No country has embraced prepackaged food as much as the United States.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
i.e. in the 1940s, sausage was ~70% meat, in the 70s it was ~50% meat and right now it's about 40% meat.
This is just an observation though.
Relax anyone?
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.)
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?
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 )
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/
And a big thank-you to all the people that buy the frozen ready meals that subsidize this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.