(If you just arrived in South Korea, meal delivery services can make life easier. Seriously consider it your first few weeks of work.) Nosh Vegan meal delivery solves many of your meal planning problems.
About this Review
Nosh recently contacted South of Seoul to see if any of us would be interested in trying some PR Samples. Since I am exhausted, I volunteered to make everyone in my house try Nosh. To be honest, I just needed a break from cooking.
Accepting Nosh’s PR samples turned out to be the motivation I needed to get my butt back to eating a more balanced diet. I also learned that I need to order prepped meals more often when life is overwhelming. It was such a better choice to have vegan meals in my fridge than eat out… but I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the Nosh details.
This review of NOSH vegan meal delivery will be like the ones I did for FUEL Weekly (perfect for KETO and calorie-conscious) and BistroBox. I’ll tell you right now, I’m fond of all three choices. I couldn’t pick a favorite meal delivery option if you paid me. NOSH has some meals that I crave like their Peanut Stew.
About Nosh
Nosh is a vegan meal prep service located in Seoul, South Korea that ships prepared meals, smoothies, and desserts across the country. They describe themselves as “Real. Easy. Vegan” and they focus on “Simple, delicious, whole-food, and refined sugar-free eats designed to nourish your mind, body, and soul.”
Nosh offers variety
Nosh doesn’t just offer lunches or dinners. They also offer desserts, breakfasts, smoothies, energy bars, and snacks. This can be a huge help for folks who might have lunch and dinner handled, but need more healthy snacks and desserts to balance their diets. Each week they post a new PDF menu for you to order from to meals change over time.
Nosh focuses on sustainability.
Every Thursday regular customers are encouraged to return their reusable food containers to Nosh to be used for future meals. This makes them an excellent meal delivery choice for those committed to reducing daily waste and who also need help eating healthy.
Nosh provides nutritional data
Nosh updates their weekly menus along with the nutrition information. This information will make it easy to create your full menu plan each week and ensure you meet your nutritional goals. You can get this information via their FB page, website, and weekly newsletter.
What Our House Learned Eating Nosh for a Week
When the Nosh PR samples arrived I had no idea what to expect. I had said, “Yes” in a rush because I have a compulsion to learn about new things and share information. Here is what I learned after eating Nosh vegan meals twice a day for about a week. These are the things that I wish I had figured out before the food arrived so that I could be fully present with the experience. I hope these notes help you as well.
Nosh and Non-Vegans
I learned that I don’t need to be vegan to enjoy vegan food delivery. The Nosh vegan meals provided a nice way to balance my diet. That said, sometimes I modified my Nosh meals. For example, I added fish and soy sauce to my Banh Mi bowl, milk to the overnight oats, and kimchi to my soups.
Nosh Offers Substantial Meal Portions
For us, the Nosh meals often lasted for two meals or we shared a meal. The buddha bowl I ate for breakfast and lunch. Look at these meals, they are huge! My husband really like the cobb salad while I enjoyed the Buddha bowl more. Nosh also didn’t skimp on the dressing and we were able to actually use the dressing on other food we made as well.
Nosh Was Great for Our House of Tired Educators
Although I used to love eating meals with my co-teachers, I’ve been very COVID conscious and I eat alone in my classroom each day. That means I also have to make my own lunches again. Over the last few months, my meal prep had deteriorated to just bringing crackers and a can of tuna in water. Let me tell you, this vegetable heavy soup made my day much happier than a can of tuna.
Additionallty, it was a HUGE help to have Nosh meals in the house. Not just for me, but also for other members of our house. Everyone is a tired educator who doesn’t feel like cooking a night. When we were too tired to make dinner we grabbed a Nosh meal from the fridge. We all appreciated the convenience and the fact it would be healthy.
The rest of having meals ready was much needed and I felt incredible gratitude for the PR sample they sent. It turned out I needed Nosh even more thant Nosh knew.
Nosh and Sweetness
Remember when I said that Nosh does not use “refined sugar-free eats” earlier in this post? Well, I mistakenly thought that meant the food would not be sweet. I was wrong. Nosh offers plenty of options for those that love sweet. If you are looking for healthy food that also quench your sweet tooth, Nosh has menu items for you.
For me, a person who doesn’t like sweets, I had to make some modifications. The overnight oats were one of the sweetest things I’ve ever tasted in my life so I added milk and ate them over two day. Maybe this was what I was supposed to do… who knows.
Nosh Uses Flavor
Nosh meals tended to be strong in a flavor direction. Our meals had strong lemon, vinegar, salt, sweet, and dill flavors. However, nothing was overly spicy. I ended up adding hot sauce to most of my meals because I have a spicy food problem.
Nosh is Good for Singles and Couples
The Nosh meals worked well for us if we were eating alone or together. When we were eating together we would split a salad and a soup between us which was actually ideal. If I had realized how easy it was to use the meal prep meals for couples, we would have been ordering meals like this long ago.
