WERE you tricked into ordering a big box of food and some bad recipes with the lie that a meal kit would be cheap and easy? Here are the stages of finding out it’s not.
Aggressive marketing with confusing discounts
It seems like every YouTube video starts with an advert for a meal box kit, plus your friends and family have discount codes coming out of their ears. You give it a go, despite wondering how humanity has been preparing meals wrongly for millennia and meal boxes weren’t invented sooner.
Choosing from two good meals and 18 crap ones
You excitedly scroll through the website to choose your menu and quickly realise that there are only two potentially interesting meals amongst all the burgers, wedges and penne with chicken. Maybe it will seem more delicious when you see the actual recipe, you optimistically think to yourself.
Receiving a massive box and a shitload of packaging
A few days later an absolutely huge box arrives at your door. When you finally make it through the various paper and plastic bags, half-melted ice packs and stuff that looks weirdly like loft insulation, you’re left with some piddly packs of meat and a few sad looking vegetables.
Trying to use a recipe that’s so ‘simple’ it barely exists
Meal box kits sell themselves on being ‘simple’ but the recipe cards you receive are so basic that you’re have to guess half of the instructions. Still, you manage to cobble together a meal that you pray is cooked through, as getting food poisoning would make a mockery of the company’s claim that this is a fun and pleasant way to eat.
Pretending to enjoy a disappointing meal that looks nothing like the picture
Finally, you sit down to a meal that looks nothing like the picture on the website and is so bland you end up adding loads of salt to make it vaguely taste of something. Healthy? No. Convenient? Not really. Just a big, flavourless pain in the arse. And you’re locked into a legal agreement that says you must have at least three a week.
