If we’re to quit our addiction to packaged food and ready meals, it’s life skills we need, not lectures. Step one: focus on ease, speed and value for money
The other morning, having digested the disquieting but not altogether surprising statistic that the UK now eats almost four times as much packaged food as fresh – in 2015, we each of us bought 1,547 calories’ worth of packaged produce per day– I did a little audit on what we consume in our house. Hmm. It started pretty well. These days, I would no more think of buying a ready meal than I would a four-wheel-drive car; I work at home, which means I can use the time other people must spend travelling for making a proper supper. But what counts, exactly, as fresh food? Spaghetti comes in a packet, after all. And aren’t we told that frozen peas are just as nutritious as those straight from a pod? Also, I regard biscuits – and here the smugness smartly fades – as essential. I eat a lot of biscuits. Biscuits are my comfort, my reward, my way of punctuating the day.
Still, it does seem to be the case that we all, me included, need to start eating more fresh food. Packaged foods are (mostly) high in salt and sugar, and they’re making us fat and ill. The question is: how are we supposed to do this? Food manufacturers push their factory-made concoctions on us – low-priced and seductively packaged – for the simple reason that their long shelf lives help boost profits. And, meanwhile, people are tired and broke, and their cooking skills are rusty or perhaps didn’t exist in the first place. Good intentions, in this environment, are about as much use as an egg whisk in a canoe. In my experience, an addiction to packaged foods – neuroscience suggests the word “addiction” might not be out of place here – often creeps up on a person. In my 20s, working the hours from hell, I started buying the odd supermarket curry. Not too many weeks later, supermarket curry – salted with my late night tears – had become pretty much the only thing I ate.
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