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

It really is not, and is likely to be part of a meal, consisting of several courses.

I agree, and those food are definitely pushed to us a lot more by the food industry. It's not that much amount but the variety of fresh produces available here is really lacking compared other European countries, which makes cooking from scratch harder / boring.

The lack of proper fishmongers, butchers, and food markets is a real shame.

Why would you think that?

I’d say that was a pretty shit meal nutritional wise

That’s the point though. UPF are becoming increasingly popular in countries like Spain and Italy. They might not be at the same stage that we are but they are certainly on the right(wrong) track.

Yes I totally agree, OP.

High street butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers very hard to find. In-store fish and meat counters likewise. This doesn't happen on the Continent. Does it happen in the USA, idk.

Who does this benefit? Profit obsessed supermarket chains. The British consumer, already susceptible to high-fat, high-sugar, easy-fix food, is now having a very hard job to navigate the outrageous price deals, buy reasonable size portions and cook from scratch affordably.

Retail engineering designed to maximise profit and make us reliant on supermarkets. While also destroying communities and high streets.

British people are so gullible, it makes me angry.

This. I can make a decent tomato sauce, and it does not take hours.

A decent tomato sauce isn't hard to make at all.

I agree that people's expectations around meat are high. When I was a child, home made veg soup would have been a common weekday meal. It was bulked out with barley, served with bread and perhaps a bit of cheese on the side. But I don't think many people would consider than dinner any more.

It is a culture problem. In countries like Italy, it’s normal for people of all classes to be interested in food and have access to good raw ingredients. Here, it’s definitely seen as a more middle class thing. Also, some people don’t have the confidence and background in cooking from raw-so after a day at work, they buy a ready meal. In Italy, the average supermarket produce section looks like something you see in Fortnum and Mason. But we don’t have the climate to grow such good food cheaply, nor the interest.

I agree with you in that people associate preparing a meal with meat and sauce. One of my favourite meals after work used to be pasta with olive oil, cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and basil-only the pasta needed cooking. However, ready meals do exist-certainly in France, the supermarket is full of them.

It is pretty insulting. You could carry on eating "Italian style" and leave everyone else to their own choices.
It's coming across as rude.

@gannett , you and @MrsSkylerWhite really are just making excuses in my opinion. I grow herbs in my garden (could easily be done on a windowsill) and some are very good dried which is dead cheap. We have a culture of culinary laziness in this country unfortunately and people have acquired a taste for ultra processed food.
This does need to change because it would massively benefit the health of the nation. Children need to be taught about nutrition and how to cook in school or they risk following in their parents footsteps which is undesirable if those parents didn’t ever learn to cook themselves.
I don’t blame people who don’t cook from scratch, billions has been invested by the big food companies to make us addicted to the rubbish they produce. Unfortunately we are going the same way as America in this respect. @HotPotLove is quite correct in her observation and she’s also correct that elsewhere in Europe people are more frequently eating more healthily. If they can do it why can’t we?

Nail on head. It's "direction of travel" across the continents. As you rightly say, we would laugh at the US a few decades ago, and now we''re the same in the UK. And yes, a few decades ago, mainland Europe was very different to the US and UK, but now you can clearly see the deterioration in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc., as they are likewise drifting towards processed and ultra processed foods, not just in shops, but restaurants etc - menus are changing! It's all coming downward from the handful of enormous global food processing firms that dominate the Western World.

So sad to see. We're old enough to see the change. Back in the 80s, we were going on foreign holidays to USA, Canada, throughout Europe, etc., and European food in shops/restaurants was head of shoulders better than the UK which likewise was head and shoulders better than America. Now that wave has swept over the Atlantic to the UK and now crossed the Channel to Mainland Europe.

You can also see the very obvious and clear effects on the populations, i.e. most people overweight, large proportion obese and morbidly obese, with all the resultant mobility and health problems than affect employments/benefits healthcare costs, etc.

