Where Did We Go Wrong?

Time, or lack of it, is probably the reason most people give for not cooking, but less than 40 years ago practically everyone cooked at least one proper meal from scratch every day, even though very few people owned a fridge, let alone all the other labour-saving devices we take for granted today. Maybe we do have more commitments in some areas of our lives than previous generations, but when it comes to food, not only do we have a much greater variety to choose from, we also have 24-hour supermarkets, internet shopping, home deliveries, endless cookery programmes on TV, recipe books galore and microwave ovens that sell for smaller sums of money than you’d spend on a family meal in a fast food outlet.

To hear some people talk you’d think no one had ever been busy until about 1985, but no matter where you live or what your circumstances are, the truth is you can put a balanced meal together in less time that it takes to dial up a pizza and wait for it to be delivered (cold, usually) to your door. Nobody should have to rely on takeaways and ready meals, let alone feed them to their children, on a regular basis.

If recent reports are to be believed, there must be more cookery books gathering dust in designer kitchens in this country than there are people who actually cook anything. But having said that, it’s simply not true that hardly anybody cooks from scratch either; lots of people combine a career with parenthood and still manage to produce decent food every day.

So apart from the old argument about having no time, what, exactly, is putting people off? Are they really too busy and important to roll their sleeves up and make a simple meal – or are they just lazy? Perhaps they don’t care about the food they eat or they don’t know where to start. Can there be anyone who doesn’t realise how much better proper home-cooked food tastes than the mass-produced, cook-chill alternative? And that by preparing your food at home, your worst nightmares about what might have got into it by mistake – never mind what some people deliberately do to the food in factories for their own amusement – don’t come into it? (Everyone’s heard stories, and you must wonder sometimes, even if you’ve never had a bad experience yourself.)

Some of the blame must surely go to the manufacturers of convenience foods for making us believe that what they produce – so beautifully packaged and presented and cleverly advertised – is good food, and that by eating it we’re making our lives easier. I bet there are hundreds of thousands of people who don’t realise they could make far better shepherd’s pie or lasagne themselves, just by following a very simple recipe – and why would they? So seductive are some of the TV commercials, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a privilege to be allowed inside the store to spend your money in the first place.

But make no mistake, no one’s doing you any favours, least of all the major stores with their gorgeous displays, catchy slogans and phoney ‘two for the price of one’ deals. Not long ago I tried a ‘cod goujon’ from one of our biggest and best-loved stores at a friend’s house. Biting into it I was horrified to discover it wasn’t even a proper fish fillet, but a mishmash of whatever goes into the cheapest, low grade fish fingers. The only difference being that this ‘goujon’ wasn’t shaped like a regular fish finger, presumably to give the impression that it was a superior product. Maybe the manufacturer wasn’t committing any breach of the law (because the ingredients would have been hidden away in tiny writing on the packaging) but people in a hurry tend to grab whatever looks good and place their trust in the brand name, without stopping to study the small print, or even really knowing what they’re looking for.

This isn’t just food, this is inferior food; cynically produced and sold to a gullible public by unscrupulous businessmen. All they have to do is apply the current buzz words to everything, then sit back and wait for us to fall for it. I’m thinking of the ‘organic’ mash I came across in the same store recently, which costs more than a 10 lb sack of potatoes from a greengrocer. So what if it was ‘organic’? I’d rather cook a few potatoes myself than spend £2 on one portion of mashed potatoes, which, looking at the label, is actually 82 per cent potato and 10 per cent fat. And, on the evidence of a friend who’s actually eaten the organic mash, ‘it doesn’t really taste right’, so no surprises there.

The funny thing about convenience food – at least it would be funny, if we weren’t the fattest nation in Europe and getting bigger all the time – is it’s not even that convenient. Once you’ve removed the packaging, read the instructions, pierced the film lid (or not), waited, taken the tray out halfway through the cooking time to stir the food, waited again, let it stand for two minutes, scalded yourself on the steam, searched in vain for a piece of meat amongst the gunk, wolfed the lot in four minutes flat and wondered what else there is to eat because you’re still hungry, it might occur to you that the little bit of effort you saved by not cooking your own dinner wasn’t really justified by the end result. And the same can be said about so-called fast food, as anyone who has ever been served a burger at the counter in a fast food restaurant, then waited at the table (dirty, usually) for the fries to be brought over ten minutes later, will know.

