5 ms·
No country has embraced prepackaged food as much as the United States.
- jister 17y agoIt is because in the US, it seems that people don't have enough time to do all the things they want to do in a day. Most of them eat, drink, put their make, etc etc on the way to work. This is just an observation though. Relax anyone?
- Mz 17y agoYour remark reminds me of the book Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It http://www.amazon.com/Timelock-Life-Hectic-What-About/dp/0060165766/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270380300&sr=1-3 http://www.amazon.com/Timelock-Life-Hectic-What-About/dp/006... Though I would guess that there are other factors as well, such as the very high divorce rate here and general breakdown of family, plus our car-centric lifestyles which have us spending excessive amounts of time driving around, thus fostering the drive-through food mentality (which means even when you get home, you want it in 2 minutes, thus microwave meals). Cooking from scratch is time consuming. It's easier to develop those skills if you have the traditional nuclear family thing going where one person is the primary cook and it's easier to come up with the time when you don't spend an hour or more every day just driving to and from work. (Generally speaking, even if your commute takes just as much time, taking the bus/train takes less mental and physical energy out of you than driving does.)
- hardik 17y agocompletely agree.. my home is an hour from work and switching to bus since over a year feels like sheer blessing
- Mz 17y agoI live without a car and hope to never go back. I currently live in an apartment in the 'burbs and bus service sucks and the number of stores/amenities nearby is limited. I am currently researching what it will take to buy a house in a more walkable neighborhood. Even with the constraints imposed by my current location, for me, living without a car has been wonderfully less burdened and more relaxing than living with a car ever was. (Of course, I hate driving and always have.)
- _delirium 17y agoI live closer (~20 min drive, ~40 min bus), and go back and forth on it. Sometimes the convenience and 2x speed of taking a car seems better, but sometimes the "don't have to drive it" aspect of the bus seems better. I definitely get more reading done on days when I take the bus: it takes 40 vs. 20 mins, but that's 40 minutes in which I can read a book. I guess I could do 20 mins of a book on tape in the car, but I hate taking in information via audio, so I just listen to music instead.
- truebosko 17y agoGreat point. To coincide with others, I have a feeling our car-centric lifestyles are a huge reason for this kind of eating (Apart from all the marketing shoved in our faces.) If you look at the majority of cities in North America they have under 500,000 people, are very widely spaced out, and generally have poor public transit. I'm moving to a city with pretty good public transit and I look forward to leaving my car at home on a more common basis. In my current city, it takes me 2 hours to get to work on public transit for a 27km trip. Educating people on cooking their own food is a problem that I think many people are trying to solve but how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations marketing all these efficient, easy, and un-realistically "healthy" products?
- Mz 17y agoGreat point. Thanks. but how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations marketing all these efficient, easy, and un-realistically "healthy" products? You give them something genuinely superior and let them choose on their own to vote with their feet? (so to speak, as someone who tries to promote a pedestrian lifestyle :-D )
- sorbits 17y agohow do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations Pass laws about proper labeling of foods, what can even be sold as food, and educate the public about healthy eating (which doesn’t necessarily require home cooking or to take more time). I think that is probably the root of the problem, that food in the US is not labelled and regulated as strongly as in most of the EU. Related to the discussion: http://www.foodincmovie.com/ http://www.foodincmovie.com/
- kjhghjmkedfcv 17y agoWho wants to beat them? Those $Bn corporations put tins of tuna, different beans, tomatoes on store shelves for pennies. They even go to the trouble of coloring the good value cans differently for me. The same corps deliver basics foods like onions, potatoes, carrots, rice year-round for roughly the cost of transport. All I have to do is open the cans, mix them together and cook for 20mins and I can have healthy tasty veggie food in about the time it takes to deliver a pizza. And a big thank-you to all the people that buy the frozen ready meals that subsidize this.
- riffraff 17y agoI'd have bet on the lack of a generalized "good eating culture", which automatically makes ready made food more acceptable.
- yummyfajitas 17y agoI don't buy this explanation. In my personal experience, the people with the least time are the most likely to eat well. Consider programmers, quants, bankers, and other such overworked types. Observing their shopping baskets at Fairway (upper west NYC) suggests they eat mostly fresh products. On the other hand, you have poor people, the vast majority of whom don't work at all. They have nothing but free time. Observing their shopping baskets (in Harlem or Jersey City) suggests they eat lots of packaged foods. I suspect laziness is a better explanation for packaged foods than free time.
- pkulak 17y agoI'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas. I'm way lazier than most poorer people, but eat only fresh food that I make myself.
- yummyfajitas 17y agoI'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas. This is simply not true. Fresh food is available in both the poor areas I mentioned (and is cheap), people just don't buy it. It's not overpriced either, on a per-meal basis (rather than a per-calorie basis) it tends to be cheaper than prepackaged crap. When I lived in Harlem [1], I noticed an interesting fact. There was almost a perfect correlation between the contents of a shopping basket and the appearance of the person carrying it. Poor looking people ate prepackaged crap, yuppies ate fresh food. [1] For those unfamiliar with NYC, Harlem used to be a terrible neighborhood. It became safe under Giuliani/Bloomberg and yuppies have moved in because it's cheap. The neighborhood is now roughly 50% yuppie, 50% local.
