foodies ruin everything

Hello Fresh, Do I Know You?

Maybe I saw you at NeconomiCon

Would I know a meal kit if I saw one? Who are they for? What are they for? My personal history offers no clues.

I had kits between the ages of like 8 and 11. They enabled me to create plastic models of cool stuff like cars, missiles, attack helicopters, and battleships.

The battleships always looked the coolest. On the box that is. Battleship models involved the intricate gluing of many tiny plastic stanchions around the edge of the deck. My nine-year-old fingers were not equal to such a task. When I finished there were invariably solidified glue boogers running down the hull like the ones that always dripped off my upper lip, me having been your typical snot-nosed kid. You can imagine my school art projects. If you can’t, lucky you!

It would be over a decade before I developed the fine motor coordination for something as intricate as those battleship decks with their little stations, by which time I was out protesting the Vietnam war so plastic battleships were the very last thing on my mind, unless it was to protest the building of such engines of destruction. Or something. Did the US build any actual real battleships during the 60s and 70s? Not that it mattered. Protesting was all about picking up women. Not that that¹ mattered either. I should write about what a no talent schmo I was in when it came to the art of the pick-up. Plenty of laughs there!

What could a meal kit possibly contain? Do foodies like to build models of food? I’m picturing little plastic replicas of tomatoes, cuts of meat, leaves of kale, etc. — all attached to those sprue trees, each one numbered so that it is at least theoretically possible to follow the instruction sheet through to a satisfying result.

Did any of you build models during the 50s and 60s? If you did, you know why building IKEA seems so easy to us old farts. The instructions were incomprehensible, and they did not include opportunities for language learning like instructions do nowadays.

I should sign up for Task Rabbit, except restrict myself exclusively to the assembly of IKEA furniture. Not only do IKEA’s instructions actually make sense, but with IKEA you don’t have to do your own painting, or even gluing.

Ah gluing! When we outgrew racing cars and battleships we found an exciting new use for that toluene-based glue, which explains a lot about the mentality of many boomers.

I never bothered to paint the plastic models I built from kits. I tried, but painting, like graphic arts in general, wasn’t part of my skill set. I made an even worse mess with paint than with glue.

Though a poltergeist when it came to paint, I wasn’t too hopeless with the decals. Remember decals? There were always a lot of decals. In those days you had to put the decals in water. No peel and stick. If you left them in too long you ended up with a slurry of colorful plastic membranes and paper backings.

If you did it right and lifted the paper out before the decals fell off, then slid that weird, insubstantial little thing away from the paper backing it would stick on pretty good, but you only had one shot. You had to put it on in the right spot. No moving it around, no peeling off and re-sticking. As such it was a good object lesson for children.

Good luck kid. This is like real life. Sometimes there are no second chances. Get it right the first time.

Are there decals in meal kits? There are decals on food nowadays. Does Hello Fresh do you the solid of removing them for you? If so I might just sign up.

Special thanks to Amy Sea for her eagle-eye editing.

¹ Forgive me, Rachael Ann Sand!

Want more of the same? Really? Then subscribe to my email blast. It’s your life to waste as you choose.

Not ready for that kind of commitment? How about is a sampler?