When you’re on a tight schedule, planning meals can be a chore. After a long day at work, you’d rather relax and eat straight away without cooking. If you live alone with no one else to cook for you, you turn to other options. There’s fast food and there’s chef-made meal delivery services both offering fully cooked meals.
But which of the two is the better option?
Fast Facts About the Fast Food Industry
Fast food is what it is — food prepared fast. Buying fast food takeout is convenient, cheap, and tasty for its price. But is it healthy?
Restaurant chains mass produce fast food items, with pre-prepared ingredients to speed up service. They use frozen ingredients, which the staff then thaws and typically deep fries before serving them. Since fast food chains depend on the quickness of food preparation as their main selling point, there are limitations in the kinds of meals they sell.
Your typical fast food menu may consist of fries, burgers, desserts, sodas, processed fruit juices, and small variations of chicken and beef meals. There are fast food chains that now feature vegetables in their menu, but their preparation is still limited to a handful of options.
Fast food meals are high in salt, which adds flavor to the meals aside from preserving their shelf life. Restaurants also make them with cheaper ingredients, like high-fat meat, fat and sugars, and refined grains. If you’re looking for a cheap, tasty meal in minutes, then you’d probably love fast food. But since you can’t consume it regularly because of all the preservatives in it, you’d have to keep your options open.
Meal Delivery Services: Fine Dining Straight to Your Doorstep
Meal delivery services began on the same premise as fast food did: delivering pre-prepared meals to your doorstep so you don’t have to do it yourself. Though a stark difference exists between the two: most meal delivery services prepare their meals from organic ingredients. This means fewer preservatives and unhealthy ingredients in every dish.
There’s more to choose from, too. Meal delivery services offer a variation of meals on their menu. They are typically healthy, chef-prepared meals that you’d only have to heat up as soon as they’re delivered. These shops promote healthy living as their slogan, so the ingredients they use are organic, fresh, and in some cases, gluten free. Meals may come in container that project an image of ”restaurant-fresh” food.
Delivery may take 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the time you called to order. Delivery does take longer than fast food. But unlike fast food, special meal deliveries accept orders in advance so you can plan your meal for an entire week.
Fast food and meal delivery services operate on the idea of convenience for the busy adult. They both offer fully cooked meals for a reasonable price, though their nutritional values differ. If you follow a healthy lifestyle, then a gourmet meal delivery service may be a suitable choice. And if you feel like having a cheat day, fast food for a day wouldn’t hurt.
