Do people really not know what to eat?

Being overwhelmed by the skills it requires (figuring out what you need, buying it, prepping it then cooking it all and it could go wrong).

If only there were some kind of device that could help them with all that stuff at the tip of a finger 🤔

I had a housemate at uni who positively reveled in her (apparent) lack of ability to cook. As in, claiming she didn't know that you needed to put water in the pan when cooking pasta and couldn't possibly make a basic bolognese sauce because it was all so haaard. She clearly thought it made her look all cute and ditsy ("what am I like, eh?"). And yet she was able to figure things out when booking holidays etc (ie when someone else wasn't going to do it for her).
For some people there is a genuine confidence issue but for others it is pure and utter laziness.

People are being sold a lie by the food companies. I know very intelligent people who eat a lot of shit because fundamentally they can’t be arsed. My DSS eats so many takeaways….he can get away with it at the moment as he’s tall….but it’s going to catch up with him. He wastes so much money….

@HarvestMouseandGoldenCups money and facilities is an interesting point. Should food banks be partnering with supermarkets to get them to donate or putting on the lists of what’s needed basic pantry ingredients and basic kitchen equipment? If they are turning on the oven to make dinner they can be shown how to utilise all the space in their oven, if they have an air fryer how to use it to make cakes. Slow cookers are often really cheap to run and to purchase, so should councils give vouchers for basic kitchen equipment to allow them to make a range of foods?

I used to cook in a night shelter, breakfasts and dinners. Most of our clients were men and the majority east European. I’ve never made so many omelets in my life! The people would rotate across the week through seven venues and I was the cook for two. We were given a budget and then free rein on what we produced. I’d always put out some cereal and the toaster, I also offered to do bacon sandwiches, but they always wanted omelets and told me it was their favourite meal of the week. I’d do ham / cheese / mushroom and made them plenty big enough. It worked out really economical, I’d use my food processor to grate blocks of cheese and any leftover filling would be frozen.

I was met with surprise that it was actually financially viable and wanted. A lot of our clients were working in factories or going out in the cold all day, so a hot, protein full breakfast did them well.

A lot of adults don't like vegetables and pass this onto their kids. Even if they feed their kids veg, the kids presumably notice that the parents don't eat it or that they pull a disgust face when they do.

Well I’m 30 and, while I am a good cook, most of my friends cannot or will not cook. I can tell you it’s lack of confidence and 0 idea how to cook anything.

Their parents never bothered to teach them any kitchen skills - my mum was a rare stay at home mum and so did as well as sending me to cookery school over summer as a teen. Around the 00s schools turned Food Tech into watching films about food and making pizza toast (fgs) to save on time and ingredients. And when they grew up their parents continued to cook for them (or to put things in the oven) and then they swapped to takeaways and ready meals.

My friend spent £3,500 on takeaways last year. We audited him. Mostly the same meals over and over. I’ve sent him my recipes for these meals and he doesn’t bother to try.

So the answer is - never cooking anything until your 20s. Being overwhelmed by the skills it requires (figuring out what you need, buying it, prepping it then cooking it all and it could go wrong).

FYI as someone who works at a food bank I’d say 85% of those who use one are confident cooks. They just don’t have the money or facilities to do so. Many turntheir noses up at the UPFs on offer.

The other 15% are homeless or single men generally. The former have bigger fish to fry and the latter wouldn’t accept advice if it hit them in the face.

@NotMeNoNo I think that’s something that should be taught by schools, food banks, the job centre, social care whoever. That actually it isn’t a privilege to eat good, healthy, thrifty homemade food. That you can build up a store cupboard one or two ingredients / herbs / spices / bottles / tins / jars a week from Aldi / Lidl / Asda over a long period of time.

Teaching food and cooking efficiency, good use of a feeezer (we had one in our lounge diner when we lived in a tiny house, j just stuck an old table cloth over it), budgeting over a week or a month for food and taking advantage of yellow stickers / olio / leftovers really stretches the budget.

Jamie Oliver’s air fryer show was great for showing how much you can cook in one, including the banana bread.

baking stuff can be bought in the pound shop or charity shop.

I was at a parade of shops in one of the most deprived parts of my city the other day and there was a shop selling cookware for making curries and all sorts of dishes, everything was really well priced along with the spices and dry goods.

Encouraging families to make choices and showing them that their children will eat it and enjoy it is key.

Of course there are opportunity costs and sink costs for the ingredients but teaching families that that’s ok and normalising it would surely help.

