Mark Bittman: Cooking! not shopping, not planning, not thinking, but it is."
It is cooking.
It's not shopping.
It's not planning.
And in a way it's not thinking.
But it is cooking."
-- Mark Bittman, the cookbook author, left his job as a New York Times columnist in 2015
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Andrea Nguyen, a cookbook author, provided Vietnamese and dumpling dishes to Chef'd. Still, she isn't enamored with meal kits because they do not provide the human contact and pleasure that come from hunting for ingredients and exploring the market.
"Cooking is a whole sociological thing," she said. "I even like talking to the cashiers."
On a deeper level, relinquishing so much over to a company guts the essence of what it means to cook, said Laura Shapiro, a culinary historian who writes about modern cooking in the United States.