I hope the Europeans are taking notice of what has happened in the UK and US as they're heading in the same direction and will also start to see collapsing healthcare systems etc.

You can slow cook a delicious tomato sauce over hours but you can knock up a decent one pretty quickly. Tinned plum tomatoes blended up with hand blender, chuck in a few cupboard bits if you have them rough chopped olives / or roasted peppers/ sun dried tomatoes then decent pinch of dried Italian herbs or fresh if you’ve got them. Add to a hot pan with fried garlic and onions. Up to temperature then pop your protien in to simmer browned meatballs/ mince normally in my house leave to simmer. Cook some pasta chuck it in the pan with other stuff. Takes about 30 minutes. If you can do it earlier and leave it on low heat then it’ll be even nicer.

There is an issue in this Country, with some people not having the faintest idea how to cook properly. The Government has a lot to answer for as well, regarding the way UPF's have been allowed to become the norm, for a large part of the population. Their ridiculous 'attempts' to address, what they know to be a real issue, such as the sugar tax, is just barely tinkering around the edges. The whole culture around food, would need to change.

Personally, not keen on that method.

And yes as others have pointed out, Italy isn’t going to be that far behind so I wouldn’t be too smug about it. It’s an increasing problem for many countries.

Not when I make it, it doesn’t. Tinned tomatoes, tomato purée, herbs and 20-30 minutes on the stove is all I need.

Each to their own.

How do you know what I’ve eaten? The point is that it’s hardly the most delicious food ever. Nice yes especially if you’re in Italy with good local in season tomatoes but even then “the most delicious meal ever?” I don’t think so.

I’ve found it does 🤷‍♀️ cheap tomatoes usually lack depth of flavour.
Each to their own.

We live in north-east USA and, while we have multiple fast-food restaurants, ready-meals in the supermarket are almost zero. It's just not a thing. There is a tiny tiny fridge with a terrible selection (I suppose they used to be called TV dinners, and I've NEVER seen anyone buy any) but there is really nothing like the long aisles in the UK of every brand of ready meals from supermarket own brand, their 'finest' ranges, to Charlie Bigham's versions. You have to cook from scratch here, and I really miss an M&S moussaka and those minted green veg in a pot when you can't be bothered to cook...

First, you have to define what you mean by 'cooking from scratch'.
Do you always make your own bread, or pastry, for example?
I remember this conversation years ago, someone telling me they never ate anything preprepared, etc, never had any tins in their house etc.
When I was a working mother, I considered it good if I managed to have homemade dinners sometimes during the week. And a homemade dinner or dessert may not have been on the same day.
I now do a lot of batch cooking, so I can freeze portions and get out of the freezer as I need.
That said, I do remember a colleague claiming that putting a 'ready meal' in the microwave, was the same as cooking from scratch!!!!

But this could well go back to Italy in comparison simply being behind the times. According to wiki

“Although Italy has one of the lowest adult obesity rates among OECD countries, it has one of the highest childhood obesity rates in Europe. According to survey data from the World Health Organization from 2015 to 2017, 21% of children in Italy are overweight or obese, which is the highest rate of childhood obesity in Europe.”

so a problem coming down the track, that has taken longer to take hold, whilst in the uk we are closer to coming out of this problem with new generations of less obese children.

You are correct.

We eat shite in this country as a whole, only beaten by the USA. But we are headed that way too.

Just look at the isles on the supermarket, one for biscuits, one for crisps, one for fizzy drinks, one for shite cereal.

A lot of families barely cook proper food and even when they do it might be full of simple carbs and meat with veg as an afterthought.

Only got to look at the rise and rise of diabetes, heart conditions, lung conditions and dementia since the 1970's.

It's really a battle to stay on the right path.

Not to mention the rise in the number of takeaways. There aren't more takeaways because the population is exploding, the same number of people are just eating more and more takeaways.

The same with crisps, when they first came out it was ready salted and a handful of other flavours. The crisp companies need to increase their profits every year and they do it by us eating more each year.

Rant over.