For a Year, This App Told Me What to Eat for Dinner

Too Good To Go is a food waste app with a simple premise: Pick a vendor, usually a bakery, fast-casual spot, or grocery store, and reserve a “mystery bag” of unsold food that would otherwise be destined for the dumpster. You show up at a set time and don’t usually know whether you’ll get a main with sides, a family-sized Greek salad, or three containers of lentil soup until you open the bag.

I downloaded the app in late 2023 at a low point. After the startup I’d hinged my future on collapsed, I lost my job, and with it, my footing. I returned to my home country of India, regrouped, and returned as an independent journalist to a life shorn of its largesse, to a version of New York life that felt smaller, shakier. 

I was raised in an Indian household where meals were neither incidental nor mere sustenance. Food was theater, an arena where substitutions were less a compromise than an act of individualism. The way you ordered, the adjustments you made, the ease with which you did so — these were the metrics of engagement (how spicy can you make it?), of affecting virtue (no butter), proof that you understood food and your own palate.