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Are 'convenience foods' really convenient?

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Replies

  • jjpptt2
    jjpptt2 Posts: 5,650 Member
    mbaker566 wrote: »
    jjpptt2 wrote: »
    TonyB0588 wrote: »
    Lounmoun wrote: »
    ...............

    I think historically when everyone cooked from scratch they often cooked larger amounts that would last several meals and limited menus instead of having something different every day like people expect these days.



    No. Historically, my parents both came from families where they ate specific foods on specific days. They would never have the "Tuesday" meal on a Thursday or Friday. And Sunday was always something more special than the other days. Not sure they had leftovers. Seems like everything was measured to fit the number of persons in the family.

    And you're certain that your family is an adequate representation of what the majority of families did "historically"?

    are you sure it isn't?

    my family was and is the same. extended and immediate. my friend's family were too. my inlaws too

    No, I'm not... which is why I didn't post in support or opposition of the claim being made. My point was simply that your n=1 (or in this case, n=50) doesn't disprove the statement. Your experience is what it is... but that' doesn't mean it's necessarily representative of the norm/majority.
  • aokoye
    aokoye Posts: 3,495 Member
    So I read about half of the posts before deciding to respond. In terms of money I can't really get behind the idea that convenience foods are cheaper. Flour, dried beans, canned tomatoes, vegetable oil, various other things that I would consider staples? Those can be bought very inexpensively. If you have enough freezer space then buying meat on sale is also a way to cut down on cost (and if you really have enough space, buying a side of an animal would be even cheaper per pound).

    Time wise it's really going to depend on what you're making. If I'm short on time I can easily whip out a good but not amazing pasta sauce in 20 min using canned tomatoes, fresh garlic, various dried herbs and spices (which are pantry staples for me), and potentially some sort of meat if I have it on hand. That is cheaper than buying canned tomato sauce or some sort of frozen pasta thing. Thai curry is another meal that comes together very quickly if you have good thai curry paste. On the other hand, making tamales from scratch takes a lot of time. It's totally worth it to me but it takes a lot of time. That said, when I make tamales I also freeze most of them and, again, it is cheaper for me to make them than it is to buy frozen or fresh tamales from somewhere/someone else.

    The pizza example is interesting because as long as you're able to make the dough in advance and let it rise overnight (rising time is not active cooking time) it really shouldn't take 20 minutes depending on what you're topping it with. I know for some people are truly short for time frozen food will potentially be quicker in a lot of ways (clean up being a big one), but I have no way of knowing if that's true for the majority of people who buy convenience food.

    I will say though that I actually really like cooking. I do only cook for myself buy I tend to make 2-4 portions and eat the rest for leftovers. I do buy frozen corn, peas, and various types of berries (if I've run out of whatever berries I frozen over the summer). That's partially an issue of cost and also of freshness (something frozen shortly after it's been harvested in season vs something that has been sitting in the store that was grown totally out of season). I also will buy frozen duck because of the cost, though fresh tastes better. Grocery shopping also isn't something that takes a particularly long time for me nor does making a grocery list. That's especially true if I organize the list by section (all of the meats are together, all of the produce is together, all of the canned goods, etc).

    I can't really think of any prepared food that tastes better out of the freezer section than what I can make from scratch. That has more to do with the quality of food in the freezer section than my own cooking skills. Again though, I like cooking and I like making food that tastes good.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    mbaker566 wrote: »
    jjpptt2 wrote: »
    TonyB0588 wrote: »
    Lounmoun wrote: »
    ...............

    I think historically when everyone cooked from scratch they often cooked larger amounts that would last several meals and limited menus instead of having something different every day like people expect these days.



    No. Historically, my parents both came from families where they ate specific foods on specific days. They would never have the "Tuesday" meal on a Thursday or Friday. And Sunday was always something more special than the other days. Not sure they had leftovers. Seems like everything was measured to fit the number of persons in the family.

    And you're certain that your family is an adequate representation of what the majority of families did "historically"?

    are you sure it isn't?

    my family was and is the same. extended and immediate. my friend's family were too. my inlaws too

    As jjpptt2 said, we'd neither something more than everyone's anecdotal experience.

