Has healthy eating become a luxury?
As people know from my previous rambles, including my rant against the pernicious evil that is Wheatabix and my righteous fury against Special K I have some issues with healthy food.
My mother is a diabetic - sufficiently severe that the doctors keep umming and ahhing about her injecting insulin, which she rather fiercely wishes to avoid. So, checking labels on food became a necessity to her and it’s a habit that has spread through the family.
So I read labels and have generally been quietly horrified by what I read. The amount of artificial crap (preservatives, flavours, colourings etc etc) that goes into everything is unreal - but that’s nothing compared to the salt, sugar and fat lurking in every little thing (go check the sugar content of any condiment - then the salt content of your bread. BREAD! We’re advised to have between 4-6g of salt a day. There’s 0.7g of salt in every SLICE of Hovis’ bread and supermarket’s own brands are often worse).
In general, the more processed the food is, the more crap they put in it (to a point where I wonder if it should even still be called food). Most ready made sauces, for example, are horrific - and ready meals? Adding a heavy dose of arsenic probably wouldn’t make them much less healthy.
So, we do most our own cooking. We cook huge batches of food and freeze it. We cook our own sauces, prepare our own condiments. We bake our cakes and biscuits and even our bread. We cook as much as we possibly can from scratch with a minimum of meddling. We go to farmer’s markets and the covered market and get our food fresh and un-messed with. Our diet is extra tasty and super healthy :)
And it’s a luxury.
How many people have the TIME or ENERGY to live like we do? If they’ve got kids or other dependents or work extra long hours (or 2 jobs) then putting in the cooking time we do isn’t practical. And trawling round the various farmer’s markets is much more effort than doing a quick shop round the Supermarket (and checking - and understanding - all the labels of your weekly shop? Yeah time time time - especially when you’re tired or busy or distracted or little Bratleigh is screaming. And who thinks to check the labels on bread for salt content? Or food covered in ‘pro biotic‘ and ‘digestive health‘ for sugar content?). The time and the energy to cook and shop like we do is a luxury.
And there’s the expertise. I’m a decent cook - but I became a decent cook because I had the time and the energy and the money to splurge on cook books, to browse the internet, to experiment, to buy overpriced ingredients and risk a disaster with them, to cook a meal that we may not like (or may be totally inedible). That’s a luxury.
And let’s not forget the money. These toxic ready meals are damn cheap. Putting together all the ingredients for an equivalent meal can be damned expensive - and if it’s fresh they don’t keep as long either (sure you can, and do, find the ingredients cheaper - but that’s more searching and checking and TIME). The money is most certainly a luxury.
And this annoys me muchly.
It annoys me when the powers that be are having the screaming meemies about the obesity epidemic that we are happy to allow and encourage conditions that ENCOURAGE obesity. There’s no standard or real pressure to make ready meals remotely healthy - or healthy meals that are quick and easy. Sure, some places have made some steps but they‘re exceptions, not the rules. We bleat at people to eat less salt, have huge advertising campaigns about eating healthily, eating less fat - and the adverts run alongside adverts for, say, yoghurt full of sugar announcing that it’s healthy. Or Special Bloody K telling us how to lose fat and eat so much salt that you might as well just eat bacon.
This idea we have that if we throw enough guilt and condemnation out there and people will stop being so naughty is ridiculous. Yes, there are things people can do, especially in relation to exercise, and choices people can make (if they choose to do so). But while healthy eating costs more money, time and energy than loading on the fat some people will simply not have a chance or choice to eat healthily.
AND while advertisers are free to wrap even the most toxic of ingredients in “light” and “healthy” labels then many more will be sincerely trying to do so and failing because of the deceptions that are the norm in the food industry.
My mother is a diabetic - sufficiently severe that the doctors keep umming and ahhing about her injecting insulin, which she rather fiercely wishes to avoid. So, checking labels on food became a necessity to her and it’s a habit that has spread through the family.
So I read labels and have generally been quietly horrified by what I read. The amount of artificial crap (preservatives, flavours, colourings etc etc) that goes into everything is unreal - but that’s nothing compared to the salt, sugar and fat lurking in every little thing (go check the sugar content of any condiment - then the salt content of your bread. BREAD! We’re advised to have between 4-6g of salt a day. There’s 0.7g of salt in every SLICE of Hovis’ bread and supermarket’s own brands are often worse).
In general, the more processed the food is, the more crap they put in it (to a point where I wonder if it should even still be called food). Most ready made sauces, for example, are horrific - and ready meals? Adding a heavy dose of arsenic probably wouldn’t make them much less healthy.
So, we do most our own cooking. We cook huge batches of food and freeze it. We cook our own sauces, prepare our own condiments. We bake our cakes and biscuits and even our bread. We cook as much as we possibly can from scratch with a minimum of meddling. We go to farmer’s markets and the covered market and get our food fresh and un-messed with. Our diet is extra tasty and super healthy :)
And it’s a luxury.
How many people have the TIME or ENERGY to live like we do? If they’ve got kids or other dependents or work extra long hours (or 2 jobs) then putting in the cooking time we do isn’t practical. And trawling round the various farmer’s markets is much more effort than doing a quick shop round the Supermarket (and checking - and understanding - all the labels of your weekly shop? Yeah time time time - especially when you’re tired or busy or distracted or little Bratleigh is screaming. And who thinks to check the labels on bread for salt content? Or food covered in ‘pro biotic‘ and ‘digestive health‘ for sugar content?). The time and the energy to cook and shop like we do is a luxury.
And there’s the expertise. I’m a decent cook - but I became a decent cook because I had the time and the energy and the money to splurge on cook books, to browse the internet, to experiment, to buy overpriced ingredients and risk a disaster with them, to cook a meal that we may not like (or may be totally inedible). That’s a luxury.
And let’s not forget the money. These toxic ready meals are damn cheap. Putting together all the ingredients for an equivalent meal can be damned expensive - and if it’s fresh they don’t keep as long either (sure you can, and do, find the ingredients cheaper - but that’s more searching and checking and TIME). The money is most certainly a luxury.
And this annoys me muchly.
It annoys me when the powers that be are having the screaming meemies about the obesity epidemic that we are happy to allow and encourage conditions that ENCOURAGE obesity. There’s no standard or real pressure to make ready meals remotely healthy - or healthy meals that are quick and easy. Sure, some places have made some steps but they‘re exceptions, not the rules. We bleat at people to eat less salt, have huge advertising campaigns about eating healthily, eating less fat - and the adverts run alongside adverts for, say, yoghurt full of sugar announcing that it’s healthy. Or Special Bloody K telling us how to lose fat and eat so much salt that you might as well just eat bacon.
This idea we have that if we throw enough guilt and condemnation out there and people will stop being so naughty is ridiculous. Yes, there are things people can do, especially in relation to exercise, and choices people can make (if they choose to do so). But while healthy eating costs more money, time and energy than loading on the fat some people will simply not have a chance or choice to eat healthily.
AND while advertisers are free to wrap even the most toxic of ingredients in “light” and “healthy” labels then many more will be sincerely trying to do so and failing because of the deceptions that are the norm in the food industry.