To think processed and pre cooked food is way too common in this country?

We are in Europe unless someone has moved us overnight.

Also as has been mentioned several times throughout this thread UPFs are becoming an increasing issue in many countries and not just the UK. The question is why? It’d be genuinely interesting to know considering their strong food culture and excellent ingredients and OP has been asked her thoughts on that but so far she has evaded it.

The whole dish sounds dull and lacking in imagination.

Most people in Asian countries still cook from scratch daily.

The fast food industry is trying to get its tentacles there as well though.

I'm sorry for you that you think your recipe is the most delicious meal ever. It rather suggests the stereotype of Italian foodies is a myth.

Have it with couscous or bread or sauteed potatoes, so.

It takes a tin of tomatoes a glug of olive oil, pinch of salt and sugar and about 30-40 mins slowly on a hob. Not exactly a kings ransome!

You can grow herbs easily or used dried or none at all. It's still tasty.

What additives? Apart from citric acid (which is also often in tinned tomatoes).
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/316438362?srsltid=AfmBOoo-z3N0-Z0asq7JLZdVxtexSYAehS-Mng3RKlEog5JQ96p22WH4

I don't care what people eat, but I hate it when people demonise certain foods and food stuff and guilt people with it. I wouldn't be eating mac and cheese, Tesco or otherwise, but it's not the devil.

This interests me, because when living and working in France (the outskirts of Paris), I regularly visited a small food market that was always conveniently open during the early evening. There were stalls selling charcuterie, lovely fresh bread and pastries, fresh veg and fruit, cheeses, olives and much more besides. I often used to shop there on my way home from work and it was easy to put a delicious meal together from the produce on display. In effect, this was a 'ready meal' as it required little or no cooking and minimal preparation, but offered the option of healthy eating. The nearest we get to this in the UK is farm shops (ruinously expensive) and farmers' markets (ditto), but they are seldom open in the evenings. And once you're in the supermarket, it's just a lot quicker, easier and cheaper to pick up a ready meal or similarly processed food than having to trail around for half an hour at least, trying to assemble various components.

I agree that processed food is very bad for us and because I HATE cooking, I now batch cook, relying on the same few meals: bolognese sauce for pasta, chilli (both meat and veg versions) a quick meat or veg curry and cottage pie and make enough to last for six weeks in the freezer. These dishes are supplemented with tray bakes with meat and vegetables and the occasional risotto or stirfry. It's very repetitive, but all I require food to be is edible, as I'm constantly on a diet and thus just try to regard it simply as fuel that needs to feel the empty space in my tummy!

Scottish, lived in France for 20 years now and visiting ‘home’ a couple of times a year usually.

It’s a very different food culture. We didn’t, traditionally, have access to a lot of the staple ingredients that form the basis of Mediterranean cooking. Poor people in Italy and France had access to a wide variety of vegetables and salad ingredients, plus fruit, beans, and olive oil etc. In Scotland we had oats, barley, potatoes, plus cabbage and turnip. That’s not very inspiring.

my friends French DH was teaching they daughter to make a perfect vinaigrette by the time she was 5. No one taught me how to cook perfect turnips at any age.

when turkey burgers, cheese hamwiches and oven chips were invented my mum breathed a huge sigh of relief. As a full time working mum, she found it incredibly hard work getting dinner on the table 5 nights a week - particularly with the normal schedule of dinner at 5:30/6:00pm. In France, we don’t eat until 7:30pm. And the evening meal isn’t usually the main one of the day.

At school in France children are offered a 3/4 course lunch that is completely different to what is normal in Scotland. It is generally cooked on the premises, includes lots of veg, salad and fruit. There are no other options to buy food at school - no sandwiches, no crisps, no muffins, no pies or sausage rolls, no sweets or chocolate and nothing to drunk except water.

