My kitchen is the heart of my home. My friends all like to hang out in there instead of in my more spacious living room.
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My kitchen is the heart of my home. My friends all like to hang out in there instead of in my more spacious living room.
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Convenience Foods are part of daily life – why do we so often look down on those who eat them?
When it comes to attaching morality to certain types of food, I'm one of the guilty ones. Since I started writing about food, I've tried to promote the idea that healthy eating means eating real, whole foods. Convenience foods were, in my eyes, the enemy.
I genuinely thought I was fighting the good fight; that is, until I came across an article by Anthony Warner, the Angry Chef.
About convenience food, he correctly hails it is a great innovation. During the process of developing pre-prepared dishes, a great deal was discovered that before was unknown, especially about food safety. During what we now look back on fondly as the “good old times”, preparing food could be hazardous. Cleanliness was optional, cross contamination was natural and food poisoning was the norm. But, thanks to convenience foods, women have been liberated from the kitchen, free to assume their rightful place in society. Anyone who feels nostalgic for the good old days, when mums spent hours in front of the stove and families ate their meals together, is out of touch with modern society.
I can hear some grumbling about “bad” convenience food and how we all need to cut it out of our diet. We're told that too much sugar, too much salt, too much of this and too much of that is bad, and the only way to eat a healthy diet is too cook fresh food from scratch. This was the assumption I shared, but reading through Warner's article, I realised my idea of what constitutes healthy food was based on my own personal circumstances.
My lifestyle could be described as 'laid back'. I'm self-employed, and therefore free to structure my daily life more or less as I please. I don't have to turn my life into a jig-saw puzzle where every piece is a perfect fit. I have time to leaf through magazines, time to surf the internet to find the recipe and time enough to cook it. In other words, it came to me that in the matter of food choice, I was quite the snob. I realised that the standard I was following was, for some, difficult if not impossible to achieve.
All this banging on about healthy eating is having the side effect of creating an unhealthy environment, in which some people was made to feel guilty about their food and lifestyle choices.
I love to cook, and sometimes it's difficult for me to understand that there are people out there who maybe are not so interested in it. While I enjoy watching TV chefs as they chop and slice, others watch the same thing and feel inadequate, and to be honest, feel their lives have other priorities.
One of the mantras of TV cooking shows is how quick and easy to prepare some dishes are, and hence everybody can cook from scratch. Well, maybe. But at the end of a long, stressful day, something you can pop in the microwave might be more than welcome. There's no shame in it. And what about people struggling to make ends meet? Cooking from scratch is the least of their concerns. There are endless reasons why people prefer convenience food, each as valid as the next.
In other words I realised that, in subtle and perhaps not-so-subtle ways, I was moralising food choices. I wished only to improve people's enjoyment of life, but demonising convenience foods is not the answer.
I agree with Warner when he says that creating feelings of shame around convenience foods: “will create the sort of guilt cycle that pushes people towards negative behaviours. At worst it will permanently damage people's relationship with food”. If only there was a way to improve the quality of what people eat. Chefs, with their next-level cooking skills tend to intimidate, perhaps even seem a little patronising. Maybe the answer lies with the same people we often hold responsible for our food choices – food manufacturers.
Our shopping habits are influenced by input from supermarkets, advertisers and the like. In the matter of our food choices, they know us even better than we know ourselves. Who could be better placed to furnish us with new ideas and solutions to help improve our diets.
It may seem a little preposterous to suggest we ask food manufacturers to help us tackle this moral conundrum, but after all – as they themselves are well aware – a happy customer is a loyal customer.
Pizza, anybody?
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AuthorI love cooking, and when it comes to quality I'm quite fussy. Archives
February 2018
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