AIBU and very stupid to say this isn't junk /convenience food?

[dottytablecloth]

Right am really exposing myself for a potential flaming here but anyway...

Am making a sausage casserole today with the following ingredients:

Butcher sausages
2 peppers
Tomatoes
Mushrooms
Onions
Tin chopped tomatoes
Fusilli pasta

And now for the bit a JAR of Lloyd Grossman tomato sauce

It's a made up recipe a la dotty so please forgive me if that's not what a sausage casserole is supposed to be like!

Anyway SIL was her earlier and says she wouldn't feed that to her 3 year old as it's junk food.

I'm mortified

I thought it was quite nutritious.

I've a very fussy 20 month old who loves sausages.

AIBU and deluded to serve this up and think it's not junk food?

Not all. Even 30 y eras ago our children did not have sugar as we knew it was bad. Not surprisingly one of those children now plays a sport of England and the children are healthy and not fat and have done fine at school. Most parents try to limit sugars but not all.

However like most of us I am glad to live in a country where there is choice and you decide if your child has halal meat or is vegetarian or eats only junk etc. Freedom. What I do not like is junk food peddled at every turn, teachers handing out sweets/sugar. machines with chocolate available in schools and the constant pushing into our faces of sugar and bad foods at every turn. it's never been so bad.

Start with changing the family only to drinking water and then move on to no snacks.

Agreed.
My 2 eat most things. Most fruit, most veg, curry etc. Won't eat salad though.

But we also have cupboards filled with crisps, chocolate biscuits and allsorts.

No organic farmers market here. Sainsburys. Because its closest.

Portions have grown, too. I mean, look at some of the posts on here: a main, three of four sides. No dinners of a bowl of soup and bread, gotta have salad, a spud and veg, too.

Obviously KatieKaye yummy mummies and palaeo diet followers all know that honey is totally different to sugar ;-)

"Yes, our ancestors ate much more variety then we eat today."

If they were lucky. Many survived on a pretty meagre diet. My great aunt was born in 1890 and she told me she lived on bread and dripping.

I grew up in the 1960s, out diet was not great then either. we had a very limited selection of fruit, vegetables or grains, cabbage, turnip, carrots and spuds.
I didn't see a courgette or pepper until I was a teenager- chicken was very expensive and only eaten at christmas time, we grew up on sausages, corned beef and potatoes.

My arse our ancestors all ate more variety than today, too. They ate what they could. If a crop failed or didn't produce well, then you went without that. Meat was from one source, whatever animal was farmed or what you could kill. Varieties of grain, fruit and veg were regionally limited and weather-dependent.

The difference being people didn't eat as much and had to do far more work to get and prepare food and in living in general.

My DH's ancestors were Scottish travellers. They ate root veg, berries and nuts, and meat was sootie pork, fish or rabbit. There were certainly no meals of five veg and salad.

Another one confused by the concept that our ancestors had a greater variety of food. I've studied history and that's a new one on me. What era is this we are talking about?

My kids wd love it. Sausages are a treat however, even butcher made. Processed meat is not a favourite for health.

Also, what are the ingredients I'm the lloyd jar? They cd well be junk?

Maybe she's thinking of a Tudor court where they ate things like peacock.

My ancestors struggled in the Irish Potato Famine. I thought they'd have been much healthier without all those carbs.

Looks around at the scores of period houses here. With smokehouses. To process the meat, usually pork, as no one had a fridge and, until recently, people used to starve in bad winters . . .

People have been processing meat for centuries, usually as a way of not wasting and or preserving it.

Oh, yes. The carbs! A plate of broth, a mash of neeps and tatties with butter, salt and pepper, rice with egg mixed in. This was one of the dinners recorded by a Scottish traveller woman in the 1920s. They were all working and pulling neeps all day and both the men and women smoked pipes.

Jump there's a whole thread here discussing it. Feel free to read it :)

Haha, Chippin, that proper made me laugh!

Im glad you got there first chipping!

Greengrow, 30 years ago kids walked around with bags of sweets. You may have grown up not exposed to lots of sugar, but many did. There was a thread about 1980s packed lunches, a few weeks back. Sugar was far from absent from lunch boxes of the time.

Anyone kidding themselves at honey is not a sugar needs to get their head examined.

If you look at ways of eating where people are healthy it can be 100% fat/protein or rice and fish and veg (Japanese) or 100% vegetarian, but the common factor is no processed foods and absence of sugar. Very simple and it's delicious food. In fact all that lard and sardines and oysters the poor in England used to eat was pretty good for them. Sea food you gather from by the sea plus seaweed is great too.

As long as they were naice sausages and not the bright pink paste filled ones that sounds pretty healthy.
I might have chucked a few fresh cherry toms in cut in half and chopped up a carrot and courgette really small too

at Chipping - that was lovely!

I want to know who the fuck buys all the fishfingers or insert some other such monstrosity ... sold in every supermarket ... in every town!!! Where are these feckless obese heathens??

It's fine. Processed food isn't a bad thing. Before preservatives there was a lot more listeria, botulism, and diarrhea.

As long as you're watching your empty calories you're probably fine.

Im partial to a fishfinger sandwich with tom sauce actually

Ouryve- you're spot on.

Sorry if I'm repeating anything as don't have the time to read the entire thread, but for those of you saying that using a jar is convenience food but then telling OP to use passatta and a stock cube - passatta has added salt and sugar and stock cubes are for convenience, make your own stock!

Honestly I despair at the judgey hypocritical posters on here sometimes! OP that meal sounds lovely and is far better than sticking a frozen pizza in the oven!

gah I hate food threads. yanbu op it sounds like an average dinner to me, perfectly acceptable as part of a balanced diet. Sausages aren't great, never personally bother worth cook in-type sauces, but shrug it has goodness in.

I agree with the post about bollocks being posted on here about food.

I also don't get what's wrong with fishfingers, they are just a white fish Sandwich really aren't they? Not prefect every day but (shrugs again). Why do people get so wound up about it?

And I don't want to drink water :P