Do people really not know what to eat?

[WilderHawthorn]

Watching ‘what not to eat’, and the family they’ve found are just hopeless. Four small children all shovelled full of UPF junk, parents both obese, freely admit to eating crap constantly.

How adults choose to feed themselves is their choice, but to feed four small kids that much junk? It’s bordering on abuse. An apple/banana costs the same as a packet of crisps, jacket potato is one of the cheapest meals you can make, basic porridge oats and milk for breakfast, it’s not difficult to eat whole foods, so why rely on packaged things?

Freely admit I judge those who feed their children this way and truly despair over childhood obesity stats. I work full time, have 4 DC, DH works full time and I volunteer. I’m very time poor and partially disabled, I still feed my kids well and it doesn’t cost me a fortune. Taught myself to cook. There’s no excuse!

I dont get the point in making banana bread, I just end up eating more sugar and more calories, wasted eggs and flour on a sweet treat that I will struggle to portion control. Id rather freeze it for milkshakes or bin it if its past eating.

@NotMeNoNo I think that’s something that should be taught by schools, food banks, the job centre, social care whoever. That actually it isn’t a privilege to eat good, healthy, thrifty homemade food. That you can build up a store cupboard one or two ingredients / herbs / spices / bottles / tins / jars a week from Aldi / Lidl / Asda over a long period of time.

Teaching food and cooking efficiency, good use of a feeezer (we had one in our lounge diner when we lived in a tiny house, j just stuck an old table cloth over it), budgeting over a week or a month for food and taking advantage of yellow stickers / olio / leftovers really stretches the budget.

Jamie Oliver’s air fryer show was great for showing how much you can cook in one, including the banana bread.

baking stuff can be bought in the pound shop or charity shop.

I was at a parade of shops in one of the most deprived parts of my city the other day and there was a shop selling cookware for making curries and all sorts of dishes, everything was really well priced along with the spices and dry goods.

Encouraging families to make choices and showing them that their children will eat it and enjoy it is key.

Of course there are opportunity costs and sink costs for the ingredients but teaching families that that’s ok and normalising it would surely help.

FYI as someone who works at a food bank I’d say 85% of those who use one are confident cooks. They just don’t have the money or facilities to do so. Many turntheir noses up at the UPFs on offer.

The other 15% are homeless or single men generally. The former have bigger fish to fry and the latter wouldn’t accept advice if it hit them in the face.

Well I’m 30 and, while I am a good cook, most of my friends cannot or will not cook. I can tell you it’s lack of confidence and 0 idea how to cook anything.

Their parents never bothered to teach them any kitchen skills - my mum was a rare stay at home mum and so did as well as sending me to cookery school over summer as a teen. Around the 00s schools turned Food Tech into watching films about food and making pizza toast (fgs) to save on time and ingredients. And when they grew up their parents continued to cook for them (or to put things in the oven) and then they swapped to takeaways and ready meals.

My friend spent £3,500 on takeaways last year. We audited him. Mostly the same meals over and over. I’ve sent him my recipes for these meals and he doesn’t bother to try.

So the answer is - never cooking anything until your 20s. Being overwhelmed by the skills it requires (figuring out what you need, buying it, prepping it then cooking it all and it could go wrong).

A lot of adults don't like vegetables and pass this onto their kids. Even if they feed their kids veg, the kids presumably notice that the parents don't eat it or that they pull a disgust face when they do.

@HarvestMouseandGoldenCups money and facilities is an interesting point. Should food banks be partnering with supermarkets to get them to donate or putting on the lists of what’s needed basic pantry ingredients and basic kitchen equipment? If they are turning on the oven to make dinner they can be shown how to utilise all the space in their oven, if they have an air fryer how to use it to make cakes. Slow cookers are often really cheap to run and to purchase, so should councils give vouchers for basic kitchen equipment to allow them to make a range of foods?

I used to cook in a night shelter, breakfasts and dinners. Most of our clients were men and the majority east European. I’ve never made so many omelets in my life! The people would rotate across the week through seven venues and I was the cook for two. We were given a budget and then free rein on what we produced. I’d always put out some cereal and the toaster, I also offered to do bacon sandwiches, but they always wanted omelets and told me it was their favourite meal of the week. I’d do ham / cheese / mushroom and made them plenty big enough. It worked out really economical, I’d use my food processor to grate blocks of cheese and any leftover filling would be frozen.

I was met with surprise that it was actually financially viable and wanted. A lot of our clients were working in factories or going out in the cold all day, so a hot, protein full breakfast did them well.

People are being sold a lie by the food companies. I know very intelligent people who eat a lot of shit because fundamentally they can’t be arsed. My DSS eats so many takeaways….he can get away with it at the moment as he’s tall….but it’s going to catch up with him. He wastes so much money….

Being overwhelmed by the skills it requires (figuring out what you need, buying it, prepping it then cooking it all and it could go wrong).

If only there were some kind of device that could help them with all that stuff at the tip of a finger 🤔

I had a housemate at uni who positively reveled in her (apparent) lack of ability to cook. As in, claiming she didn't know that you needed to put water in the pan when cooking pasta and couldn't possibly make a basic bolognese sauce because it was all so haaard. She clearly thought it made her look all cute and ditsy ("what am I like, eh?"). And yet she was able to figure things out when booking holidays etc (ie when someone else wasn't going to do it for her).
For some people there is a genuine confidence issue but for others it is pure and utter laziness.

