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)

I live in Spain and things have really changed here over the last 10 years in terms of processed food and ready meals. 10 years ago pretty much the only ready meals available were frozen/chilled pizzas, tortillas and lasagne/cannelloni. You couldn't even get things like fresh hummus or coleslaw type mayonnaise-heavy salads. There has been an explosion in convenience foods here and I have to say a simultaneous noticeable increase in obesity rates. Still not such a huge range and quantity as the UK and not such high levels of obesity but it's catching up!

Greece. Have struggled on the mainland and the islands to buy ready meals when we couldn’t go out in the evenings. Most frozen food is usually spinach or cheese pies, or bougatsa.

I grew up eating these meals regularly because my mum was working and very much a single parent (no regular shared custody). My eating habits have changed as an adult and now I make all my sauces from scratch, batch cook, plan varied meals and carefully choose ingredients.

The biggest difference in my life now is I have the luxury of time and money. I can sit on a Monday evening looking at recipes and meal planning, I can buy whatever ingredients I want and we can afford a house big enough to have a chest freezer with a garden that I grow vegetables in.

If you don’t have time or money, it’s much harder to eat well in the UK.

I don't disagree; I've never claimed that it was purely an income issue. It is absolutely also about food culture/education/mindset.
I think it's somewhat generational as well; again, I agree that in some times and places people with lower income/less education etc do or did know how to cook cheap nutritious meals from scratch, out of necessity. I’m 50 and I would say that, in the UK, people of my grandparents’ generation were (broadly speaking) the last to fit this category.
If you weren't brought up watching people cook/being taught to, of course you won't know how to make pulses or cheap meat taste good and fill up your household.

Yes, it is a food culture thing, not an income thing. Or a time thing.

And I don't know why the British are so very touchy and defensive about it. It's annoying, you cannot have a proper discussion about it.

Instead of getting annoyed with other posters, why aren't people annoyed with the horrible food industries pushing junk down our throats by any possible means?

Stressed, overwhelmed people can't make effective decisions, so the supermarkets like to stress and overwhelm us.

Why take the piss out people eating good home cooked food? Why is that laughable? I don't understand.

Batch cooking saves a lot of time and effort if you have a freezer.

Why the scorn for batch-cooking - it saves time and money.

I live alone and like to cook and eat well - if I don't have family or friends visiting I still want to eat something tasty and interesting such as a lamb & prune tagine. I bought yellow-stickered lamb in M&S the other day had one portion of the tagine and put three in the freezer.

Last week I got a large organic chicken reduced from £20 to £12 - it was roasted with various vegetables, portioned and put in the freezer.

The quality of these meals at around £4 per portion far surpasses anything I could buy ready-made and they're without any preservatives, palm oil, fillers, binders etc.

This is a really privileged and abilist take though isn't it?
You seem to be blaming people for not cooking from scratch or suggesting ready meals shouldn't be as available.
Fact of the matter is some people need ready meals because of their lives.
If they are disabled.. if they are living in poverty and don't have cooking facilities.. if they work ridiculous shift hours and don't have the time or energy to cook from scratch.
I rely on ready meals a lot as a nightshift worker. I do not have access to an oven on my 12 hour shifts. I am eating at unusual times which means I'm cooking for myself alone alot. I do my best to choose healthier options but I do rely on pre cooked food a lot. I'm not going to be able to sit and chop vegetables and roast meat.
You want to change this it's about tackling poverty.. tackling social care issues.. tackling the cost of living and working conditions.
It's not about shaming people or removing a food source which would make their lives harder and more expensive.

So again what’s your theory on why it’s also becoming more of an issue in Italy, Greece and Spain?

Interestingly though, Greece is really obese. One of the most obese countries in the world, iirc

A Tesco finest mac and cheese with a side of frozen peas is no less nutritious, in fact the peas would probably be more so.
It's just food snobbery and something else to hit stressed out families with.
Sometimes I cook from scratch, sometimes I fancy a ready made fish pie. It's food.