- kellishaver 17y agoEating fresh foods isn't necessarily more expensive, but there's the common misconception that is and many people just don't take the time to find out otherwise. Often times, people who try it end up spending more, too, because they're not used to it and don't make a full committment to it, so all that fresh produce they bought sits in their fridge and goes bad, taking a back seat to the pre-packaged stuff they bought along with it. So there's another thing that can be seen by them as driving up the cost. They end up wasting a lot of food and thereby wasting a lot of money. What a lot of them don't realize as well is that healthy food is more filling than pre-packaged crap. Your body is getting all of the nutrients it needs with less food, so you don't stay hungry all the time or need huge quantities, so you can actually buy less food. Also, many people in poorer communities who are, for example, on food stamps, will get their $250 in food stamps at the beginning of each month of whatever and they think they need to go out and buy $250 in groceries with it right then, because they're on a limited budget and they think this will be an easier way to see what they have/need and balance that budget. So they buy pre-packaged stuff, because they can throw it in the cabinet and it will still be good 4 weeks later, or 6mo later, just in case they lose those food stamps or that minimum wage job.
- stretchwithme 17y agoIts just the spinning of that tray in the microwave has us mesmerized is all.
- TorKlingberg 17y agoI wonder why prepackaged foods are always so bad. If I make a big homemade meal, I can put some of it in the freezer. Then I can take it out and microwave it later and it is still a good meal. It stays good quite long in the freezer too. Why can't I buy something like that? Sure there are ready-made meals marketed as "healthy", but it usually just means smaller portions and no taste. I think the reason is that since you cannot tell what went into a packaged meal, the producer has every incentive to replace good ingredients with something cheaper, and hide it will coloring, flavors, etc.
- mark_l_watson 17y agoThat is a really good point. BTW, food stays fresh in the refrigerator for many days, so often there is no need to freeze it. I like to add a small amount of fresh finely chopped vegetables to leftovers while I am heating them: adds a minute to preparation time but gives meals a fresh taste.
- Confusion 17y agoBecause you make it the way you like it, which is different from the way your mother makes it, different from the way your neighbor makes it, etc. Even with the same recipe and ingredients: a different brand of dried peppers, a slightly larger amount of tomatoes, less water in which you boil the pasta, etc. can be enough to change the taste. Small differences can be decisive in chemistry. On the other hand, they make it in such a way that the average consumer will consider it reasonable, which means that many people will rate it 'meh'. Convenience trumps taste and it's considered 'good enough'. It's impossible for a mass manufacturer to make stuff so that you like it as much as you like your own (or your familie' designated cook's) food.
- elblanco 17y agoI find that Kashi seems to do a good job of providing food like you describe.
- tptacek 17y agoBecause producers A/B test their food, and rapidly find that (a) things that increase shelf stability at the price of freshness don't cause consumers to buy less, and (b) things that increase increase perceived sweetness, saltiness, and unctuousness do cause consumers to buy more. In any mainstream market there's room for a cost leader than operates at atypical economies of scale, and for several narrow-line high price niche producers. People who shop at Safeway aren't going to pay $10 for frozen pilaf. You're either going to be driven inexorably towards cheap, highly shelf-stable, highly marketable products, or you're competing at Whole Foods. Cooks Illustrated finds this all the time when they test ingredients. They don't always pick the sweetest (say) tomato sauce, but the hyper-organic natural brand with no additional sweetener often comes in last. And that's a test panel of chefs.
- mark_l_watson 17y agoAll about marketing: this is big business, so a lot of money is spent pushing the convenience life style. I have a difficult time relating to this however since cooking is a favorite activity of mine and my wife. We just got home from a trip so yesterday I made up a shopping list of fresh food that my wife picked up and in the afternoon I made Pad Thai with 6 different fresh vegetables from our garden and our local market. Cooking is a lot of fun, and I can't understand why people can not make it a priority.
- mark_l_watson 17y agoAlso, please excuse plugging my own little project, but here is my cooking web app: http://cookingspace.com http://cookingspace.com I use the USDA nutrition database to assign fairly accurate nutrient values to recipes. (Runs on Heroku, and I just spun up extra dynos, so try it out - I don't advertise this web app since I more or less wrote it for my own use.)
- spazmaster 17y agoI love cooking too, but my wife couldn't care less. It's not everyone's hobby! (sadly)
- kellishaver 17y agoI absolutely hate to cook, but I have found it's much easier to grab some fresh fruits/veggies and a handful of nuts or make a decent sandwich on whole grain bread than it is to heat up some microwave something. I think that's another misconception some people have. Fact is, you don't have to do a lot of cooking to eat healthy. Eating your fruits, vegetables and whole grains raw is healthier than cooking them and requires no more effort than a quick rinse in the sink.
- spazmaster 17y agoI've just started watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution series on ABC and it's quite shocking to see so much prepackaged/processed foods. This trend is happening everywhere, but nowhere as much as the States. I really hope movies like Food Inc., the new ABC series and articles like this will reverse that trend.
- tptacek 17y agoThere is zero chance Food, Inc. is going to change anything. Agree with it or not (and I'm very sympathetic), it is neither cost- nor time- effective to eat in the way that Food Inc. suggests. Normal people do not have access to a supply chain that provides cost-effective and palatable protein from local, "responsible" producers. For a lot of families, the 6 pack of Tyson chicken breasts is the fancy, careful dinner.
- vaksel 17y agoI was actually flipping through the channels lately and I saw a show where they basically reported that sausage has been getting less and less meat over the years. i.e. in the 1940s, sausage was ~70% meat, in the 70s it was ~50% meat and right now it's about 40% meat.
- elptacek 17y agoCarboxymethyl cellulose! This article is good, but flawed. There are no conclusive studies that link higher intakes of fat to higher rates of heart disease... but higher intakes of fat AND carbohydrates are a different story. Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462 http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc...