Why Dinner Never Gets Easier
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Of the many problems modern life has promised to solve, dinner remains a stubborn nuisance. Not the eating of it, exactly, but the endless planning for it: the recipe hunting, the shopping, the post-work reckoning of what is or isn’t in the fridge. An entire industry made up of meal-prep companies, delivery-food apps, and grocery-store frozen entrées is devoted to this nightly question.
Dinner has been vexing people for a very long time. Read the writing by women expected to run their household’s kitchen, and you can see how this sphere of domesticity has long doubled as a window into the shifting concerns of daily life. In 1932, Helen Keller published an Atlantic essay, “Put Your Husband in the Kitchen,” and opened with the intricate ritual of making a Christmas fruitcake. The scene is dense with logistics: nuts to crack, oranges and lemons to peel, a stove fire to maintain with “the utmost precision.” Family members are instructed to walk softly, so the batter won’t fall.
As she describes this carefully managed procedure, Keller notes that it is already becoming a “lost art.” New technologies were expediting even the simplest tasks. Electricity, preprepared ingredients, and advancements in home appliances had transformed household labor. A modern housewife could now call the grocer to place an order, because more households were installing telephones. “The machine age has come upon us, transforming the home no less surely than the factory,” Keller wrote.
Keller understood that the changes to domestic work revealed something larger about the economy and people’s broader anxieties outside the home. In 1918, a writer credited as Mrs. A. Burnett-Smith described a British food system strained by wartime scarcity. Milk was so limited that restaurants would not serve it unless a child was present; eggs had become prohibitively expensive. The new ration-card system, she noted, did not increase the food supply but did “insure equal distribution.” The problem for women was how meticulously these supplies had to be tracked when planning meals. “Food is not a very inspiring subject to write about,” Burnett-Smith wrote, “but it is very wonderful how inspiring it can become when there is none of it.”
As the century progressed, the strain in the kitchen took on a different character. By the late 20th century, women were entering the workforce in large numbers. In The Atlantic’s September 1986 issue, George Gilder observed that “drastic shifts in sex roles seem to be sweeping through America.” From 1890 to 1985, the labor-force participation of women ages 25 to 44 rose from 15 to 71 percent—a revolution that upended the calculus of family meals.
By the late 2010s, the technological transformation that Keller described had largely come to pass. The fruitcake didn’t need to be baked—it could be dropped off by an Uber Eats courier. The grocery store was always open. Dinner, in theory, should have been easier than ever. But the pressure around it hadn’t disappeared.
Writing in 2019, Amanda Mull described the familiar sight of meal-kit boxes—Blue Apron, HelloFresh—sitting abandoned and “slightly stinky” in apartment buildings. These services promised to streamline the nightly meal: perfect portions, no menu planning, restaurant-style cooking at home. Instead, they kept colliding with the same constraint: time.
“From February 2018 to February 2019, 45 percent of American meals were eaten alone,” Mull wrote. No matter how many meal kits and fast dinner solutions were being peddled to consumers, the structure of American life had shifted in ways that made a traditional dinner routine harder to sustain. Dual-income households had become common. Commutes had lengthened due to urban sprawl and more traffic congestion. Work had followed people home on their laptop. Fast-casual restaurants swooped in to fill in the gap.
“A quiet monologue runs through my head at all times. It is this: dinner dinner dinner dinner,” Rachel Sugar wrote last January. “The Dinner Problem might be especially acute for working parents like me—children are unrelenting in their demand to eat at regular intervals—but it spares almost no one. Disposable income helps mitigate the issue (disposable income helps mitigate most issues), but short of a paid staff, money does not solve it.”
If logistical innovation alone could have solved dinner, it would have been solved several times over. Even in what Sugar calls the “world-historic peak of dinner solutions,” the meal remains “unrelenting, in the way that breathing is unrelenting.”
Meals can now be reheated in minutes. The groceries may arrive in a box, and the onions may come pre-chopped. But the constant decision making—what to prepare, when to eat it—hasn’t gone anywhere. What happens in the kitchen has never been just about food.