Culturally, id also say that the Brits are much more attracted to novelty and trying different things. The French are very conservative by comparison - many people still eat the sane foods that their grandparents did, and the classics are still very present. The typical British pub menu with (highly processed) cuisines from all over the world (an Indian curry, a Thai curry, fish and chips, a couple of pasta dishes, a noodle dish, plus steak, BBQ. Bbq chicken etc etc) just doesn’t exist here. It’s only in the last 5-6 years that pubs serving beer and burgers had really caught on here, the whole informal eating thing has finally taken off - but in a very French way: you are still asked how you want your burger cooked.

another thing: food marketing and the whole ready meals thing is light years ahead in the UK. And processed food is utterly addictive, a treat - and Brits are very, very susceptible to treats, especially sweet, fatty, tasty ones. In France a decent oyster or 6, or a very good piece of cheese is considered a treat.

Actually I think it is a uk thing.. and an American thing..
I do think people in Europe tend to have more work life balance. And particularly around eating and having time to eat.

Please keep this thread going OP, you get more supercilious with every post.

I'm afraid that sounds the very opposite of 'delicious' to me. I detest pasta.

Yeah it's true. Sometimes there can be a lot of salt in ready meals and some can be very calorie dense so these are things to watch out for. But the absolute demonization of ready meals does nothing to tackle the obesity crisis at all. Realistically if you watch your macros then having some convenience food in your diet will not harm you at all. I really think it puts people off even attempting to be healthy when there's such snobbery around food
People on here pretending frozen veg is some kind of evil.. or that cooking the same food in the microwave not the oven, somehow strips it of all nutritional value

Quite. I was in Intermarché in rural france this morning. Along with the well dressed man selecting a large bag of oysters, there were many people in the processed meat aisle.

Confit duck is delicious but presumably if you can it, it has to have stabilisers etc so is processed.

I think it depends on your budget, where you shop and your social circle.

I'm going to find an Italian forum and make a thread about how low their bar is for excellent food.

I was at secondary school from 1985 - 1990 and that doesn't sound like our curriculum. It was called 'Home Economics' - it included two terms of cookery and one term of needlework per year, but no 'marketing'. The cookery terms were focused on cooking, with some elements of food hygiene and nutrition. There was a mixture of food you'd class as healthy (e.g. chicken casserole) and not (e.g. flaky pastry, which we did over two weeks to make sausage rolls). I didn't continue it to GCSE level but we had three years of Home Economics in that format.

See I think that's totally nonsense. Far more additives, preservatives, bad fats, higher sugar. But you believe that if you want.

We shouldn't be taking the piss out of anybody. But like most things the food on our plate has become another source of tribalism.

I'm so confused by the tomato sauce debate herem..surely a tin of chopped tomatoes, reduced a bit (for however long you have) and some garlic and/or herbs is a better sauce than dolmio at a fraction of the cost? Sure, it's nice to make a fancy version with fresh lovely tomatoes and slow roast them but that's a different thing.

I have a toddler and both us parents work full time. I'm completely British and disorganised but we somehow manage not to eat much processed food. If we haven't managed to cook a proper meal then things like omelettes, crudite type vegetables, toast, bagged rocket, stir fries etc are on the menu. Or grab a freezer meal which would be something we froze when we had leftovers. I always have soup in the freezer so soup and a sandwich is fine.

We are not upf free but for example today there was nothing in for my lunch and I'm working from home, so I made noodles, eggs and frozen peas, mixed in some chilli sauce (probably UPF but mainly fermented black beans, chilli and oil, plus it was only a teaspoon). Not the height of culinary achievement or a particularly healthy, but it was nice, filling, cheap, and I managed to get a vegetable in there! It took maybe 7 minutes max to cook.

As for the diet of other toddlers ...I just find it sad. I will literally just take a hunk of cheese and an apple out with us if I haven't got anything good in for him to snack on and he's happy with that, yet everyone I know brings expensive, processed crap from the "baby food" section because they don't have time. I think in this case it's a confidence thing - marketing tells you this is a proper healthy food for your child, whereas you look at what I pack and think that's a bit rubbish 🤣 but it's all real food so I'm happier with that.