From The Atlantic.

The thing about dinner, Rachel Sugar writes, is that you have to deal with it every single night.

Figuring out what to eat every night at 6 p.m. is a pleasure until it becomes a constant low-grade grind. It’s not just cooking, but “the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the soon-to-be-rotting produce sitting in my fridge. It is the time it sucks up during the week. It is the endless mental energy.”

“Dinner isn’t just the largest meal in the standard American diet; it is the most important, the most nourishing, the most freighted with moral weight,” Sugar continues. “The mythical dream of dinner is that after a hard but wholesome day at school or work, the family unit is reunited over a hot meal, freshly prepared. Even if you’re dining solo, dinner tends to be eaten in a state of relative leisure, signaling a transition into the time of day when you are no longer beholden to your job.”

As it stands, dinner is a game of trade-offs, Sugar writes: “You can labor over beautiful and wholesome meals, but it is so much work. You can heat up a Trader Joe’s frozen burrito or grab McDonald’s—there is a reason that as of 2016, the last time the government counted, one-third of American adults ate fast food on any given day—but you don’t have to be a health fanatic to aspire to a more balanced diet. You could get takeout, but it’s notoriously expensive and frequently soggy, more a novelty than a regular occurrence.”
When one dinner solution fizzles, there is always another, and another, which will be superseded by still more.

Dinner exists, daunting and ominous. “Dinner resists optimization. It can be creative, and it can be pleasurable. None of this negates the fact that it is a grind,” Sugar continues at the link in our bio. “There is freedom in surrendering to this.”

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