Eat The Store Food

Just get takeout, it’s fine.

A fun game I play every now and then, when I’ve been at home for too long and realize that it’s starting to get dark and I still haven’t eaten is whether or not to get store food and call it a night. Anything I make at home is food that isn’t store food; anything purchased outside of my home, from a sit-down dinner at Babbo to two slices of pizza is store food. If someone else made it and I am paying money for it, it’s store food. Making the decision to order out instead of eating what I have at home is almost always fraught. But it shouldn’t be.

In that moment, my decision making faculties are often compromised; I’m very hungry and want an immediate solution. Usually there is no food in the house, but sometimes there is. Most of the time, I cave to the impulse and thumb through Seamless on my phone while gnawing at a heel of bread.

“You need to remember to eat,” my friend reminds me every time I Gchat a string of expletives born out of hanger. “Just eat lunch. It’s okay to take a break.”

Forgetting to eat when I’m working is normal because sometimes it takes effort to get up, make a sandwich, eat that sandwich and hop back on the train of thought you abandoned. Ordering takeout is just as easy as finishing something in one tab and moving on to the other, but it does add up, just like eating croissants instead of peanut butter toast for breakfast and buying Kit Kats and “treating yourself” to a sweater when you should really just go home. The point is, it all adds up, but if the money is there and you are not bankrupt and have some sort of grip on your finances and feel okay about the everyday decisions you make, ordering takeout every now and then isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Still, seeing how much the thing you want a person to deliver to your house actually costs feels a little bad. It’s easy to spiral and calculate precisely how you are bankrupting yourself via the occasional delivery burger. There have been days when I have somehow eaten takeout for both lunch and dinner, usually because I worked late and came home late and found myself incapable of cooking, even if I wanted to. Those days are bad; I try to avoid having those days, but if it happens, it happens. We can spend time beating ourselves up over the little things or catalog them properly where they belong and vow to do better next time around.

Even though I know it’s fine to order takeout, I still feel bad about it. I make myself feel better by telling myself that if I eat lunch from the food I’ve made for the week, I’m “allowed” to order takeout. It doesn’t matter if there’s leftovers in the fridge that would feed me for dinner. It doesn’t matter if all I need to do is make some rice for the curry. It’s okay to order the store food, if you want. It’s fine. Just do it. You’ll be okay.

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