Give me a break, you don’t have to be a family with a stay at home mom (or dad) to enjoy home made meals, and I think the assumption is kind of funny from someone who claims to spend 8-10 hours a day at the gym.:rolleyes:
The problem, as has been mentioned, is that people are lazy and unhealthy foods tend to be very tasty/pleasurable to eat. So taking the time to make a meal (easy to do in under an hour) isn’t as fun or easy as picking up the phone and calling for pizza with your ass planted in front of the TV. Or, hubby/dad thinks the kitchen is for women and mom/wife (who also probably works 40+ hours a week) gets stuck with all the cooking every day, gets burnt out, and goes for the easy/less healthy stuff.
Michael Pollen was interviewed on NPR and few weeks ago about the increasing popularity of cooking shows and he thought that it was pretty ironic that as more people watched cooking shows,even less were actually spending time in an actual kitchen.
I’m sorry if I sounded defensive but I get a little weary of convenience being the primary ‘good’ when it comes to food. Even if you have a very limited budget, most of the farmers I know will try and help you if you’re a market regular. I’ve given away chicken to folks that have helped me set up my booth. If you show up at the very end, folks normally have slightly bruised veggies that they sell on the cheap or even give away.
A decent meal doesn’t require hours over a stove either. It’s not as if a roasting chicken requires your undivided attention for an hour. Throw it in, flip it once and go do some other chore. Recycle the same chicken into quick wraps the next night or chicken salad and you have the basis of two quick meals. I work 7 days a week and a short day is about 11 hours and I can still come up with something that doesn’t come out of a can or box most of the time.
Pollen also quoted an anthropologist who believes the beginning our journey towards modern civilization came not with the discovery of fire but with the discovery of cooking. Before homo sapiens learned to throw meat on the pit and stew grains, we spent much of our caloric energy just digesting the raw materials in our diets. We had big bellies and small brains.
Personally, with the advent of junk ‘food’ and processed ‘food’, I’m beginning to conclude that we are now moving back in that direction.
Food is so much more than just ingesting the calories necessary to function. It is a cornerstone who we are as people and what we value. It’s how we mark our celebrations and share our tragedies together. Not surprisingly, numerous studies show that children whose families share an evening meal consistently achieve higher grades. And I suspect their dinners didn’t come out of a bucket or Styrofoam container.
I’m a little surprised that your farmer’s market doesn’t have any meat producers.
Here’s a link to the one I sell at every week. The market also has pork and beef and bison and lamb for sell. http://www.sunsetvalleyfarmersmarket.org/
People don’t know how to cook from basic raw ingredients. That’s part of the problem. They don’t know how to use various techniques to balance time/effort/energy. Cooking becomes something one does for a special occasion rather than a daily part of the routine.
I’ve been working 9-10 hour days at a physically demanding job, and having to feed two on about $25 per person per week. I will admit, finally figuring out how to cook rice and noodles in the microwave has been a big help, but really, 3-4 hours of chopping and cooking on a weekend afternoon yields soup, stew, tuna salad, lettuce salad, raw vegee trays for snacking, prep for stir fries, and now tortillas (a new addition to my repertoire). Some of it is frozen, some of it will keep for several days, and when I get home it’s pop soup or stew in the microwave or pull out ingredients for a stir fry or for tacos/burritoes and I have a healthy dinner for two in under 20 minutes with minimal effort after a hard day of manual labor. Some of it gets “recycled” into leftovers or new meals. So… in 3-4 hours I do the bulk of food preparation for an entire week. That’s less than an hour a day on average. I used to bake bread, but that does require some uninterrupted time (I won’t leave bread unattended, though I will do things like pay bills or deal with paperwork while waiting for it to rise or bake) and right now I am hitting the “bread thrift store” for convenience sake. Still eating 100% whole wheat bread (I miss my homemade rye, though). But I’m only able to do this because I have had a basic education in basic cooking that goes beyond “open box, follow instructions on back”. That, and I have a working stove, oven, and microwave along with a couple of good knives and an assortment of pots, pans, and other cooking vessels.
So is it possible to set up and run a kitchen on a very low budget? Yes. But only if you know how to do it. Much of what supplies kitchen equipment and food is geared to making people spend money, not maximizing their efficiency in regards to time, money, and effort. This includes cooking shows, which all too frequently feature gadgets, gizmos, or expensive ingredients. If you didn’t grow up with a parent or two that cooked I can well imagine a person being at a loss for how to do this efficiently. It becomes much easier in the short term to rely on convenience foods than to make the effort to learn a new skill like cooking from scratch.