A home-cooked dinner has an ingredient no drive-through sells: somebody’s afternoon.

Cooking for people is time converted into something you can eat. Somebody decided, shopped, chopped, stood over it and timed the parts, and that whole afternoon went into the meal as surely as anything on the plate. A drive-through can match the food and cannot supply that, which is why a fairly average dinner at home often beats a good one out.

Say something about the afternoon rather than only about the taste. And cook for somebody yourself before long, because the quickest way to understand what you have been given is to spend the time once.