to think that people have no right to be smug about being somehow "above" ready meals?

[frgr]

I hesitated to post this, but I'm not sure if I'm being unreasonable to get irked by people who smugly declare that they never buy ready meals. I am, of course, referring to another thread which I didn't want to derail, in which some posters are hinting that anyone who has eaten a ready meal with contaminated egg sort of deserves it for eating shite.

I don't eat a bad diet, due to finances I quite enjoy making soups and meals from scratch to bulk out in the week, but I do think there is a place, nay a NEED, for ready meals.

My nan can't mash potatoes due to weak wrists, I've heard a friend commenting "who'd buy that mashed up shite anyway", it allows her to easily eat mashed potato at a small premium, and she doesn't have to lift bags of spuds.

When I was ill in hospital after DCs, I couldn't drive to a takeaway, we live outside decent deliveries, and ready meals solved a problem of having an exhausted DH and me being too weak to make anything.

There is a space for ready meals as part of a wider, healthy diet. And I don't think i'm being unreasonable to think this. Any blanket statements about people being smug about not "eating shite" is being quite narrow minded. So there! :)

I think there is a difference between ready meals, and pre-prepared veg.

There is no difference in taste or nutrition to peeling and mashing your own potatoes, to buying ready made fresh mashed potatoes. It saves time when you are in a rush, and is handy to keep in the freezer for emergencies.

The issue I have with ready meals (ie lasagne, roast dinners, curries) is the added preservatives in them. If you made from scratch you would not expect it to still be safe to eat after a week or more in the fridge, but those readymeals have been made a few weeks ago and are still ok to eat..

The argument that has come up most on this thread is one of ability.

I think that's a huge thing - years ago, a disabled person would have to have carers, meals on wheels or have to live outside their own home just because they couldn't cook for themselves.

Ready-meals these days have gone such a long way since the first ones (TV dinners). That's an achievement in itself. It means that people with disabilities can have the same lifestyle and freedom as able-bodied people.
That's great!

It's also great from a time poitn-of-view, no matter how able you are. I work 6 days a week, and when I get home from work, I usually can't be bothered to spend an hour cooking. When I have time, I love it, and I've got my DH into cooking too - we do 2 meals' worth at a time, so that the next day, we can just pop it in the microwave (or in the case of sunday dinner, we make loads of roasties and mash and stuffing, then we bring the rest to the shop on Monday and have lunch here with it - a bowl heated up in the microwave with fresh gravy (granules, I'm afraid - brought up on bisto and it was the only way to have veggie gravy when I was a child), served with bread. Yummy.
Although we don't have fully ready meals all the time (or often, really), we do use ready-prepared parts a lot.

It's a lovely special treat to have one of the taste-the-difference ready meals.

It really makes me laugh the way people feel so smug about making all their food 'from scratch' because it's 'so much better for you'. You do know about all the pesticides/irradiation/chemical washes etc that fruit and veg go through? Also the antibiotics and slop pumped into farm animals? Also before it reaches you food is touched by a million people, shipped across the sea in dirty great containers and packed and unpacked in the back of vans before being waxed/packaged and sold on shelves. This is the world we live in. Whether it's made into ready meals or sold in component parts is really fairly irrelevant. Unless you grow and harvest all your own food and rear and slaughter your own animals, you really have no idea what your eating either way, and being smug because you think you're eating better food than other people just shows how we are all lead a merry dance by clever marketing.

Check this, motherfeckers;

Once a week, when I am at work, I send DS to his nanna's with a ready meal. From Asda. Sometimes it's got chicken in it.

Yeah you read it, beyotches. READY MEAL. ONCE A WEEk. FROM ASDA.

HAhahahahahahahahahhahhaahahahhahhhahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!!!!

Zack - I think a lot of people that make food from scratch do it so they know whats going into it. If you make it from scratch, it rarely contains preservatives, E numbers or added salt/sugar/fat that you don't want. I think a fair proportion of people are not naive to what happens to the base ingredients they are using, but are aware they don't want extra crap in their food if possible.

bupcakes - I like your style. Surely thats what ready meals were invented for? The times when we don't have the time etc.

YANBU. DH and I virtually live on ready meals. We both work long hours - he gets home at about 8.30, and because I am running my own business without full time childcare I usually work between 7 when the boys go to bed and 8.30 when DH gets home, sometimes beyond. No way either of us want to start cooking from scratch at that point.

The boys usually have proper homecooked food though, as our nanny cooks for them 4 days a week and I batch cook and freeze for them for other days.

I outsource some of my work already and am working towards doing it more so I can give up working Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings as I do currently. Once I'm at that stage and then once we also have a cleaner, I might be able to think about spending time either cooking from scratch in the evenings or doing more cooking at the weekends.

But at the moment, I have too much to do and other priorities. Ready meals are great now anyway, they are certainly not full of rubbish like they used to be at all.

I just read the labels. If it sounds like I could make it at home I will buy it. If it sounds like a chemistry dept. I don't! Labeling it so much better than it used to be and most super markets make big deal of having no hydrogenated fats in the meals etc so there easy enough to spot. We use them a lot for dh and me and then my kids have school dinners. Pretty good round here
in the evening they may have a sarnie or egg and soldiers so I'm happy My dd loves fruit and veg as well tho I'm still working on fussy ds ages 3