To not understand the obsession with ‘hot meals’?

[LastToBePicked]

As in “kids need to have a hot meal”, “They haven’t had a hot meal today” etc

Is it just short-hand for a more substantial meal or do people think there is some magic about food being hot that makes it more nutritious?

Is, for instance, a tuna pasta bake superior to a tuna sandwich? Or sausage and mash better than ham salad?

@speakout

A ham sandwich is not particularly healthy anyway- it will be 75% bread, ham ( a bad protein source) a tiny bit of salad or whatever.

The quality of the ingredients means the nutritional value of a ham sandwich can vary widely. Homemade brown bread is about ten million times healthier than Warburtons, and 'ham' can mean anything from cold pork to that teddy bear frankenfood stuff.

Until you have lived a childhood where you have never felt warm you wouldn’t understand. For poor kids eating cold food is a reason why obesity can be more likely - cold food often needs to have more salt more calories to taste good. It’s often more processed. And you need to eat more of it to feel full. Plus there’s the added problem that some kids probably don’t get the heating on very often at home or access to warm clothes and so are less likely to be active. It’s a vicious circle.

@HunterHearstHelmsley

My Dad claims a hot meal is more filling than a cold meal - cheese on toast is more filling than a cheese sandwich, pasta bake is more filling than a pasta salad etc. I really do not get it.

It is. I agree with him.

It's Shorthand for a proper balanced meal. Sandwiches rarely are

From the point of view of myself, when I was a child and having free school meals. With the exception of weekends when I stayed with my nan, my school dinners were the only got meals I got.
They were important to me.
If you have plenty of hot meals yourself you would be privileged enough not to realise.

I think it's because generally a hot meal includes a substantial portion of protein and vegetables. Whereas a cold meal for kids is usually a sandwich and mainly carbohydrates. So nutritionally a hot meal is better. I suppose if you eat cold eggs and ham with a big salad that is good but usually this is not what kids get as a cold meal.

Also unless the bread is homemade then it often has additives but something like a baked potato doesn't even though it is also a carbohydrate.

[quote 5thnonblonde]And bleurgh- tuna is gross cold but the idea of warming up what I assume to be tinned tuna?

Well a hot meal warms you up, obviously. Which in colder weather is a good thing. How does this need to be explained?

Ah yes, I actually had this conversation with my cousin recently as it was something our late-grandmother would say. She would have been appalled by what toddler DS ate that day:

Breakfast: weetabix with milk and flaxseeds, banana
Snack: Apple and Greek yoghurt
Lunch: Cheese, ham, cucumber, red pepper, toddler crisps
Snack: Oat bar
Dinner: leftover roast chicken, leftover pasta in a mixed roasted veg sauce, avocado, orange segments, yoghurt. (all cold because I'm lazy and also DS loves it cold and eats it better than when I heat it).

She would have scolded me. However, if his lunch has been cheese on toast, he'd had porridge for breakfast, or if I had heated the leftovers it would have been fine!

I think its a hangover from older times when a) people thought cold in and of itself made you ill -- before they realised it was actually the microbes rather than the cold and b) hot food was a bit of a status symbol.

My DD's grandmother (who is from a working class background in a fairly poor country) is always banging on about the importance of a hot meal every day and I'm sure its connected to having a hard up childhood when this was something of a luxury.

It is definitely something one craves on a cold day when you're hungry but I'm sure there's nothing more inherently nutritious about hot food.

@HunterHearstHelmsley

My Dad claims a hot meal is more filling than a cold meal - cheese on toast is more filling than a cheese sandwich, pasta bake is more filling than a pasta salad etc. I really do not get it.

I totally agree with this even though I know it’s psychological. A cold cheese sandwich is one of the most dry, unsatisfying things in the world but grill the same sandwich and the textures make it so much more satisfying and for some reason more filling. I’d say this for any sandwich really.

Another example is leftover pizza or any takeaways for that matter. When it’s fresh and hot it’s more filling and tasty. When you much on cold pizza leftovers the next morning it’s tasty but nowhere near as satisfying or filling for some reason.

*munch

Hot food makes you feel good, warm and cosy.
A sandwich or salad can be delicious and nutricious, but nothing will beat a warm soup on a cold dark winter's day.
I preferred mine to have school meals when little. And home cooked dinners. Now she has sandwiches in school and a hot dinner at home. They do mot give much hot food in her secondary, so sandwiches make sense now.

raw vegetables are better in terms of health than cooked

That’s a myth. The pros and cons balance each other out. Additionally, there are a shit load of vegetables that are virtually inedible or fast pretty horrible unless cooked: see kale, cabbage, peas, aubergine, mushrooms, potatoes, etc.

I think it’s just another way of saying a “proper meal” ... as opposed to, say, two slices of shit bread with a slice of processed cheese inside + sugar packed yoghurt.

Hot food is comforting. Especially in the colder days.

My son eats loads more with a packed lunch than he ever did with a school meal. He is definitely not obsessed with a hot meal. Similarly, I don't like a hot meal at lunchtime and two hot meals a day would definitely feel like overkill.

Some thought provoking posts.

I do very much understand why free school meals exist and @Ozanj makes a good case for why food being hot is important in its own right.

I do still hear people taking that principle and being quite literal about it and taking it as gospel that hot meals are always the gold standard.

It’s a plot to keep us women in the kitchen.

Yes, like all dads never cook for their kids hmm

Did it occur that this poster was possibly being facetious?

@pregnantncnc

Ah yes, I actually had this conversation with my cousin recently as it was something our late-grandmother would say. She would have been appalled by what toddler DS ate that day:

Breakfast: weetabix with milk and flaxseeds, banana
Snack: Apple and Greek yoghurt
Lunch: Cheese, ham, cucumber, red pepper, toddler crisps
Snack: Oat bar
Dinner: leftover roast chicken, leftover pasta in a mixed roasted veg sauce, avocado, orange segments, yoghurt. (all cold because I'm lazy and also DS loves it cold and eats it better than when I heat it).

She would have scolded me. However, if his lunch has been cheese on toast, he'd had porridge for breakfast, or if I had heated the leftovers it would have been fine!

If your grandmother was anything like mine she grew up without central heating, children having no shoes or socks, let alone coats and getting them warmed up with food was the only way to heat them. It was a matter of necessity.

@Joystir59

Hot food is comforting. Especially in the colder days.

Perhaps, but posters on MN (I've never encountered this IRL) seem to think hot = more nutritious, when that's not the case. A hot piece of pizza for tonight's dinner is no more nutritious than a cold piece of piza for tomorrow's breakfast.

Jot food is so much more comforting and satisfying. I think you get more of a 'build up' to the meal with hot food. The smells as it's cooking stimulating your apetite etc. The flavours and smells mix together better, there is more textural variety. A hot meal is just a more sensory experience.

I was reading about some experiment recently where they found that people who had a cold lunch actually did feel less satisfied and went in to eat more portions than those who had a hot lunch.

I think it is only recently that we had much choice of cold food so your main nutrition was from cooked food, often cheap cuts of meat. Hot food is generally a sign it is cooked which was safer from an evolutionary point of view, takes less of the calorific value to digest so was more efficient protein source and warmed you up in damp and cold houses. More likely to socialize over hot food as cooking and serving was an important part of family structure and in cold dark winter evenings it was a source of comfort.
Whether any of this is relevant in our modern society is debatable, but the reasons are ingrained and that's why people say these things.

Personally I’d be really depressed if I knew I was coming in to a cold meal every evening. I might just not come home