Meal Prep for People Who Hate Food: Seven Ways to Cut Sadness into Tupperware Portions

Let’s be honest: food is overrated. Everywhere you look, people are smiling at kale, posting erotically lit photos of lasagna, or pretending to be moved to tears by avocado toast. But some of us—the emotionally drained, the culinarily challenged, the spiritually beige—look at food and see only chores.

This is a guide for you: the person who doesn’t hate eating, exactly, but hates everything that happens before eating. The shopping. The cooking. The cleaning. The seven YouTube videos where someone cheerfully says, “This will change your life!” while dicing an onion like they’re auditioning for Cirque du Soleil.

So here it is: the definitive, short-and-punchy lifestyle guide to meal prepping when you hate food. Seven ways to cut sadness into Tupperware portions. Seven ways to weaponize apathy. Seven ways to trick your body into surviving until Friday without collapsing into a puddle of vending machine Snickers.

1: Accept That Flavor Is a Scam

Flavor is capitalism in powdered form. Salt, pepper, garlic—tools designed to manipulate you into thinking food is fun. Don’t fall for it. If you hate food, lean into the beige. Boil some chicken until it’s no longer legally raw, divide it into seven identical containers, and call it “minimalist protein experience.”

If anyone asks, say you’re practicing culinary stoicism. The Greeks did it. Marcus Aurelius didn’t have sriracha. He had boiled grains and crushing responsibility, just like you.

Pro tip: label your Tupperware “Monday through Sunday” not for organization, but so you can whisper each day’s name into the void before reheating your sadness at 11:47 p.m.

2: Season Everything With Regret

Meal prep blogs tell you to season with “love.” Cute. For those of us in reality, regret is the only seasoning that never runs out.

Here’s the method: while preparing your ingredients, reflect on all the questionable decisions that led you here. That college major. That haircut in 2014. That subscription box you forgot to cancel. Allow the regret to marinate into your chicken thighs. By the time you taste it, you’ll barely notice the lack of paprika.

The beauty of regret-seasoned meals is their versatility. Regret pairs beautifully with undercooked quinoa, limp carrots, and the sound of your neighbor living their best life while you measure sadness into 1.5-cup servings.

3: Invest in Tupperware, Because That’s All That Matters

Let’s face it: the food itself is irrelevant. The real power move is the Tupperware aesthetic. Sturdy, stackable, Instagrammable rectangles of clear plastic. You don’t need joy when you can have symmetry.

Pro tip: arrange your containers in the fridge like a museum installation. Rows of identical sadness, gleaming under the cold fluorescent light. Call it “The Persistence of Hunger.”

People will come over, open your fridge, and gasp: “Wow, you’re so organized.” They won’t know the truth—that the containers are empty because you forgot to actually cook. And honestly, they don’t need to know.

4: Outsource Your Sadness to Costco

Shopping for food is a nightmare: crowded aisles, impossible decisions, self-checkout machines that scold you like Victorian schoolteachers. Solution? Costco.

Costco is the only place where you can buy a chicken large enough to feed a village and a pack of 72 muffins designed for lumberjacks. Meal prep becomes simple: slice sadness into industrial portions and shovel them into buckets labeled “Family Pack.”

Pro tip: freeze everything. Frozen food is eternal, like death, taxes, and people arguing about oat milk on the internet.

5: Microwave Like You Mean It

If you hate food, the microwave is your soulmate. Oven-roasting? Too slow. Pan-searing? Too fancy. Microwaving? Instant beige mush at the press of a button.

Don’t stop at reheating. Experiment. Microwaving vegetables until they collapse into unrecognizable sludge is basically art. Rice? Microwave it until it fuses into one solid brick, perfect for hurling at your enemies or sculpting into a bust of yourself.

And don’t forget: nothing screams “self-care” like setting a microwave timer for 3:33 because symmetrical numbers are the only joy left.

6: Call Everything a “Bowl”

Food bloggers love bowls. Buddha bowls. Grain bowls. Protein bowls. You can make literally anything sound trendy if you dump it in a bowl and sprinkle sesame seeds on top.

Your sadness-prep menu?

• Shredded rotisserie chicken + plain rice = “Lean Energy Bowl.”

• A hot dog cut into coins + Kraft mac and cheese = “American Nostalgia Bowl.”

• Half a can of beans + despair = “Rustic Comfort Bowl.”

The bowl revolution is your ticket out of admitting you just microwaved leftovers. Because if it’s in a bowl, it’s a lifestyle.

7: Embrace the Beige Olympics

At the end of the day, meal prep for food-haters is not about joy—it’s about endurance. It’s about staring into seven identical beige meals and saying: Yes, I can survive this week. Yes, I can power through another Monday. Yes, I will eat chicken and rice until the sweet release of death.

Turn it into a sport. Compete with yourself: how many identical beige meals can you eat before breaking? Keep a leaderboard. Reward yourself with a colorful meal only if you’ve survived five days of grayness. Spoiler: the reward meal will disappoint you too, but at least you’ll have earned it.

Why This Works

You might wonder: why bother with all this? If you hate food, why not just…not? But that’s the beauty of meal prep: it takes the thing you hate and industrializes it into something efficient, sterile, and almost corporate. It’s not food anymore. It’s productivity.

When you hate food, meal prep isn’t about taste—it’s about control. It’s about standing in your kitchen on Sunday night, staring into the abyss, and whispering, “At least Monday is handled.” It’s about reducing life into small, manageable plastic boxes. It’s about outsourcing joy to people who actually enjoy being alive.

Closing Thoughts: Sadness, Packaged With Love (Sort Of)

Meal prep for people who hate food is not glamorous. It will not make your Instagram followers swoon. It will not impress your friends. It will not awaken your taste buds or your soul. But it will get the job done.

It’s about survival, not celebration. It’s about lowering expectations so far that microwaving limp broccoli feels like an achievement. It’s about proving to yourself, week after week, that you can endure the crushing monotony of existence one beige meal at a time.

So go ahead. Boil the chicken. Portion the rice. Stack the sadness. Open the fridge on Wednesday night, look at the identical meals lined up like prisoners of war, and whisper: “We’re in this together.”

Because in the end, life is just one big Tupperware container—and all of us are just trying to keep the lid on.