Headline: Your healthy habits are eating into the packaged foods industry
I thought some here might be interested. An article on how packaged food profits are down, and attributing it to the assorted "healthy eating" trends.
They aren't going away, but I found it interesting that the effect was as large as it seems to be (at least according to this author).
I have watched this trend ebb and flow over the years.
I cannot understand why the time it takes to cook fresh food, in some cases no more than prepared food, is such a problem to people. I cannot understand how so many spend time and money going to the gym or jogging instead of working in the garden. I know not everybody can have a garden but so many who could don't try.
I insisted my children learn to cook and I taught them from scratch. Starting about 13 they had to cook dinner once a week and were not allowed to repeat the same dish all the time. By 17 they were reasonable cooks. After some initial resistance ('who cares about cooking Dad I just want to eat ') the penny dropped. If you have fresh ingredients and cook well then you eat well and it doesn't cost the earth. Anyone can do it with a little effort to learn how.
Now it is cool to cook. One child grows fresh veges in tubs because they are in a rented house that cannot have a vege garden. They feed their families and friends good food and are asked if they took cooking classes. They might admit that they did but not the details.
I read that in some high-rise appartments they have built no kitchen or the kitchen has been remodelled into some other use. This is because the inhabitants eat out or take-away all the time because they don't have time to shop or cook, because they have to work so hard to earn the money to eat out all the time.
The move towards fresh food cooking has many fellow travellers, some of these are sloganeering idiots.
"Don't use more than four (or some silly number of) ingredients" Meat and three vege again - that will have them coming back for more. "Don't use any ingredient your grandma didn't use" Well my grandma never saw a zucchini, a capsicum or a chilli, and pasta was something those odd people with funny accents down the road would eat. "Don't ever eat this food group, you must always eat that food group". Whatever happened to eating a suitable amount of a balanced diet? "Fookyoo berries will make you live longer. Fermented tiger's milk will extend your penis" And make me rich! " We have a new study that will tell you why you are fat that contradicts the old studies that tell you why you are fat, change your ways before it is too late!" Oh wait isn't there an even newer study that contradicts the new study?
It's a strange world where there are so many serious problems that seem to have no solution but when the solution to the basic problem of good nutrition is so obvious and easy many still won't do it.
Well that can't come soon enough IMO.
Thank you, I did find it interesting. The first thing I found interesting was the picture of all those cans of food. I don't know American can labels but from those I could read there was canned ravioli, lasagna and cheese something or other and I'm sure there was that distinctive shape of cans of Spam in there.
I can't imagine buying any of those things. I guess I might if I was homeless or a teenager going camping, but not to eat as a person who owns a fully functioning kitchen or for either nourishment or because they taste good.
Since the GFC, I suspect for the reading of some of my American based blogs, there is an increased interest in frugality because of necessity
- although not always stated openly, people seem to still be doing it tough.
Buying packaged food has never been frugal or even tasty or, IMO, worth eating. It amazes me that it has taken so long for people to discover the benefits of eating home cooked food. As a keen cooks since I became and adult (and told by friends that I'm also a good cook) I'd say that cooking can be a great hobby and gardening goes hand in hand with good eating so its no wonder the packaged food industry is losing out.
The most disturbing thing about that article is the mention of eating on the run and buying MacDonalds and other fast food stuff.
How can people not be organised enough to shop for food and get up early enough to shower AND have breakafst? We dinosaurs do not understand that.
Hi Drew,
Yipee!
More people home cooking is good. Unless they are all goes out to eat or ordering in.
Somewhere I heard, but can not verify, that the Primal/Paleo crowd (I am one of them) has really put the hurtin' on candy bar sales too.
Home cooking "implies" they eat with someone, although not all the time. Family/friends/loved ones/tribe is very important to our health too. Those you are born to and those you find.
Also, if home cookers do not reduce their carbs to under toxic levels, home cooking will not help the number of people being injured by it (T2 Diabetes). It will help in a lot of other mattes though -- baby steps.
-T
Today's Sunday Review in the NY Times has article "Vitamins Hide the Low Quality of Our Food".
