Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, which is getting to seven in the evening, opening an app or the freezer, and eating something somebody else made, again, not because tonight is special but because tonight is a Tuesday and cooking has become, somewhere in your head, an event. An event needs a recipe, a shop, an hour, a clean kitchen and a result worth all that. You haven't got any of those at seven on a Tuesday. So you order.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the order makes sense from the inside. You're tired, you're hungry now, there's nothing in, you don't know what to make, and the app knows exactly what to make and will bring it to the door. The second is that the event you're avoiding isn't the thing that's on offer. Most cooking that people actually do on weeknights is a small repertoire of five or six things that take fifteen to twenty minutes, need no recipe and get made in one pan, and the reason it looks like an event to you is that you haven't done it for a while, and the longer you don't do it the bigger it looks. There's research on what makes people cook and what stops them, and the shortage that stops them is mostly the feeling of having no time, not the time. The third is practical. Keep a shelf of things that don't go off. Know six plain plates you can make without looking anything up. Decide what's for dinner before you're hungry. Chapters 19 to 22 cover how, and none of it takes an hour.

This book isn't a diet book, and it isn't a recipe book. It won't tell you what to eat, and it won't tell you that a takeaway is bad. It's about the default, the night when nothing was decided and the app decided. Chapter 13 is about the takeaway you chose on purpose, which is fine.

Three cautions.

If you've stopped cooking because you've stopped doing most things, and you've felt low most of the day, most days, for a fortnight or more, the NHS says to see a GP. Dinner can wait until you have, and the app is doing a job for now.

If your relationship with food is the problem, if you're eating very little, or eating and then trying to undo it, or spending a lot of the day worrying about your weight and shape, that isn't this book. The NHS says to see a GP as soon as you can, and the charity Beat has a helpline.

And if you have a condition that makes standing at a hob for fifteen minutes hard, or you don't have a kitchen, chapter 23 is written for you and some of the method changes.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.