dinner

It’s Saturday afternoon. The sun begins to set and in the living room of a shared apartment, the Catan board It is spread out on the low table. We are four friends. The conversation has drifted, as almost always lately, towards uncertainty: the price of rentals, geopolitical instabilityhow difficult “everything” is. Suddenly, there is silence. It’s 8:30 p.m. and hunger is pressing. A decade ago, someone would have gotten up to the kitchen. “I have pasta, shall we make a quick sauce?” the host would have said. Today, no one moves. Almost by a synchronized reflex, three phones are unlocked at the same time. Nobody wants to cook. Nobody wants to stain. And, above all, no one wants to wait. Within minutes, a delivery person will be at the door. We have outsourced the most basic act of survival and socialization: feeding ourselves. It’s not that we became lazy overnight. The structure of our consumption has changed radically. If we look at the x-ray of Spain, the data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA) draw an ascending curve that is dizzying, the consumption of prepared dishes has grown by 514.8% since 2004. In the last two decades, we have gone from seeing convenience food as an emergency solution to making it the base of our nutritional pyramid. In 2024, each Spaniard consumed on average almost 17 kilos of prepared food per year. The penetration of this habit is absolute. According to data from the consulting firm Kantar“ready to eat” already reaches 98.6% annual penetration. Virtually all Spanish consumers resort to it. The point is that we no longer look for flavor, or even health as an absolute priority (although it is valued). He drivers The main thing, in 85% of cases, is convenience. Six out of ten Spanish households openly declare “not having enough time to cook.” We don’t buy food, we buy time. The monopoly of “not cooking”: how Mercadona kept half of the cake On this game board, there is an undisputed winner who saw the future before anyone else. Mercadona, with its “Ready to Eat” section, has achieved a dominant positioncapturing 51.2% of the market share in the distribution of ready meals. Juan Roig not only sells ingredients; Now sell the time that you don’t have—or don’t want to dedicate—to cooking them. This brings us to the prophecy that the president of Mercadona launched a year ago and that sounded like a death sentence: “In the middle of the 21st century there will be no kitchens.” Roig maintains that, in the future, houses will not have space to cook because we will simply arrive at them with the food already made. The industry seems to be betting everything on this card: the Familia Martínez group, Mercadona supplier, is investing 150 million euros in facilities to manufacture roasts and gratins on an industrial scale. This trend has transformed even historical giants. Telepizza, the pioneer that taught us to order food by phone in the 90s, has entered the red in 2024. The paradox is cruel: they lose money in the golden age of delivery because the market has been saturated. They no longer compete against another pizzeria, they compete against all types of gastronomy delivered to your door in 30 minutes. Roig’s prophecy is not science fiction, it is current urban planning. Our own homes are expelling us from the stoves. Domestic architecture has undergone a radical bifurcation explained perfectly in a report by elDiario.es: the “decorated” kitchen and the “waste” kitchen. On the one hand, in luxury or renovated apartments for tourist rental, we see immaculate kitchens, open to the living room, designed to be photographed but not used. As the architect Luis Lope de Toledo explains: “Many contemporary kitchens seem designed to be photographed, not to be stained (…) When the kitchen becomes an aspirational symbol rather than a tool for living, it loses its authenticity.” On the other hand, the reality of housing precariousness in large cities pushes towards the model kitchenless (without kitchen). In the growing “mini apartments” and studios, cooking space is reduced to a minimum. The architect Laura Pato points out the harsh reality of the real estate market: “It is very common to see apartments that only have a stove and most do not have an oven.” If your kitchen is a narrow, unventilated hallway or a corner in your bedroom, the app of delivery It stops being a leisure option and becomes an infrastructure necessity. Saying goodbye to the aspiration of cooking If industrial investment is face A of this phenomenon, face B is found in second-hand platforms. Wallapop has been filled with kitchen robots Thermomix of previous models (TM5, TM31) at knockdown prices. At first glance, it might seem that there is a culinary resistance that seeks to equip itself cheaply. But a more cynical—and probably more realistic—reading suggests the opposite: it is a failed operation. Thousands of users are getting rid of an appliance that cost more than 1,000 euros and that promised to make cooking easier, realizing that even with a robot, you have to peel, clean and wait. The Thermomix requires planning that the average user no longer has. Selling the robot is the final act of giving in to immediacy. The decline of cuisine brings with it the death of a sacred ritual in Spain: the after-dinner meal and the traditional structure of meals. According to the Gastrometer 2025 by Just Eathe delivery It is no longer a weekend treat but has become part of the work and family routine. But the most alarming thing is how we eat. The Ministry of Agriculture confirms an extreme simplification: Half of the meals we eat during the week are already single dishes. In the case of dinners, the figure skyrockets: 7 out of 10 times we have a single dish for dinner. We have eliminated the first, the second and the dessert. The dining room table, that piece of furniture that once presided … Read more