I dont get the point in making banana bread, I just end up eating more sugar and more calories, wasted eggs and flour on a sweet treat that I will struggle to portion control. Id rather freeze it for milkshakes or bin it if its past eating.

Making banana bread out of overripe bananas is missing the point, in fact a bit privileged. Someone on the borderline of food poverty is unlikely to have all the eggs, flour, sugar, dried fruit, equipment and baking tin. They will just either eat or leave the banana. Yes your thrifty granny might have done that but she would have been already set up for home baking.
It's very easy to be healthy and economical when you have a well equipped kitchen and plenty of cooking skills.

Subjects that weren't measured by SATS or deemed 'essential' by OFSTED were squeezed out of the timetable. I noticed a big difference in the amount of cookery lessons between my oldest being at high school and my youngest 7 years later.

Both parents work full time.

Loads more takeaways, it used to be you could only get a takeaway in the evening, now you can get breakfast, lunch, dinner, cakes and alcohol delivered until about 3am.

Ready meals are a thing.

Packed lunches used to be a sandwich and a piece of fruit, now they include yoghurt, and the fruit yoghurts are full of sugar, crisps, some form of UPF and a drink.

Immigration has an impact, both in terms of immigrants bringing their food and not knowing things in the supermarket that are healthy.

Poverty. If a school does have some form of cookery class then you need to buy the ingredients, and often something to put the final product in.

School breakfast clubs.

After school clubs, children used to be home from about 4pm, not necessarily to eat at that time but children did often eat earlier than they do now followed by playing out with friends.

I get what you're saying @BambinaCucina and I think it's partly because it's easy to conflate several issues;

-healthy vs unhealthy (in terms of the actual ingredients and macros)
-whole, real food vs industrial/UPF
-high calorie vs low calorie

Very few foods other than fresh, whole plants tick all those boxes, so which things do we prioritise?

I have so many random thoughts to add. I don't think home cooked meals are without flaw. The vast majority of our meals were homemade. I grew up eating, and loving, every vegetable but they were all dripping in butter. They tasted lovely, but did not help my weight. I was also told that I had to clear my plate, even when I was full - because "there are starving children in Africa". This still has an impact on my life today (I don't tend to get the "belly is filling up" signal until it's too late and I almost feel sick). I don't make my kids clean their plates. When they tell me they're done, they're done.

Unfortunately, we were sold a lie. We were told that a "vesta curry" was the answer to the busy woman's prayers. A little extra help in the kitchen, and people found them handy. And, in truth the ready meals and products sold in the 70s/80s (not sure exactly when vesta arrived) were probably not too bad. But today's UPFs are highly addictive substances. They have been specifically engineered to make them taste as good and be as addictive as possible.

Also, we are a lot less active than we were (as a whole), and portion sizes are colossal!
In our local bakery, the cakes are so big that I struggle to eat even half. I think people don't realise the amount of calories that they're actually eating unless they're actively tracking them. It's eye opening.

I think there's almost too much availability of food also these days. There are takeaways, cafés, fast food restaurants on every corner and now you don't even have to leave your house, you can uber eats until your heart desires.

I can cook well. I've always been interested in food. I grew up in a food-oriented family, and watching jamie Oliver and devouring any cook books and magazines I could get my hands on. I was lucky to learn to bake with my Granny. Home Economics was not what it used to be, and not every person grew up like I did. I have a friend who has asked me to go to her house to show her how to cook because she was never shown how. I make things like curries (but add spinach and chickpeas), lasagne, gnocchi bakes with butternut squash, roasts, stirfries, Chinese takeaway dishes (such as chow mein, sweet and sour, chicken and cashew nuts, etc), fakeaway McDonald's sausage and egg bagels... cakes, biscuits, pies, confectionery.

Interestingly, my now-adult daughter hated that I cooked every night and would tell me that it was horrible to have to eat these home cooked meals every night and she was deprived, and why couldn't she have the 'good food' like her friends etc, etc. She had a boyfriend for a few months who would come round for dinner (his own mum didn't cook and he ended up eating takeaways every night), and he kept telling her how lucky she was that I cooked. You can't win!

factually incorrect to state that fresh food was ‘far cheaper’ than UPF. The cheapest fruit is cheaper than the less cheap processed food, but as a whole, UPF are cheaper than
fresh foods for ineluctable reasons which I won’t bore readers by repeating. I don’t think what I am saying is really that complicated or controversial: I am not advocating in favour of UPF but if there is no interventionist measures then capitalism will do its work.::

I notice you're using dollars so evidently you're not in the UK, and prices will be different.
I regularly buy a single banana for work. It's around 12 - 14p in Sainsburys dependent on size.
A 45g bar of Dairy Milk will cost you 95p.
The cheapest own brand multipack (6 bags) of crisps in my nearest supermarket is £1.10.
Six bananas at 14p each is 84p.
The bananas are much cheaper.
Yes they ripen too quickly if you don't store them correctly but then you can have banana bread which is delicious and can be cooked at the same time that you have your main meal in the oven.

