"I'm too tired to cook"

You are tired. This chapter isn't going to argue with that. You've worked, or looked after people, or both, and at seven the tank is low, and the thought of the event, the shop and the hour and the washing up, is the thought of something you haven't got. If cooking were the event, being too tired for it would be a good reason.

But look at what the tiredness is measuring. Jennifer Jabs and Carol Devine, reviewing the research on time and food, describe time scarcity as the feeling of not having enough time, and they're careful to call it a feeling, one that's been linked to less cooking at home, more fast food and more convenience food. The feeling is real. It isn't the same as the clock. Pablo Monsivais and colleagues, in a survey of around thirteen hundred adults in the United States, found that people who spent under an hour a day on food preparation and cleaning up were the ones who ate out and used fast food most, and that they tended to be working adults who put a high value on convenience. Under an hour a day is still an hour a day for some of them. The gap between the people who cook and the people who order isn't a gap between people with evenings and people without. It's narrower than that.

Here's the thing the tiredness doesn't see. A plain plate takes fifteen minutes, and about ten of those are the pasta or the rice or the potatoes doing their own thing while you stand there. The part where you do something is chopping an onion, opening a tin, and stirring. That's less effort than the wait, if you count the forty minutes of low-level hunger as effort, which I do. And on the far side of the fifteen minutes there's a plate of food and a pan to rinse, rather than a box and a slightly sick feeling from a portion sized for someone who runs.

I'm not saying you're not tired. I'm saying the event is the thing you're too tired for, and the event isn't on the menu. A plain plate is. The question for tonight isn't whether you've got an hour and a recipe in you. It's whether you've got fifteen minutes standing up in you, and on most nights you have, because you'll spend more than that standing in the kitchen waiting for the doorbell.