If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.

It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.

Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.

You haven’t failed at a normal human task, you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task. Go get takeout. Or beer, bread, and onions. Eat cheese and some dates. Relax.