IMO the most obvious harm reduction strategy for “fast food delivery is expensive and terrible” is not to order different fast food, but to keep pre-made frozen meals on hand. You can buy frozen meals with the nutrition profile of your choice, make them yourself, or pay someone to make them for you. This costs less money and time than ordering delivery, and has the added benefit of leveraging that cognitive bias where you make “healthier” food choices when planning meals in advance compared to decisions that you make while hungry.
I’d postulate that people often order delivery because it’s the quickest and easiest option available to them. It seems like getting people (including oneself) to eat something healthier than their defaults is a matter of making something even quicker and easier available, rather than offering a choice between “do it your usual way” and a higher-friction option of checking a list first.
Updating your beliefs about the relative health impacts of frozen vs fast food seems like a low-effort, high-impact opportunity for improvement here.
There are a lot of distinct questions or comparisons that you may be casually conflating in reasoning about frozen food:
Nutrition of a fresh ingredient vs the same ingredient commercially frozen. Frozen often wins here because fresh food in grocery stores has to be harvested long before it’s ripe. Food harvested when it’s ripe then frozen can travel fine, but food harvested when it’s ripe then only refrigerated tends to degrade before it gets to the consumer.
Nutrition/quality of a given ingredient frozen at home vs commercially frozen. Home freezers will freeze items more slowly, which changes how ice crystals form and can sometimes degrade the quality of the item worse than extremely rapid commercial freezing. Plus if you buy a fresh ingredient at the store, it was picked way before it was ready, and freezing it at home isn’t going to magically have left it on the plant for longer.
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs a frozen pre-made meal. Fresh, conscientious cooking will add less salt and fat than any processed food. It may also not taste quite as delicious ;)
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs a serving of that same meal which was frozen at home and reheated. For many meals, home freezing is mildly detrimental to the food’s texture, and home cooks probably won’t test enough variables on the freezing process to really dial in the optimal technique.
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs fast food. Fresh, conscientious cooking will add less salt and fat than restaurants, but may also be less delicious. Fresh cooking will also be more variable about ingredient quality—ingredients might be much better or might be worse, depending on the cook and the pantry.
Make sure your intuitions on those fronts are consistent with each other and with available research that meets your standards, and then revisit the question of how frozen foods compare to fast food takeout in the ways that matter to you =)
IMO the most obvious harm reduction strategy for “fast food delivery is expensive and terrible” is not to order different fast food, but to keep pre-made frozen meals on hand. You can buy frozen meals with the nutrition profile of your choice, make them yourself, or pay someone to make them for you. This costs less money and time than ordering delivery, and has the added benefit of leveraging that cognitive bias where you make “healthier” food choices when planning meals in advance compared to decisions that you make while hungry.
I’d postulate that people often order delivery because it’s the quickest and easiest option available to them. It seems like getting people (including oneself) to eat something healthier than their defaults is a matter of making something even quicker and easier available, rather than offering a choice between “do it your usual way” and a higher-friction option of checking a list first.
This is a reasonable point, but I have a cached belief that frozen food is substantially less healthy than non-frozen food somehow.
Updating your beliefs about the relative health impacts of frozen vs fast food seems like a low-effort, high-impact opportunity for improvement here.
There are a lot of distinct questions or comparisons that you may be casually conflating in reasoning about frozen food:
Nutrition of a fresh ingredient vs the same ingredient commercially frozen. Frozen often wins here because fresh food in grocery stores has to be harvested long before it’s ripe. Food harvested when it’s ripe then frozen can travel fine, but food harvested when it’s ripe then only refrigerated tends to degrade before it gets to the consumer.
Nutrition/quality of a given ingredient frozen at home vs commercially frozen. Home freezers will freeze items more slowly, which changes how ice crystals form and can sometimes degrade the quality of the item worse than extremely rapid commercial freezing. Plus if you buy a fresh ingredient at the store, it was picked way before it was ready, and freezing it at home isn’t going to magically have left it on the plant for longer.
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs a frozen pre-made meal. Fresh, conscientious cooking will add less salt and fat than any processed food. It may also not taste quite as delicious ;)
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs a serving of that same meal which was frozen at home and reheated. For many meals, home freezing is mildly detrimental to the food’s texture, and home cooks probably won’t test enough variables on the freezing process to really dial in the optimal technique.
Nutrition of a fresh meal cooked from scratch vs fast food. Fresh, conscientious cooking will add less salt and fat than restaurants, but may also be less delicious. Fresh cooking will also be more variable about ingredient quality—ingredients might be much better or might be worse, depending on the cook and the pantry.
Make sure your intuitions on those fronts are consistent with each other and with available research that meets your standards, and then revisit the question of how frozen foods compare to fast food takeout in the ways that matter to you =)