    But all those people had special meals they ate on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., every single week? You couldn't have pot roast on Tuesday if it was the Wednesday meal or pork chops on Monday if it was supposed to be for Thursday? My experience is the opposite (again, why anecdote is not a good basis for making claims about what the majority of families did).
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    edited April 2018
    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    mbaker566 wrote: »
    jjpptt2 wrote: »
    TonyB0588 wrote: »
    Lounmoun wrote: »
    ...............

    I think historically when everyone cooked from scratch they often cooked larger amounts that would last several meals and limited menus instead of having something different every day like people expect these days.



    No. Historically, my parents both came from families where they ate specific foods on specific days. They would never have the "Tuesday" meal on a Thursday or Friday. And Sunday was always something more special than the other days. Not sure they had leftovers. Seems like everything was measured to fit the number of persons in the family.

    And you're certain that your family is an adequate representation of what the majority of families did "historically"?

    are you sure it isn't?

    my family was and is the same. extended and immediate. my friend's family were too. my inlaws too

    As jjpptt2 said, we'd neither something more than everyone's anecdotal experience.

    But all those people had special meals they ate on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., every single week? You couldn't have pot roast on Tuesday if it was the Wednesday meal or pork chops on Monday if it was supposed to be for Thursday? My experience is the opposite (again, why anecdote is not a good basis for making claims about what the majority of families did).

    I remember my mom had a rough meal schedule (there were eight of us so she needed all the planning help she could get). So we'd generally have, say, fried rice on Tuesday. But if there was an activity or a sale on something else or she was out of something, she had no problems switching things around. It was a loose guide, nothing more.

    (I know you said we needed more than anecdotes, but couldn't resist chiming in).

    That makes more sense to me. My mom had a rotation, but it wasn't only 6 meals, and wasn't tied to any day of the week, and she'd vary based on what was in season, sales, if my dad went fishing or someone gave us fish (not uncommon), so on.

    Of course, my mom also used some convenience foods and we had leftovers, although probably not as often as I now do, as I plan that in to make it easier for myself.

    My mom worked full-time and hated cooking, although I didn't know that she did until later. She and my dad went hardcore into convenience options once she didn't feel like she shouldn't use them to feed her family (and because there are better options available now), and then when she was sick and less mobile my dad used them a lot since he liked cooking when it was a hobby but not when he essentially had to do it daily.

    By convenience foods I don't mean fully made freezer meals, but basically relying on convenience products mixed with whole foods. She did some of that (canned soups, dried spaghetti, etc.) when I was a kid, but used many more in more recent years.
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    edited April 2018
    We've never had a meal schedule. We still cook most of our meals and we still don't have a meal schedule. It must be a cultural thing in some places. Here the person who cooks just looks at what's available and decides what today's meal is then buys what's needed, or if someone asks for something specific we buy things needed for that. Produce stores are at every corner here, so planning is rarely needed. We usually cook a main meal that lasts for 2-3 days.

    I remember when we visited my grandparents for a couple of months every year, they didn't have a meal schedule either. They live in a village and everything is made from scratch, still churn their own butter, harvest their own produce, and slaughter their own animals. We ate what my grandmother chose to prepare - there was no schedule to it. When it was a larger animal, we ate the few dishes prepared from that animal for a while and sold the rest at the market (you could rent stalls). We went to the market once a week and sold whatever was in excess that week, mostly dairy because we had great cows, then bought whatever we didn't have much of and was cheap. Basically just going by what was available and in season.

    It's probably one of the reasons why meal planning didn't feel natural to me as a way to manage my calories and why I didn't take to it like many would. I'm used to cooking/eating based on what I feel like eating and what is available.

    So that's my n=2: no meal schedule in 2 different cultures and two different places (city and village) in my own family.
  • HoneyBadger302
    HoneyBadger302 Posts: 1,981 Member
    As with most things, IMO, it depends.

    Oftentimes, I could prepare something similar and it would cook in about the same time as some pre-packaged meals, but there are many other factors for me.
    #1: Planning and shopping. Sorry, there's a big difference there. It's a hell of a lot easier to grab a jar of pasta sauce than it is to get all the ingredients to make my own. I live with roommates with limited storage, so I can't keep a lot of non-perishables on hand.

    #2: Clean up from prep. Having to cut, measure, scoop, etc means more dirty dishes. This means more work. Perhaps multiple pans when a packaged food would take one. This is actually one of the things I hate the most about cooking!

