I Have Eaten Cereal for Dinner Three Times This Week, and the Supper Memes Did Not Judge Me

The struggle meals are where I see myself most clearly, and I’ve made peace with it. There’s the cereal-for-dinner meme, presented with elaborate chef-style flourish, which is exactly how it feels, because pouring cereal at 8 p.m. as an adult carries a strange ceremonial dignity. It’s cold soup. It’s fine. Then there’s the deeply sad plate of chopped hot dogs, presented as a culinary cry for help, paired beautifully with tap water, and I want to defend that plate, because that plate represents a person who ate protein on a night they had nothing left. And there’s the enormous bucket of macaroni, the only bucket list that matters, carbo-loading for a marathon nobody is running. These aren’t failures. These are meals eaten by someone who ran out of executive function at 6:15.

Then the delusions, which are my favorite part of cooking culture. There’s the meme about feeling like an 1800s prairie pioneer simply because you cooked one meal at home instead of ordering delivery, and I have absolutely had that feeling, standing over a pan, thinking “look at us, surviving off the land,” the land being a grocery store four minutes away. There’s the tweet about measuring garlic with your heart, because the amounts printed in recipes were clearly written by cowards. That’s not cooking, that’s a personality. And there’s the apocalypse-stirring energy, standing at the stove while everything outside collapses, because the stove still works and dinner is still happening, which is either denial or heroism and probably both.

And the unpaid chef material, which is where the real exhaustion lives. There’s the meme about cooking for children, which is accurately framed as a thankless hostage negotiation with a very small, very unreasonable counterparty who wanted the other shape of pasta. There’s a jelly bean placed in a burger bun, which I choose to believe was made by a child and represents the entire genre of food that gets served to you proudly and must be received graciously. And there’s the exhausted figure staring into the void after the meal, smelling like sautéed onions, doing the math on the dishes. Because that’s the twist nobody prepares you for. You cook for forty minutes, eat in nine, and then the actual job begins. Just throw the pans away. It’s easier.

Here’s the thing this genre gets right that no cooking show does: dinner is not an event, it’s a recurring obligation with no end date, and the emotional labor of deciding what it will be is heavier than the cooking. Nobody’s tired of chopping onions. Everyone is tired of being asked, at 5 p.m., every single day, for their entire life, what’s for dinner. That question is the real workload. The pan is easy by comparison.

And yet, and I say this as someone eating cheese from a bag, the cooking memes are also secretly affectionate, because everyone posting them still cooks. They complain and they show up. Every night, in millions of kitchens, exhausted people who would genuinely prefer to lie down instead stand up and produce something edible for themselves and the people they love. It’s unglamorous and repetitive and completely unrecognized, and it is, quietly, one of the more heroic things people do. Now somebody else pick the restaurant. Please. I’ve done it eleven days running.

The cereal is poured. The dishes are waiting. Somebody else decide tomorrow.