"It's quicker"

Go back to the number you wrote down in chapter 1, the time from opening the app to the first mouthful. If you didn't write it down, the app will tell you, because it gives you an estimate before you order. Forty minutes is common. Thirty is a good night. On a Friday it can be an hour. A tray in the microwave is quicker, seven or eight minutes, and I'll come to it.

A plain plate is fifteen to twenty minutes. Pasta water takes eight minutes to boil and the pasta takes ten, and in those eighteen minutes you've opened a tin, softened an onion, and grated some cheese, and the whole thing is on a plate at minute twenty. Rice is similar. Eggs are five minutes from cold pan to plate. A jacket potato in the microwave is ten. The tray wins on time, and I'll give it that, though what it wins is seven minutes against fifteen, and what it loses is anything you'd choose to eat if you had the choice.

So why does the order feel quicker. I think it's because the order is quick for you. Two taps and the deciding is done, and the forty minutes that follow don't feel like cooking time because you're not in the kitchen. But you're not doing anything else either. You're hungry and waiting, and hungry and waiting is a state, not free time. If you're honest about what you do in the wait, it's usually the phone, and the phone in a state of hunger isn't rest.

This is my interpretation and not a finding, but I think "quicker" is a word for "less of my attention", and the order does win on that. It asks for two taps and then nothing. The plain plate asks for fifteen minutes of attention, most of it mild. What you're buying with the order is the attention, not the time, and it's worth knowing which so that you can decide whether the attention is really something you haven't got. Some nights it is. Chapter 13 is about those. Most nights, the fifteen minutes of attention would have been spent on the phone, and the phone was a worse use of it than an onion.