Should You Buy Pre-Cut Vegetables?

Should you buy pre-cut vegetables in the supermarket?

The short answer is: it depends.

On one hand, they are convenient. Pre-cut veggies can save you time and energy in prepping dinner. This might be valuable to you on a busy day.

On the other hand, pre-cut vegetables are more expensive, lower quality, and carry risks of contamination.

If you want to prep dinner in the shortest possible time, pre-cut vegetables may be a good solution for you — if you can overlook the lower quality and risks of contamination that come with pre-cut vegetables.

Beyond Time vs Money

At a surface level, it appears to be a classic tradeoff between time and money. But that time vs money issue is not the full equation.

Whether pre-cut vegetables are a worthwhile shortcut for you depends on your bigger objective for cooking dinner.

This highlights an often-overlooked distinction between a goal and an outcome.

“Dinner on the table as quickly as possible is a goal.

The Bigger Picture

The process by which you get there, and what you get out of that process, is part of your larger outcome, or objective.

Perhaps part of your objective in cooking dinner is to work on your knife skills, so you can develop greater fluency and facility in chopping, slicing, and dicing.

Or, perhaps this is an activity you do with your kids as a way to foster connection and conversation. (It’s always easier to engage with kids when you’re doing a task together that occupies part of their attention).

Maybe you use the time you spend cutting vegetables for dinner as a form of active meditation. You might use your dinner prep as a sacred ritual in which you decompress and reflect on your day.

In any of these cases, buying pre-cut vegetables defeats your larger objective.

What to Ask Before You Take a Shortcut

The shortcut may get you to a finished product faster, but what are you sacrificing for speed? And is the finished product actually better quality than it would have been without the shortcut?

At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t only apply to pre-cut vegetables.