HB
I went in search of one of my really ancient cook books because I've seen this comment online abobut pasta before and meant to check it out because I thought it was not right. Grandma would have called it Macaroni. Recipes for Macaroni and cheese appear in cook books back in the 19th C.
Pasta is quite an old food. It was certainly eaten in Oz in the first half of the 20th C and the Chinese imigrants in the goldfields in the 1850s probably ate noodles. Pasta didn't become widespread though until after the imigations following WW2 and it didn't reach every cupboard in suburbia until the 1970s by my recollection.
As I suggested before she would have known of the existence of pasta as an exotic food but my Gran never cooked it - didn't know how. She imigrated in about 1905 from Germany and lost most of the cooking she learned there and adopted the local overcooked meat (mainly lamb and beef), taters and overboiled veg (sigh).
I can only speak for myself, and the answer would be ignorance. I don't really know how to cook much. I know how to follow a recipe, but I can't look in the fridge and think of what can be done with what I see. Fortunately, I am also an exceedingly boring person, so I am okay with eating a small number of dishes. (Leftovers from roasting a 9 lb chicken can carry me pretty far.)
Well, it is currently 8F in my area, so I'm going to the gym later. The garden will have to wait at least 6 weeks.
But lots of people find gardening to be dirty, and not the fun kind of dirty.
The near field is Chef Boyardee, canned pasta with very mild and very sweet sauces. It is something many in the US grew up on, and qualified as comfort food for my wife until she had to cut things like that from her diet.
I loved it (especially the ravioli) as a kid. Now I have trouble being in the same room as someone eating it.
Unless I've cooked something with major left-over potential, it can be a challenge for me to get out the door in the morning with something for lunch. I used to end up with something-on-a-bun several times a week. When I cut out the buns and fries, I had to play more carefully. I still end up ar Chipotle about once a week for lunch.
For me, comfort food was always cooked or prepared at home. Sausages and mashed potato with peas, Pea and Ham soup with fresh bread, grated apple when I was sick. I was sometimes given canned food when things got overly busy at home but the only one of those I ever liked was baked beans on toast. I never liked canned spaghetti so I don't know that I'd be able to ever face any other form of canned pasta - I'm sitting here knowing there is a slight upchuck response floating in the background when I'm thinking of that canned spaghetti.
:-)) I think I would too if I was ever in a room with someone eating canned spahgetti.
Is that because you don't include lunch foods into your shopping list? I know a lot of people don't for a lot of their working lives.
I'm not exactly sure what "lunch foods" are. I've cut out most bread, so I don't make sandwiches. I could pack up the content of a sandwich, but would need to do that in the evening. The morning schedule is too hectic.
My favorite lunch is pot-roast leftovers, but I don't often think to buy a roast. That use dto be my wife's meal to cook, but it no longer fits her left-over preferences, so she doesn't volunteer much. I can eat lasagne for a week, but since it makes her sugar spike, I don't cook it as often as I used to.
I have lots of cookbooks that I should use, but trying something unfamiliar when I only have about 2 hours left to the day after work is not inviting.
TMWOT it is anything that is your preferred food at lunch. For me, in summer that was often meat that I'd roast and so could use the cold meat in my salads, or I'd buy sliced ham for the same purpose. That sort of thing was what I liked in summer.
I've cut out most
I can understand why sandwich fixing in the morning would get old real quick.
:-)) There is a possible answer to your lunch problem: buy one regularly so you can have it in your lunches perhaps?? If you can make a packet angel cake you can make a pot roast.
When I was still working, if I wanted a hot lunch I used to do freezer packs specifically for my lunches (my SO likes sandwiches but I was never overly keen on them). I'd fill make a whole lot of disposable containers full of my lunch food in the freezer and then grab one pack as I left the house in the morning. These could be left over roast and veg or soup or casserole or whatever I'd cooked a bulk lot of at some time on the weekend. I learned to love my crock pot in winter.
That use dto be my wife's meal to cook, but it no
Could you cook it and, when cold, cut it up and put it in packs in the freezer for your lunch for the coming week????
Wow. That sounds like one of those work/life balance situations that could drive you bonkers in the long run.
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