What the order costs you

The order costs money, and chapter 6 said the money isn't the argument, so I'll leave it there. The other costs are the ones nobody adds up.

It costs the wait. Forty minutes a night, hungry, on the phone, five nights a week, is over three hours of the week spent in a state that isn't rest and isn't dinner. The plain plate spends fifteen minutes on the same job and hands the other twenty-five back.

It costs the evening its shape. An evening that waits for a doorbell is organised around the doorbell. You can't go out, you can't start anything, you can't have a bath, because the food's coming. A plate that's on the table at twenty past seven leaves the evening open at half past.

It costs the box on the side, and the plate you didn't wash because it was only used for one thing, and the sense that the kitchen is a room you keep the fridge in.

It costs something to your health, and I'll put this in its place, which is supporting rather than central. Julia Wolfson and Sara Bleich, looking at nearly ten thousand adults in a United States survey, found that those in households where dinner was cooked six or seven times a week ate less overall, and less fat and sugar, than those where it was cooked once or not at all. Mills and colleagues, in over eleven thousand adults in a UK cohort, found that eating home-cooked main meals more than five times a week went with more fruit and vegetables and a greater chance of being in the normal weight range than eating them fewer than three times. Those are associations and can't prove cause. They describe two groups of people, and the group that cooks eats a bit better, and it's the group you'd expect.

And it costs the thing chapter 18 is about, which is the cooking itself. Every night that's ordered is a night the plain plate didn't get made, and the plain plate doesn't get easier by not being made. The event grows in the dark. That's the cost the app never shows you, because the app doesn't know what you could have done.