□Ranyu
As the Spring Festival is approaching, restaurant reservations for New Year’s Eve dinners are extremely hot, and some consumers have begun to purchase ingredients to prepare a sumptuous New Year’s Eve dinner at home. Different from previous years, whether in restaurants or at home, prepared dishes are "stealing" the New Year's Eve dinner table. Recently, the topic of "pre-made New Year's Eve dinner" has become a hot search topic on Weibo. This year, major e-commerce platforms and supermarkets have launched a variety of prepared vegetable products. With dine-in reservations so popular, some restaurants have also launched family banquet gift boxes and other pre-prepared dish products for consumers. (China News Service, January 29)
There are some seemingly divisive and contradictory phenomena regarding prepared dishes that are curious. A survey report on prepared dish consumption previously released by the Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Protection Commission showed that 62.32% of consumers said that the taste of prepared dishes was average. But at the same time, judging from recent e-commerce statistics, sales of some pre-made dishes that focus on New Year’s Eve dishes have been rising. how so? Some netizens bluntly said, "It's not that you can't accept pre-prepared dishes, it's just that you can't accept eating pre-prepared dishes in restaurants." This seems to be a double standard, but in fact there is an internal logic that makes sense.
It’s actually quite understandable that it’s not acceptable to go to a restaurant and eat pre-cooked food. First of all, most of the time, merchants do not inform them in advance, so consumers naturally feel that they have been deceived; secondly, when restaurants switch from freshly prepared dishes to "prepared dishes", while the cost is reduced, the selling price is not reduced. In this regard, customers are naturally unhappy. In contrast, buying pre-prepared vegetables and eating them at home is a personal choice. Based on this different psychological premise, even the same prepared dishes will have different perceptions.
Even though more than 60% of consumers say that the taste of pre-prepared dishes is average, the public still shows great tolerance for the new changes in pre-prepared dishes "seizing" the New Year's Eve dinner table. Does this mean that everyone actually doesn’t value the taste of New Year’s Eve dinner that much? That may actually be the case. We know that although the New Year’s Eve dinner is called the most important meal of the year, this “importance” is mainly reflected in the atmosphere, process and sense of ritual. The family sits around the New Year’s Eve dinner table and takes a photo. "Family fun" means it's done. In those days, dinner parties became more and more "visual". It was actually not that important whether the food was delicious, or whether every dish was delicious.
Nowadays, there are many pre-made dishes for New Year's Eve dinner, which are large dishes, hard dishes and horizontal dishes. The main dishes are arranged with noodles and can be sliced. This is very suitable for the current "rigorous need" of posting pictures and posting on friends. Furthermore, preparing New Year's Eve dinner is hard work. Parents often have to work all day just to prepare a meal in the evening. Now that there is an alternative to "have fun and relax", why not do it. For some people, preparing New Year's Eve dinner is a joy. For others, preparing for the New Year's Eve dinner is overwhelming. For the latter, prefabricated dishes bring more of a certain kind of "relief", the kind of comfort that they don't have to cook hard and can spend the New Year with ease.
(The author is a well-known media commentator)