Life Changing for Tired People Who Want to Be Healthy
Nosh provides nutrition rich vegan food right to your door. The Nosh staff take on the emotional and physical labor of sourcing ingredients, choosing recipes, preparing food, and worrying about recycling the waste associated with the project. I hadn’t realized how much emotional energy was drained each day thinking about keeping my meals healthy. It improved my life to not have to consider these things.
Nosh Made Us Feel Better
Without a doubt, I can tell you that eating Nosh for two meals a day for a week made us feel astronomically better. It was not easy to adjust to such a big change in our diet and we complained about the healthy food sometimes, but holy smokes, it improved our mood and mental health.
If You Need Help in Life, GET MEAL DELIVERY!
You do not need to be a hero. Get support and help in life. If healthy food shopping in Korea is too hard for you, get meals delivered. If you are overwhelmed by cooking, get your meals delivered. If you are struggling with mental health, get meals delivered. You deserve to eat healthy. You deserve to have help with the emotional labor of life.
The Hard Talk About Nosh Flavor
Is Nosh the best vegan food I have ever had? No, it is not. Do I wish some of the Nosh recipes were less sweet, spicier, or a little bit different to cater to my individual food palette? Of course, that’s because I am not vegan and I like really strong flavors like kimchi, fish sauce, blue cheese, and curries that soak into the very walls of my home. Thankfully, I could easily modify Noshes meals by adding a few sauces or a piece of chicken.
I also think that Nosh provided me with a lot of value beyond “the best Buddha Bowl ever!” I actually don’t need Nosh to be the best vegan food in the world. I need them to be reliable, healthy, and thoughtful about their products. They do that. I can take emotional responsibility for modifying the flavors for my carnivore lifestyle. Nosh sure as heck tastes better than the tuna-in-a-can I’ve been eating. Also, if I keep only eating “delicious food” with six kinds of cheese I am going to die young.
The Cost of Living a Vegan Nosh Life
If you ate Nosh meals twice a day, seven days a week it would be around 547,000 won a month (126,000 a week) per person. That’s not dirt cheap but if you consider the fact someone else is doing the dishes, grocery shopping, and planning it starts to look like a steal. Maybe you get Nosh for lunch or Nosh for weekly dinners. It’s worth it if you are living alone.
Our Favorite Nosh Items
Not everything we tried from Nosh was right for us. However, each of us found different dishes we liked. If something wasn’t right for me, my husband liked it, and if we didn’t like it one of our housemates did. The fact that Nosh had a pretty wide variety of meals made it comfortable to find our own favorite. Here are a few of the menu items that stood out to me personally.
Nosh Makes Nice Energy Bars
We ate the Nosh bars before our time at the skatepark and they really helped keep our energy up. They were the perfect afternoon snack to keep us powered up through exercise. This picture is not sexy. It’s hard to make an energy bar look like something you can to eat. Despite this, the Nosh bar was perfect for being active and avoiding unhealthy food.
Smoothies
The smoothies, once again, gave us a nice boost of energy when we needed it. Instead of grabbing a second coffee, we grabbed a juice. Instead of eating chips, we had a bit of juice. The best part was that we had no dishes to do. Easy and labor free makes everything taste better. We’ve also been using reusing these bottles for our vinegar drinks instead of just tossing them.
Soups and Bowls
The soups and bowls were our favorite meals. These meals traveled well and were kept easily throughout the week. They made hassle-free work meals that filled us up and gave us the energy to teach. The vegan pastas and vegetable soups were perfect for us. Maybe because adding kimchi went perfectly and we are “those people” after a decade in Korea. I am sorry, I straight forgot to get a photo of the pasta because I was so hungry the day I ate it. Let me just say, quite tasty.
Give Nosh a Try
If you want to order from Nosh, check their website www.noshkoreavegan.com. If you have had trouble getting your diet headed in a better direction, I encourage you to try Nosh for a week of dinners and see how you feel. Take baby steps. Maybe order pre-workout snacks. Use Nosh as a tool to explore taking care of yourself in new and healthy ways. You deserve help living your best healthy life.
Lanae Rivers-Woods moved to Korea in 2011 where she lives in the countryside with her family, friends, and puppies. She holds a BSSW (Bachelor’s of Science in Social Work), a MAIT (Master’s of Arts in International Teaching), and registered by the Pyeongtaek Korean Times with the Korean government as a Cultural Expert.
Ms. Rivers-Woods used her 15 years experience as a social architect, UX/UI designer, and technology consultant to found South of Seoul in 2015. South of Seoul is a volunteer organization that leverages technological tools to mitigate cultural dissonance in multi-cultural communities.
Through South of Seoul, Ms. Rivers-Woods works with independent volunteers, non-profit organizations, businesses, local & federal government, universities, and US military organizations to develop solutions to support English speaking international residents in rural South Korea.
Additionally, Ms. Rivers-Woods founded the South of Seoul smart phone app available for Google Play and iPhone. The app provides information a resources for those living and traveling in South Korea.
When she isn’t in South of Seoul development meetings or working her day job, Ms. Rivers-Woods loves to be outside at skate parks, the beach, or playing in the mountains.
