Bag is a service whereby a bag of food (izt should probably be called Your Food Bag), arrives at your door (inside the cat flap if you are out – don’t tell the cat). Ingredients are portioned exactly to what is needed for you to cook your meal. This of course shortens your supermarket journey and more importantly reduces decision making time. You don’t have to waste those precious brain cells trying to decide what to have for dinner, Nadia and her skinny team have decided for you. Way to go Nadia.
But there is a catch. No it’s not the price, or the cat cat getting to it first. The catch is that you have to cook it yourself. Now call me simple minded, but this seems to be a major weakness in the food bag concept. The beauty of My Food Bag is that it fits so neatly into our desire for division of labour. We don’t make soap anymore, nor do we journey to a well for a glass of water. So tell me this – why do we cook our dinner? If you like to cook then sure, knock yourself out. But surely such cooky types also want to meander through markets casually tossing local fresh produce into their wicker baskets. Having ingredients arrive in a bag must surely be contrary to the foodie code.
I therefore assume that My Food Bag is targeted at people like me – lazy bastards who can’t even manage to decide on dinner, yet alone cook it. Needless to say, there is a key missing ingredient in the bag. That is, a robot to cook it, or a string you pull and the whole thing heats up and cooks itself before you can say “What’s for dinner?”
So just like sleeveless vests and margarine, My Food Bag is only meeting me halfway. Better than nothing but not the whole hog. The economic success of My Food Bag is testament to the financial bonanza that awaits those who can attend to lazy bastards like me. But to really take off and get me interested, they really need to find a way to deliver dinner to me cooked. Just like the way Pizza Hut does it – and you wonder why pizza is so popular? If they can make driverless cars on the basis that people don’t want to drive then surely it’s relatively simple to cook me my dinner and drop it round. Is that really too much to ask?
Richard Alexander Bain
self confessed lazy bastard