black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             
“If you’re one of the millions of Californians who voted against labeling genetically modified foods, you can’t complain when it turns out you have horse meat in your hamburger, and your sushi is made up of lost cats and condoms. You said you didn’t want to know, so lap that shit up. […]

And if we really don’t want to know, why don’t we take all the labels off and replace them with just, ‘sugary shit’, ‘salty shit’, and ‘cool ranch shit with extra shit’?”
Bill Maher
Everything But the Cook Nick Taranto thinks you should cook your own dinner tonight. He even thinks you might pay him for the privilege. At 28, Mr. Taranto already has a double-Ivy education (Dartmouth, Harvard) and served in the Marines; he was a microfinancier in Indonesia and a private wealth adviser on Wall Street. Now his professional focus is on perfecting recipes for maple-glazed salmon and Mexican lasagna — and on how his new e-commerce business, Plated, will buy, measure, cut, chill, box and ship every ingredient to your door. All the home cook has to do, in theory, is click on “order,” open a box and follow a recipe. This ready-to-cook meal is called the dinner kit. And Plated — along with a host of similar new services, including Blue Apron, Chefday! and HelloFresh — is the latest in a stream of technological innovations and corporate interventions, from the cake mix to the cookbook app, that have long promised to relieve Americans of kitchen drudgery while retaining the flavor and cachet of home cooking. Because “cooking dinner is really, really hard.”

Everything But the Cook

Nick Taranto thinks you should cook your own dinner tonight. He even thinks you might pay him for the privilege. At 28, Mr. Taranto already has a double-Ivy education (Dartmouth, Harvard) and served in the Marines; he was a microfinancier in Indonesia and a private wealth adviser on Wall Street.

Now his professional focus is on perfecting recipes for maple-glazed salmon and Mexican lasagna — and on how his new e-commerce business, Plated, will buy, measure, cut, chill, box and ship every ingredient to your door. All the home cook has to do, in theory, is click on “order,” open a box and follow a recipe.

This ready-to-cook meal is called the dinner kit. And Plated — along with a host of similar new services, including Blue Apron, Chefday! and HelloFresh — is the latest in a stream of technological innovations and corporate interventions, from the cake mix to the cookbook app, that have long promised to relieve Americans of kitchen drudgery while retaining the flavor and cachet of home cooking.

Because “cooking dinner is really, really hard.”

©2011 Kateoplis