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

[HotPotLove]

Before you all start yelling at me, I know that there are of course millions of households that eat a healthy diet, cook from scratch all the time, carefully choose ingredients etc etc. But my feeling as a foreigner (have been living in the UK for almost a decade though) is that ultra processed food, pre cooked and ready meals etc are very much normalised here and part of most people every day life. It’s pretty obvious just by looking at the supermaket aisles really.
Curious to know if people are generally trying to stay away from these and make healthier choices or whether it is generally so embedded into our lives that we are not even noticing?
Second disclaimer is that I am not pointing any fingers, infact I often buy these myself but what makes me think about this is that I would have never bought these types of meals when living back in my own country (also less available than here overall)

You can make a perfectly good tomato sauce in considerably less time with tinned tomatoes.

This is an interesting topic, the rise of ready to eat foods isn't solely a British phenomenon. "Home cooking Recipes" from the USA have used pre prepared ingredients, like a can of chicken soup in a casserole for decades, long before it was common place in the UK. I have noticed on my holidays to France that the number/range of ready meals in the supermarkets has increased steadily over the years as the working and shopping culture changes.

Food education in schools is virtually non existent, if you don't have a parent who cooks no one has taught you those food prep skills. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the prospect of returning from work with tired grumpy children and then face cooking an evening meal. Quality fresh ingredients are more expensive than a supermarket ready meal (and anyone who says otherwise is delusional in my opinion) unless you are happy with quite a boring diet.

Home cooking is however, cheaper, tastier and healthier than a delivery or Uber eats! Money isn't always the cause of poor diet.

Well, again, you need a certain amount of initiative, intellectual curiosity and confidence to even think to go and do that.
It is really easy to just assume everyone is starting from the same point, but that is just to take for granted your own advantages.
Speaking personally, there is a mindset among my family of 'Oh, I just don't know about that.' and that some things are 'too clever' or 'not for the likes of us'. This translates into a resistance/refusal to use initiative and try to educate oneself. Some of my relatives with this mindset just wouldn't think of going online to look up something like a recipe or food tips.

Really?

I just googled how to peel a garlic clove and countless videos, all under a minute, popped up, mostly on you tube.

If you want to find this stuff out, it's easy to.

Sadly I don't think they're as extreme as you assume. More and more people are struggling with the cost of living.
I've just written a longer post about the mindset needed to take steps to find out things for yourself. I know these things seem simple to some of us, but really, not everyone is starting from the same point.
This mindset thing is really hard to get across, but I see it in my own family and my peers from where I grew up. It was socially pretty disadvantaged and most people didn't (still don't) set much store by/care much about education or any sort of intellectual curiosity. It was and is somewhat frowned on/sneered at to be 'clever' or 'posh' (and by 'posh' I mean things like growing your own tomatoes, or buying fresh fruit and veg to make your own food from scratch).

No shit, Sherlock. Have you anything useful to add?

How is it Brit bashing please? I agree with her, and I am British born and bred (Liverpudlian/Irish/Scots). There was no need for you to make childish threats to be xenophobic towards the OP.
I grew up in a UK family where home cooked meals was the norm, so I also cook, but that is seemingly no longer the British way. Feel free to accuse me of Brit bashing, given that I am a Brit 😁

I think future generations will look back on the prevalence of ready made meals / UPFs in the supermarkets in the same way we look at smoking. It was so widespread not so while ago and socially accepted. Now it’s this processed shite poisoning us - and the kids who are increasingly unhealthy; and we just go… yeah ok. It shouldn’t be allowed to be so available, so in your face and marketed often as ‘healthy’. In the same way that smoking isn’t anymore.

I grew up in a very poor and battered country and largely ate very simple foods as a child. Various lentils, beans, veg, soup, bread, meat or fish sometimes. Everyone cooked from scratch because there was no other option. No one was ‘not smart enough’ or ‘not confident enough’, people had to cook for their families. It’s SO much easier to do well
now. It’s the availability and promotion of shite foods that is the biggest issue - from companies that just want to make money. It should be criminal.

I’ve had this and it is nice but has to be eaten straight away. Its the sunshine version of pasta pesto.

Pasta is rubbish really, not much different to sliced white bread. The amount of veg in that probably wouldn't amount to 1 of your 5 a day.
Quite frankly, a decent ready meal with a side of veg often won't contain any upfs and will be just as healthy. It is perfectly possible to buy a jar of ready made pasta sauce (that can be used for things other than pasta), which contains no sugar or upfs.
Upfs are just the current MN obsession to rival the massive salad and mythical chicken which feeds 20 and there's still leftovers.

I both agree and disagree at the same time.

Yes, people are often tight on time. And yes, some dishes can take ages to cook, plus, if you’re watching every penny for your gas and electricity costs, it can be tricky.

However, what I disagree with is the idea that all home-cooked meals are time-consuming or expensive. In many cases, it’s really about convenience. People often choose what’s easiest, not necessarily what’s best or most economical.