I grew up with a meat and two veg meals and that is mainly what I have done with my children. You are right it doesn’t have to be complicated and it can be simplified. Our veg is mainly frozen because I have one child that likes and one doesn’t so worry about food waste. May not be the best but better than none. I also do very simple meals jacket potatoes with a filling. It’s like with everything nowadays we have too much choice so often forget the basics.

I'm so confused by the tomato sauce debate herem..surely a tin of chopped tomatoes, reduced a bit (for however long you have) and some garlic and/or herbs is a better sauce than dolmio at a fraction of the cost? Sure, it's nice to make a fancy version with fresh lovely tomatoes and slow roast them but that's a different thing.

I have a toddler and both us parents work full time. I'm completely British and disorganised but we somehow manage not to eat much processed food. If we haven't managed to cook a proper meal then things like omelettes, crudite type vegetables, toast, bagged rocket, stir fries etc are on the menu. Or grab a freezer meal which would be something we froze when we had leftovers. I always have soup in the freezer so soup and a sandwich is fine.

We are not upf free but for example today there was nothing in for my lunch and I'm working from home, so I made noodles, eggs and frozen peas, mixed in some chilli sauce (probably UPF but mainly fermented black beans, chilli and oil, plus it was only a teaspoon). Not the height of culinary achievement or a particularly healthy, but it was nice, filling, cheap, and I managed to get a vegetable in there! It took maybe 7 minutes max to cook.

As for the diet of other toddlers ...I just find it sad. I will literally just take a hunk of cheese and an apple out with us if I haven't got anything good in for him to snack on and he's happy with that, yet everyone I know brings expensive, processed crap from the "baby food" section because they don't have time. I think in this case it's a confidence thing - marketing tells you this is a proper healthy food for your child, whereas you look at what I pack and think that's a bit rubbish 🤣 but it's all real food so I'm happier with that.

We shouldn't be taking the piss out of anybody. But like most things the food on our plate has become another source of tribalism.

M&S ready meals are not bought by people on the poverty line, are they? And people have busy lives and jobs/work long shifts in other parts of the world too, it is not a UK thing!

See I think that's totally nonsense. Far more additives, preservatives, bad fats, higher sugar. But you believe that if you want.

I was at secondary school from 1985 - 1990 and that doesn't sound like our curriculum. It was called 'Home Economics' - it included two terms of cookery and one term of needlework per year, but no 'marketing'. The cookery terms were focused on cooking, with some elements of food hygiene and nutrition. There was a mixture of food you'd class as healthy (e.g. chicken casserole) and not (e.g. flaky pastry, which we did over two weeks to make sausage rolls). I didn't continue it to GCSE level but we had three years of Home Economics in that format.

I'm going to find an Italian forum and make a thread about how low their bar is for excellent food.

I think it depends on your budget, where you shop and your social circle.

absolutely - it's not difficult to read a label really!

Quite. I was in Intermarché in rural france this morning. Along with the well dressed man selecting a large bag of oysters, there were many people in the processed meat aisle.

Confit duck is delicious but presumably if you can it, it has to have stabilisers etc so is processed.

Yeah it's true. Sometimes there can be a lot of salt in ready meals and some can be very calorie dense so these are things to watch out for. But the absolute demonization of ready meals does nothing to tackle the obesity crisis at all. Realistically if you watch your macros then having some convenience food in your diet will not harm you at all. I really think it puts people off even attempting to be healthy when there's such snobbery around food
People on here pretending frozen veg is some kind of evil.. or that cooking the same food in the microwave not the oven, somehow strips it of all nutritional value

Sure, do what you like. Italy is famous for having a bad food culture, isn't it? And what do you mean by low bar? If by low bar you mean simple and fresh then yes, absolutely. And I am sorry for you if you cannot see how that would make a delicious meal.

I'm afraid that sounds the very opposite of 'delicious' to me. I detest pasta.

Please keep this thread going OP, you get more supercilious with every post.