Take a peek inside most people’s supermarket carts, kitchen cupboards and iceboxes these days and more than likely you will see endless varieties of convenience foods. With time being such a precious commodity and lifestyles being so frenetic, perhaps in some ways it is not entirely surprising that we resort to prepared foodstuffs and ready meals. When you consider just how short of cash many people are as a result of this latest economic recession, it might be expected that more of us would have reverted to cheaper and healthier ways of eating.
In most cases, fresh fruits and vegetables are significantly cheaper than tinned or frozen alternatives, they take only minutes to prepare and they contain much more goodness, and yet many people still plump for the latter. A huge range of delicious and incredibly cheap dishes can be created from scratch using pasta or rice, but all too often we are tempted by the ready-cooked versions, which cost twice as much.
Although the more expensive convenience foods might at first appear to be the time-savers, by cooking homemade meals in batches and freezing them, there is no reason why we cannot eat more healthily without spending endless hours in the kitchen or so much of our hard-earned cash.
[Article first appeared in December 2010 issue of Family Times.]