I'm always baffled by people's stupidity.
There's a sandwich chain called Subway which advertised itself as healthy. I remember a woman saying she wanted to improve her diet, but unfortunately there were no Subway shops near her - as though she was convinced that was her only option.

I checked this on the supermarket app we use. Here - a single banana costs almost twice what one of a multipack of crisps costs.

The reason I checked is because I once did a charity challenge to eat for $2 a day (based
on the amount a refugee gets) with a friend, it fascinated me that she thought brown rice, leafy green veg and fish would be the things to buy (as simple, nutritious etc) and was shocked she could not do it in that budget. Meanwhile I, who had lived on a very very tight budget through 11 years
of entirely self-funded university study found it very easy to make meals within the budget with the cheapest crappiest plain pasta etc.

So I know now that many people make sweeping unfounded statements about the relative costs of food they consider good and bad.

Sorry, I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here? In your original comment, you told another poster that it was 'factually incorrect' to say that a banana or apple costs less than a bag of crisps or a chocolate bar. It's not.

Now, I think you're talking about calories and affordability which is a different matter.
I'd need to eat a heck of a lot of crisps and chocolate to make myself feel full. In fact I'd probably make myself feel sick eating crisps and chocolate before I felt full. Not to mention the massive increase in the price of chocolate in the last few years (an average increase of 18% in one year). Who can afford to fill themselves up on chocolate?

Whilst Torres are pricy, I can still pick them up in the same aisle of the supermarket that I can buy a multipack of your aforementioned Walkers.
If I can buy something in the supermarket it feels to me unlikely that it is 'the best of anything'.

Research and development in the food manufacturing industry.

Competition for our food budget is fierce.

There's a lot of time and effort being poured into developing formulations with ingredients that are;

1. as cheap and stable as possible, and
2. as tasty and moreish as possible so you'll eat more and buy more.

These ingredients don't necessarily come from what you would recognise as food.

The absolute last thing they care about is whether any of these ingredients are any good for you, as long as they're not already banned because they're proven to be harmful. Very difficult to establish with new ingredients and combinations coming out all the time, and some of the effects could be seen years and years down the track. We're being experimented on.

There's a good chance that in the 80s your biscuits had flour, butter, sugar and cocoa in them and not much more. Have a look at the packet now!

It’s all about balance really isn’t it. We mostly eat fairly healthily and I cook from scratch probably 5 nights a week, but on the other two nights we might have fish in batter or fish fingers, or at the moment the kids are very keen on southern fried chicken thighs from Tesco with some oven chips. Or we might have veggie fajitas (from a kit) made with Quorn - that’s UPF city but not awful compared to some things we could be eating. I encourage fruit / veg as snacks before anything else, but the kids do eat a small pack of crisps most days in their packed lunches, and I let them have Frijj milkshakes after sports training a few times a week (they also love homemade banana & blueberry smoothies too). They do huge amounts of sports training and they are hardcore sessions they do as well. I can’t be bothered to get too excited about UPF as long as we’re not solely existing on them, and I do think there’s different types of UPF as well. For example we all eat wholemeal sliced bread for our sandwiches, that’s a UPF but I would also see it as pretty healthy.

Same! We currently have a 6 month old who wakes hourly and if I’m lucky I get 2 hours sleep. I also exclusively bf and have another young dc and housework, work etc but still find the time to cook whole foods because eating well is the only reason I’m feeling ok and coping!

I think it's a bit of both. I'm not in the UK but here when you go to a cafe the size of the muffins, scones, cakes etc. is so much larger than it used to be. You used to be able to buy a sandwich with just simple fillings, now they usually only come in packs of two which are stuffed with several fillings. It's ridiculous.

I see USA has reviewed its good food pyramid to tackle poor diet. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2026/01/07/rfk-jr-new-us-dietary-guidelines/88063817007/#

What happened 20 to 40 years ago to the current generation of parents to young children which means they don’t know how to cook from scratch a simple nutritious meal?

Even if someone hasn't learned to meal plan, it isn't rocket science?

That's a poor excuse.