Defending the 30-Minute Meal
The 30-minute dinner recipe doesn’t need my defense. In the commercial space, it’s doing just fine. Cookbooks and newsletters dedicated to the topic of what busy people can make for dinner consistently rank highly in sales charts.
But when the newest iteration of Gourmet Magazine launched, I was struck that its very first Instagram post, its introduction to the world, included the phrase “you deserve more than 30-minute weeknight meals.” I’m not picking on Gourmet here; it’s a sentiment I’ve heard a million times before. In some ways, it’s become background noise, along with the I don’t need to read 1,200 words about your grandma on your food blog; just give me the recipe dust-up that happens quarterly on whatever social media platform people are using.
This is the tension both within food media and between food media and its (non-industry) consumers. As writers and editors in this world, we want to explore, prod, and tell the bigger stories about where our food comes from and who grows, harvests, processes, distributes, and prepares it. We desperately want more people to care about these stories. At the same time, practitioners and readers/viewers of food media have to make dinner every night, forever. Sure, there’s the occasional restaurant or takeout meal. Sometimes, there’s a potluck or leftovers or a girl dinner. But by and large, people are worried about what they’re going to feed themselves or their families tonight and may not have a single thought about the challenges along coffee’s supply chain.
I should acknowledge that I’m not the target audience for quick and easy dinner recipes. I live in a dual-income-no-kids household; my husband and I both do work that involves food. I buy as much as I can from local farms, haven’t purchased bottled salad dressing in at least 15 years, and famously cook my beans from their dry state. But also, I also have to fucking cook dinner again tonight—in between work, walking the dog, doing the laundry, and preparing to teach tomorrow night. Dismissing the need for easy weeknight recipes, and by extension the people who come to food media for them, doesn’t make anyone care more about the sociopolitical stories about food. Dinner doesn’t simply appear on the table because we’re reading about how potatoes became a staple in so many parts of the world.
I see a parallel to the return of thinness culture, and the commentary around it. My social media feeds are filled with posts about who benefits from keeping women small and undernourished. The question becomes, who benefits from the dismissal of quick, easy dinners?
Acknowledging the inherent flaw in data that divides gender along a binary, it’s got to be noted that women are more likely to cook dinner than men. For example, a National Institutes of Health study found in 2017 and 2018 that, in the U.S., women cook dinner 3 to 4 times a week, while men cook dinner 2 to 3 times a week. Pew Research Center, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, stated in 2019 that in households with children, women are the “usual meal prepper” in 80 percent of households with children and 75 percent of households with no kids.
More to the point, food media was born of women instructing women how to keep house, which included efficient and economical ways to make dinner. As far back as the 1700s, women were writing cookbooks and columns on the subject. It was a socially acceptable way for women, across class lines, to earn money and build a career. For women who needed to work outside the house while still being expected to handle all domestic tasks, these resources have always been a godsend.
Many of those books from 300 years ago are now resources when we go to write stories about how food and cooking have changed over time, or what a given economic class, ethnic group, or regional cohort may have eaten in less industrial time. I’m open to the argument that it’s not that deep, but to me, insouciance around the 30-minute meal feels like disrespect to those forebears.
So who benefits when we demean the weeknight-friendly dinner recipe? The easy answer is any- and everyone who thinks that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Or, at the very least, the beneficiaries are anyone who wants to maintain a hierarchy of privilege in which some people have time and resources to prepare elaborate meals any night of the week.
I don’t think that’s what the folks at Gourmet have in mind, or any of the other food writers who are dismissive of the 30-minute meal. I think they’re frustrated with an industry that rewards quick and easy over reported and thoughtful. Simply put, there’s more money to be made from weeknight meals with grabby, optimized titles than the type of deep, newsworthy stories so many of us want to be writing. And, again, I think so many of us desperately want more readers to care more about where food comes from and how it’s prepared, to enjoy the process of being in the kitchen and working with our senses and our carefully selected ingredients.
Still, at this point, I assume most of us are familiar with conversations around intent versus impact. When a food writer or publication positions 30-minute meals in opposition to newsy reporting around food, the impact is to create a further divide and hierarchy in a moment that could, instead, be welcoming people in. For some, those simple weeknight suppers will be an entry point to care more about food. On that note, I’ve got to get dinner going.
Layla Schlack is an award-winning writer and editor based in Connecticut. Formerly an editor at magazines including Whetstone and Wine Enthusiast, she is now senior editor at Clarkson Potter and coauthor of Cha McCoy's Wine Pairing for the People.
