The Cleanup Quotient

When dining out, there are a number of criteria by which to judge one’s meal. The quality of the food, of course, and its presentation, and the service, and the ambience for certain. Perhaps the value of the experience relative to expectations, and so forth.

But the stakes are different when eating at home, since one has to make the meal in addition to eating it. Obviously, one can still try to make the most delicious meal possible, but time and expertise limit the ordinary home chef. Speed and simplicity of preparation are sometimes factors, or perhaps the cost of the ingredients. And it’s true that such matters factor into the overall sense of pleasure one gets from home cooking. The feeling of getting home late and throwing together a decent meal in twenty minutes&mdaash;that’s a special pleasure indeed.

There’s a whole industry built around this sort of culinary pleasure—Rachael Ray’s 30 minute meals and Claire Robinson’s 5 ingredient fixes, for example.

But there’s a problem with this attitude toward home cookery. It leaves out an important factor: cleanup.

Cleaning up after cooking sucks. There’s some pleasure in cooking, at least, but there’s no joy in cleanup. It’s just awful. A really great meal, culinarily or socially speaking, can dull the pain of kitchen cleanup, but it’s still there, lingering. Like an unreachable itch.

Cleanup never makes an appearance on cooking shows or in cookbooks. The shows have “people” for it, just like they have people for prep work. The cookbooks focus on the end product rather than the number of pots and dishes and spoons and the like that have to give their lives in the construction of a dish or a menu.

One Pot Meals and casseroles and the like offer something of an alternative, but it’s all all-or-nothing proposition. There are only so many things that one can cook effectively in a single vessel, and nobody really wants to eat hotdish anyway.

Cooking can be a chore, but at least there’s artistry in it, whether you pull out every stop or strive to produce the best meal given a particular set of constrants, like time, cost, or ingredients.

But there’s no artistry in cleaning up afterward. it’s just a chore. Instead, there’s a spectrum of cleanup complexities, complexities that may or may not have anything to do with the time commitment or gastronomical quality of a particular meal. The number of pots and pans and dishes, the type of scrubbing involved, the room they take in the dishwasher, the intermediary vessels used—all of these cleanup factors ought to be measured against the quality of the meal, an ambiguous measure itself.

Here’s a dorky way to think about it: the Cleanup Quotient. The CQ would correspond with the quality and enjoyment of the meal relative to one’s expectations for it (Q), divided by the relative nuisance of its cleanup (N).

CQ

=

Q N

Rather than trying to accommodate all the various factors that can go into both the enjoyment of a meal and the relative nuisance of cleanup, think of Q and N as values on the same normalized range, say between 1-10, where low values of Q correspond with low quality and low values of N correspond with low nuisance. Determining quality and nuisance is a qualitative, perhaps even arbitrary, process. (You could also imagine arriving at Q by some more complex calculus that takes into account preparation in addition to enjoyment—see below.)

This means that the CQ of a meal—even a really great meal—increases as the nuisance of its cleanup drops. A fantastic meal with really onerous cleanup boasts the same CQ as a fairly lousy meal with really easy cleanup. Meanwhile, a super fantastic meal with really easy cleanup is an order of magnitude better than a super fantastic meal with cleanup obligations to match.

This isn’t a useful way to think about dining out, nor about special meals like holidays or dinner parties. But on a day-to-day basis, I’d wager that most folks would rather maximize their CQ than maximize the quality or simplicity of their meals. I think this remains the case if we imagine a more sophisticated version of this model that expands Q into a weighted factor of Q and the complexity and nuisance of preparation (P):

CQ

=

kpP + kqQ N

Which is just to say: a really great home meal is one that cleans up as well or better than it preps and eats. But an even better meal is one that cleans up surprisingly better than it preps and eats, even if its preparation and gastronomical qualities are mediocre or poor. As far as I can tell, there’s been very little focus placed on such a view of home dining contentment.