Meal Train
Choo, choo. All aboard! Here comes the meal train!
“What’s a meal train?” you ask.
That’s a new-fangled, digital way to supply meals to a new mom or someone recovering from an illness. Technology has replaced paper and pencil.
IMHO (in my humble opinion), the “innovative,” digital meal train arranged for our son, who was recovering from major surgery at our house, turned out to be a train wreck. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, however…
Website
The meal train website claims it has “everything you need to organize meals.” For example:
- Information in one shared place
- Answers questions for volunteers such as: What do they like? Do they have any allergies? What have others made so there’s little duplication?
- Easy to use for everyone
- Easy to use for those of all tech skill levels so everyone can easily participate while reducing questions for organizers.
It sounds great in theory. What if the set-up person doesn’t put in allergy information or food likes and dislikes? Suppose the recipient doesn’t know the cooks and has no way to contact them? Only the set-up person can interact directly with the cooks on the meal train.
Extrapolation
Being the control freak I am, especially when it comes to my kitchen, I extrapolated the meal train information from the internet into a chart, as follows:
Here’s the key to the chart.
- In column 2—”Cook,” the XXX stands for someone I didn’t know and had no way of contacting. Mostly these were my son’s co-workers and friends. The OOO stands for people I know and could contact.
- TBD in the “Menu” column means “to be determined.”
What’s the problem?
“What’s wrong with this list?” you ask. “Twenty-five people signed up! Isn’t that great?”
Yes and no. Sixteen out of the 25 cooks wrote “TBD.” One filled in her menu slot with “mystery.” What’s interesting is that most of the OOOs were Baby Boomers. The XXXs were millennials (Gen Y). FYI, the meal train was set up by a millennial.
The meal train had two instructions: (1) send “heart-healthy food” and (2) please deliver by 5:30 p.m. One cook contacted me, asking, “What does heart-healthy food mean?” Look it up, honey. “Heart-healthy food” for the others meant salmon, lots of it. (Is that why my skin is so scaly?) And the 5:30 p.m. drop-off turned out to be 7:00 p.m. for one cook. When the food didn’t arrive on time, I fed my husband leftovers from our fridge.
At the most, the chefs needed to cook dinner for no more than four adults. After day six, we were down to three adults. Without exception, the dropped-off dinners could easily have fed eight hungry teenage boys!
Leftovers were problematic. How much can be frozen? Plus, there’s only so much room in my freezer. Even with two refrigerators and the full-size freezer, we were bursting at the seams with 9 x 13” pans of food.
Much of the food, such as salads, vegetables and fresh fruit, couldn’t be frozen. A lot had to be thrown out. Food costs too much! It broke my heart to throw out what someone had spent money on and a lot of time preparing.
As noted above, a millennial set up the mail train. My contact information was not included. As a result, no one called or emailed to ask what we liked. The “ethnic” meals cooked by a few cooks weren’t to our liking.
After 10 days recuperating with his mom and dad, our son had enough and returned to his apartment. Every day I had to remind him to contact that day’s cook to bring the food to him. He got tired of my texts real fast.
Derailment
An OOO acquaintance signed up to cook the second-to-last meal on the train. Our son let me know that he told her to deliver dinner to him. As a result, I assumed that he also contacted the XXX, whom I didn’t know, who was cooking for him on the last day.
Never assume. The last day came. That afternoon, I informed my husband that I had no idea what to make for dinner for the two of us. He said, “Let’s do take-out,” which we ordered online from Accents Grill. At 5:25 p.m., he left to pick up our food.
Just after he left I fell and cracked my head on a piece of furniture in the bedroom, which is located at the back of the house. As I lay on the floor in a state of shock making sure nothing was broken, wouldn’t you know it? “Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong” went the doorbell.
Whoever was at the door didn’t give up easily. “It must be someone collecting money or trying to sell us a new roof,” I thought while on the floor. “Then again, maybe the restaurant is delivering dinner by mistake!”
I managed to get myself up and limped to the front door. Walking away down the sidewalk was a man holding a plastic bag of aluminum pans. “This must be the delivery,” I sighed to myself.
I opened the door and yelled, “Are you from Accents?”
He looked bewildered. “No, I’m delivering dinner for the meal train. Isn’t this the Creeger residence?”
Oops! I assumed wrong. Our son never contacted them. I graciously accepted the food, meanwhile thinking OMG! The delivery consisted of four large 9” x 13″ aluminum pans—salmon (again), salad, fruit, roasted vegetables—and one smaller pan with cheese and spinach turnovers. Whoever prepared the food made enough for 10 people (or eight hungry teenage boys)! The instructions indicated that the food was considered a dairy meal. Naturally, our take-out dinner was meat. The full pans barely fit in our fridge.
A lovely end to the derailment of our meal train.
Conclusion
Yes, we ate some of that last salmon meal the next night. But our son never came by to pick up the rest; he said he didn’t need it. We were left with lots of leftovers. And while the salmon was delicious and cooked just right, I have to say the coating was salty. So much for “heart healthy.”
As stated in the beginning of this piece, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. So many people reached out to us and offered to help in any way they could. We are lucky to live in a community such as ours where chesed (kindness) is the norm. This technology dinosaur just wishes the millennials will communicate better with the baby boomers next time.
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Read more by Eileen Creeger.