The other food myth that often gets repeated is that the unhealthiest foods are necessarily the least expensive, and that some people, especially families on very low incomes, only resort to eating them because they have no choice. But this is nonsense. A week’s worth of good quality meat and fish with lots of potatoes, rice, pasta, vegetables, fruit and other whole foods costs no more than the same amount of cheap chicken, burgers, pies, reconstituted potatoes, instant microwave meals and fizzy drinks.

I know cooking isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, and some people through no fault of their own are never going to enjoy it, which is why this book isn’t about learning to cook complicated meals that take hours to prepare and only minutes for your kids to reject. You don’t have to like cooking; you don’t have to be a great cook, or even a particularly good one. You don’t have to go shopping more often than you want to, or spend more money than you can afford. There’s nothing here that you can’t buy from any of the big supermarkets – assuming that’s where you do your shopping because, like me, you’re not lucky enough to have anything better where you live – and no expensive ingredients with unfamiliar names. Some of the recipes can be thrown together in minutes and a few don’t involve any cooking at all. They all contain a certain amount of fat, sugar and salt, but nowhere near as much as you’d find in commercially prepared food – and at least the nutrients are there as well.

There seems to be a list of so-called super foods for everything and everybody these days; pregnancy, the menopause... I even came across a series of articles in one parenting magazine under what I thought was the very bad taste headline: ‘Cancer-proof Your Kids’. One minute I’m reading about how I should be eating more purple food; the next week it’s green, then orange and yellow. There’s The Bikini Diet, The Sunset Beach Diet, The GMI Diet, The F-Plan Diet, low-fat-high-carb diets, high-fat-low-carb diets, and everything in between. Are we meant to be eating more, or less dairy right now? Is wheat an excellent source of fibre and slow-release carbohydrates, good for sustaining our energy levels – or a totally unnecessary food that many people have some kind of intolerance to? What should we be eating to be sure we’re getting enough zinc? Is it a magnesium or potassium deficiency that causes sugar cravings? Sometimes, when you only want to know what is good for you, rather than why, it’s too much information.

And yet, despite all this food knowledge, there are still people who think we need sugar for energy (not necessarily; we get energy from all our food), that diet colas are better than those containing sugar when they’re potentially worse (because of the chemicals in artificial sweeteners), or who, when asked to name a typical English food say ‘quiche’. I recently read that thousands of primary school children don’t know where eggs come from, which is probably not surprising if it’s also true – as yet another recent survey claims – that one-fifth of adults don’t know which animals sausages and bacon come from, or what the main ingredient of yoghurt is. I know of a very middle-class child with professional parents who didn’t recognise a potato, and I even met one mum who thought the dinky little bits of carrot in a single frozen vegetarian burger amounted to a portion of vegetables. And it’s strange that we can be so squeamish about fresh raw meat and offal when we happily eat far more unsavoury bits of the animal (eyeballs, genitals, you name it) in burgers, kebabs and sausages.

The latest thing is for food to be colour coded with green spots for the healthier options and red for, presumably, foods which contain hydrogenated fats and unacceptably high levels of salt and sugar, but it goes without saying that if you stick to unprepared whole foods most of the time and give the ready meals a wide berth, colour coding is something you won’t need to worry about.

When I was a child growing up in the 1960s and 70s, a healthy meal was meat and three veg followed by a fruit pudding; a takeaway meant the occasional trip to the fish and chip shop, and for something continental there was Batchelor’s Savoury Rice and Vesta Curry. Now we can laugh, but people worried a lot less about food in those days; no one obsessed about their five portions a day, far more people stayed effortlessly slim, women apparently had smaller waistlines, obesity and obesity-related diseases were a lot less common, if not virtually unheard of, and a seriously overweight child was rarer than a white Christmas.

Much has been made in the past about the history of our unhealthy British diet, but it doesn’t seem to me to have been too bad for what was, traditionally, a skinny population inhabiting a chilly little island off the North Sea. We may have had something to learn about the way we cooked our vegetables (like how to steam instead of boiling them to death), but what’s wrong with potatoes, puddings and pies, as long as you’re eating your greens? For my money, a proper home-cooked meal – with or without chips – is worth a dozen fast food hits that leave you with nothing but a craving for something sweet and a raging thirst.

Miracle foods come and go, but whether the current flavour of the month is wheat grass, alfalfa sprouts or Goji berries, the secret of feeding good food to your family without chaining yourself to the kitchen, depriving your children of the things they like to eat and driving yourself round the bend is that really, there is no secret. The answer was here all along.