Recently in Miami I was shocked that a single banana was 94cents

Look… I know. I know that it’s as easy as looking it up but they won’t. Because, as I discovered, they don’t even know what cooking terminology means… if I ask them to dice the onion they’ll stare blankly. Dice, slice, sauté, reduce, knead, chop, julienne. They don’t know what those mean. So they give up because it’s taking ‘too much time and effort’ to have to google what dice means while trying to chop an onion to do the next 10 recipe steps.

Yes, with a few weeks work they’d be competent… but they don’t see the point of that much effort. Their parents didn’t bother even with those skill so why would they?

@FurForksSakegiving away kitchen equipment like air fryers won’t really help for a lot of people. Many people are living in hotels / bnbs where they’re not allowed to use anything but a kettle. They get kicked out if caught. Things like pans and baking trays etc might though for newly housed folk.

Funnily the Eastern European food bank users are some of our most foodie and competent cooks. LOTS of homepickling and preserving of anything fresh they can get their hands on.

@HarvestMouseandGoldenCups inappropriate housing of homeless and homeless families in “temporary accommodation” for months and years is an absolute scandal. The government should be putting all their efforts to ensure no families are in them longer than a week and individuals as short a time as possible.

I think we're in total agreement here but I guess the point is, it's not that they're "overwhelmed", as that implies that they're trying but struggling. They just can't be arsed and justify it to themselves with the narrative that cooking is difficult and not worth the effort (cf. the modern tendency to refer to cooking as "cooking from scratch", which implies a much more onerous job and therefore one which people couldn't possibly have time for).

I suppose that’s true. To me overwhelmed can also just mean ‘outfaced’ maybe. They’re outfaced by the prospect of the effort for what they see as little reward.

Plus they’re all addicted to fat and sugar and UPFs anyway. You’d think id said I regularly fly to the moon when they found out I bake my own bread and make my own oat cookies.

I think when you don’t see others doing it, it’s going to involve expending effort and you just don’t have any motivation for it, you don’t get it.

If we are thinking about the section of society who are living on benefits, hand to mouth, poor housing, difficult family and social situations they aren’t thinking long term. You are getting through one meal, one day, one week at a time. There isn’t necessarily the planning for the future as that’s not pressing, so thinking about your health being impacted isn’t going to be an issue until it is. And even then the dots won’t necessarily be joined for making changes or improving health as you’re now dealing with the health implications that then make it harder to cope.

We know well a family that are all massively overweight. Including the child, she’s terribly overweight. The parents both smoke. The adults have some learning differences and also massive health challenges. The health challenges for all of them would be massively improved by losing weight (back pain, leg ulcers, joint issues) and stopping smoking. But their capacity is limited, they don’t have the capacity to deal with it and don’t really want to. Their lives often feel massively challenging, in pain, in exhausting minimum wage jobs, house is falling apart, extended family all poorly. So, they turn to their comfort foods and nicotine. It makes sense to them. These are genuinely lovely people, they are community minded and engaged and really love their child. I imagine social care will try at some point. We nudge through community shared activities, but it’s limited.

Cigarettes are £15 a packet. I don’t understand how they afford it.

But if you've not been taught to do that, you don't think to do that.

My shopping is 90% fresh ingredients and I do chop stuff the majority of the time. It's cheaper and healthier. But we also always have a bag of oven chips in because some days I collect DD from nursery on the way home from work and we're both exhausted and it's much easier to throw some sausages and frozen chips into the air fryer and a tin of beans on the hob for a quick, warm meal done in 20 minutes.

There's surely a balance to be had. I buy mostly fresh/whole stuff, no ready meals at all, but do use fairly "normal" UPFs like supermarket bread, mayo, stock cubes, ketchup, sausages, the odd flavoured yoghurt... Are the health benefits of eliminating those things really significant, against the backdrop of a 90% home cooked diet? Maybe it would give me an extra year of life... eh, not too sure I'm bothered about that 😂

A lot of this is cultural. Obesity is a problem across the nation, but some communities put value on home cooked food. The people buying chicken jalfrezi in the ready meal aisle are not Indian!

Yes it's horrible but you really cant judge what makes another person tick.

I've watched the first two episodes. The people in it were likeable people who've just got into bad habits and are wanting to change that.

One thing I have noticed in my work role is that better off famillies can 'reward' their kids with trips out, holidays, experiences. Less wealthy families tend to reward with food treats as they can't afford experiences etc.

I also have met adults who have no idea of how to cook ...and have grown up in households where their parents have prioritised relationships , drink , drugs and alcohol over them.The cycle then repeats

This is fairly common in my experience

And yet British South Asians have a higher prevalence of overweight and obesity than the wider population as a whole.

Your first paragraph is about the value that some parts of society put on education, thats why experiences are valued.

I didn't say British South Asians weren't obese.

My point is UPFs are only part of the story.

If you spend "3-5 mins on prep" you get 3-5mins worth of taste, though. For it to be a really great chilli it would take much more time because you'd sweat the onions in the spices and brown the mince etc.

This isn't directly related to UPFs, I know, but if I'm going to spend just a few minutes on dinner I'd rather it was a proper convenience food like a fully loaded pizza than a slightly sad chilli that used actual ingredients I could have put in something tastier.