POWER HAS GONE OUT ... NOW WHAT DO YOU DO???

 Okay - so its 5am local time (I'm not feeling the best, so I'm up) watching Doc Martin (its an UK tv show that is being shown in repeats) when this commercial comes on ... 

Basically its a food kit commercial ... that's against food kits ... but very pro-Toaster over by the looks of it.

Here's the thing that gets me ...

With a "food kit" they send you most of the stuff you need to make your meals ... including the instructions so if you want to later on, you can easily purchase the items needed and then cook the same meal again by yourself .... very important, that bit.

This commercial was saying how awful meal kits are because you have to actually cook a meal ... oh no ... but the big feature of this particular meal kit was you simply have to scan in the code on the meal package and the toaster oven will automatically cook it for you!!

Okay - on the business side, it's genious ... the ONY way the meals will scan is with their cooker ... it did not say anything about being able to scan with any sort of app, so I'm assuming you will have to purchase the cooker with the built-in scanner.

On the consumer side though, it really stinks!

The problem is ... COST ... you know that toaster oven is going to be as expensive as heck ... and the meals -- since they are all pre-made you do not have a choice if you wish more wihout having to cook another meal (and we all know that proportion sizes are always too small) 

But it will still suffer from the same problems that other meal plans do:

    You have to hope your food has been kept at a proper temperature during delivery soyou don't catch some food borne illness.
    You have to wonder if there is anything in the meal you might be allergic too - so many things do not have to be declared if they are simply used for seasoning, but you can still have a highly allergic reaction to.    
        Cost of product used to make the meal ... they say they use the "best ingredients they can find" but you know its within a certain budget range ... I mean, they aren't going to cut into their profit so you get the best cuts of meat ... and chances are even greater that you will be able to find the ingredients cheaper in your area.
    Then there's storage of the food ... many meals I've seen have things split up by the meal - meat, veg, components in a single package OR all the meat in one container, all the veg in another, all the other componens sorted ... this set up has, well "tv dinner" type packages - ala Lean Cuisine type ... looks like its a single container.
But still - does it go in the cabinet? Refridge? Freezer?

To me ... it seems like MORE effort than its worth.

But this still is not the problem I have wih it ...

Its the electricity that the toaster oven needs.

Suppose you have all your meals in this thing ... or a microwave ... or even an electric stove/oven, for that matter ... and you lose power ...

Now What do you do??

How do you eat?

Why does our society want to dummy down our kids??

I used to work with a woman who, at the age of 30+ yrs, still did not know how to use neither the oven nor the stove in her apartment!!

I just cannot imagine that.

I have taught all my kids how to use the stove AND the oven AND the microwave AND hubby taught them about the grill AND how to cook over a campfire.

When the power goes out ... my kids will be prepared.
Our oldest, sad to say, took an incredibly long time to learn though - never thught I'd see a kid over cook french fries ... but his came out looking like crunchy, brown worms.  And let's not get into the egg rolls that he microwaved for 20 minutes - he said he followed the conventional oven directions, because its a "microwave oven" ... okay, he could benefit from a power outage.