Sometimes I wonder how people manage to watch hours of TV in the evening when, as you mentioned, they come home from work, sort out the kids, and still need to eat. It makes me think that for some, convenience has become the top priority , so they can spend the rest of the evening sitting on the sofa doing absolutely nothing. And that’s fine occasionally everyone needs downtime, but when it becomes the default, it’s part of why people stop seeing cooking as worthwhile.

What people often forget is that taking a little time to cook something from scratch isn’t just cheaper it’s so much healthier. You actually know what’s going into your food, and it doesn’t take as long as many think. I don’t believe most people realise how big of a difference it makes for their health and energy levels in the long run.

Take a simple spaghetti bolognese, for example. A bag of pasta costs less than £1, add some tinned tomatoes, mince, and Italian herbs (you can buy a mixed herb blend instead of several separate jars). From that, you can make several portions, bringing the cost per serving quite low — and it doesn’t need to simmer for hours. There’s no way that buying ready-made versions os spag bowl is cheaper, especially since you’d need multiple of them To feed everyone. And for those who can plan ahead, it’s easy to make a bigger batch and freeze portions. That way, you’ve got quick, homemade meals ready to go and much healthier ones too, without all the added sugar and preservatives you find in ready meals.

Don’t get me wrong, I sometimes buy ready meals too. I’ve got a few “emergency” ones in my freezer for when life gets crazy, and I think that’s exactly what they’re for. But I wholeheartedly disagree with relying on them. When ready meals become the everyday solution, that’s when it turns into a habit that’s hard to break and honestly, it’s our health and wallets that pay the price. It’s false economy for sure.

That’s just one example off the top of my head. I’m not saying anyone should live on spaghetti bolognese 365 days a year, but I hope you get the point I’m trying to make :)

So forget about Brits- what’s your advice to your fellow Italians to help them stop growing such fat kids?

I think part of the problem is we’re on about the third generation of people who never learned to cook at school and didn’t have those skills to pass on. I’m sure it’s quite intimidating to get started if nobody has ever shown you the basics. I remember watching Jamie Oliver on telly talking to a group of women who didn’t know what ‘simmering’ meant. If you’ve never been shown, how would you know?

Because it’s literally Brit bashing?
Sadly, lots of Brit bashing is done by Brits so I don’t think your post is the ‘gotcha’ that you think.
The fact you describe the prospect of me saying something negative about another country as ‘xenophobic’ but yet you’re happy to have yet another thread bashing the U.K. is just another example of Brit bashing.

That's just total nonsense though.

Carbs, vegetables, quality oil, a bit of cheese - all relatively unleaded around with - that's far better than a huge amount of what people are eating

Supermarkets! It's the pattern.

Big supermarkets muscle in, initially offer cheap goods, good ranges etc. to force out the smaller competitors.

Then when they're established, the prices creap up, the ranges reduce and they end up full of imported or processed crap.

It's exactly what has happened in the UK over the 90s and 00s' and now the rest of Europe is seeing it.

When I started going on foreign holidays in the 80s, you bought your food from local/small shops, markets, stalls, etc. In the 00s', on our foreign holidays, we started to see the creep of smaller supermarkets, like Spar, etc. Now, there are loads of big supermarkets and you struggle to find local/small shops/stalls, etc.

It used to really "feel" different to UK when going to places like Spain or Italy in the 80s. Now you may as well be in the UK, with the only difference being the weather.

Completely agree with you OP. Leaving the EU has also meant we skip a lot of regulations so we have a lot more emulsifiers and general shit in our food. Far fewer people grow veg here too.

It’s sad as well as lazy. The only people who benefit are the supermarkets and packaged food companies.

Thays true, but nowadays if there's anything you don't understand or don't know how to do, google it and you'll find a video showing you.

Come on! We had all kinds of crap in our foods before Brexit. We had obesity and heart conditions on the rise in the 00s long before Brexit was a twinke in Farage's eye.

Food Ed in schools has been crap forever. I'm in my fifties and the only useful thing I took away from those lessons was, pastry is half fat to flour plus water. I've used that formula to make pastry out of various ingredients all my adult life.
None of my kids learned anything about cooking in school and nutrition was so science based.

AA Gill (of all people) had a great article about British food culture and how it was more decimated after the world wars than the food cultures of other countries.

Which then left it a sitting duck to be further destroyed by the convenience food culture of the 1970s.

I agree OP. Huge reliance on processed food and for many, nutrition just isn't considered an important factor to make time for.

Absolutely not true, have you seen the additives in supermarket white bread?

Generally, in my house, we have on average five cooked from scratch meals (simple meals, nothing elaborate, e.g. chicken breast and new potatoes) and two ready-meal dinners, e.g. a bought curry with our own rice, a week. DH is retired so has time to do this. I work full time so if it was just me the ratio would probably be the other way round. Eat out about once every three months. Very seldom have a takeaway as most of them upset my stomach nowadays.

Yep it's often cheaper to grab a ready meal.
We do buy cooked ham and salamis (also common in Europe) and sliced bread (not so common).
But I have to be gf and have found that stops us being too high in upfs as most things contain wheat as a bulking agent.

I also think culture is very different sliced bread that lasts a week has been common in the UK for at least 40 years compared to going to the bakery each day for bread