    #3: Ease. It may not take a LOT of time to think through a meal plan, but there's a lot less thought when grabbing something and just throwing it on. Grabbing one or two things, bam, done, rather than grabbing more things. Plus, most packaged foods are one and done, coming from skratch I'm more likely to need to put things back/into other containers for future use as they are seldom single-meal sizes.

    Yes, it's all "little stuff" but it's little stuff that adds up. When you have a grand total of 2 hours/day for cooking, eating dinner, errands, and any possibility of relaxing, 2 minutes here and 5 minutes there can add up pretty darn quick.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    I'll add to the conversation. Yes, strictly speaking convenience foods probably ARE more convenient than homemade - but I don't think real life is that simple or black and white. For example, I am sometimes amused at frozen microwave dinners that have potato in them. They microwave in 6-7 minutes - the same time it takes to cook a raw potato from the bin.

    I generally agree with your post, but I found this amusing. I also consider potato a really convenient thing to cook, but no way does it take me anything like 6-7 minutes. It takes longer than that to heat up the oven (I tend to chop while that's happening), and then they cook quite a bit longer. If you'd said asparagus or green beans or something, I would have agreed.
    "Instant" rice is another example. From my memory there was maybe a 1-2 minute time saving for the "instant" version. Those are extreme examples though...

    The best "convenience" thing I have is my rice cooker for rice and oats. Takes a while, but totally fool-proof and I can do other things while it cooks.
    Much of the convenience question depends on if they like to cook, how inconvenient shopping may be, and what stage of life they are currently in.

    Yes -- in my 20s I rarely cooked (other than convenience). Cooking would be something like a bagged salad that I might add some chicken I'd cook to, or pasta I'd add a premade sauce plus some veg to, or a packaged rice and beans I'd add some veg and maybe some feta cheese to.

    Those WERE convenient for me, and way less effort than trying to decide what I wanted, figuring out how to make it, getting the ingredients (which would require a shopping trip and getting lots of staples I didn't have and too much of everything), and stuff like that. No wonder my normal rice and beans seemed more convenient (and at least it was a change from ordering delivery).

    When I decided to learn to cook (and not just find and follow a recipe -- something harder when you couldn't just google), it soon became way more convenient to cook and I soon realized I could cook something I enjoyed as much as anything I could buy, even without freaking out about following a recipe perfectly. I started to do a lot of pasta with homemade sauce, and also a variety of easy dinners (roast some chicken and potatoes and have cauliflower and green beans on the side). The more I cooked, the more I had ingredients on hand and started just winging what to do with them to use them up. It became convenient. It's still not ALWAYS convenient -- if you are exhausted and get home at 10 pm, sometimes you just want to be able to reheat something -- but even there habitual cooking can make that easy, as I often have something on hand.
  • garystrickland357
    garystrickland357 Posts: 598 Member
    @lemurcat12 I was comparing the time it takes to microwave a raw potato vs a microwave dinner with potato.
  • aokoye
    aokoye Posts: 3,495 Member
    If you like to cook and are a skilled cook, then convenience may be relative in several ways. For example, it pains me to watch some people do something like dice an onion. It takes them seemingly forever because they have poor knife skills - I can dice one in a fraction of the time.
    Agreed. I also think one's ability and/or experience in cooking can really dictate things like having a sense of timing in the kitchen. Someone above mentioned using minute rice with their stir-fry. In my head I thought, "or you could just cook a number of different types of white rice in a pot or a rice cooker at the same time."

    This evening I made roasted potatoes, asparagus, and trout. In all it took around 40 minutes and that's in part because I boiled the potatoes before cutting roasting them. Had I used new potatoes it would have been faster. That said while the potatoes boiled the asparagus was cut and the trout seasoned. Once the potatoes were boiled and cut, those too got seasoned and all of it went in the oven for 25 min.
  • aokoye
    aokoye Posts: 3,495 Member
    I have been eating fast food and what used to be called "TV dinners" since I was a latchkey kid back in the day and they are still a significant part of my diet. Back then my parents worked a lot and didn't have the luxury of spending hours a week cooking meals from scratch for us 7 days a week. Today it is the same theory - both adults work full time, I exercise at lunch and eat microwaved food at my desk almost every day, and most evenings we have a very narrow window of opportunity to eat between getting out of work/school and getting kids to event destinations nearly every weekday.

    The good news is that "convenience food" has evolved and there are higher quality options available than when I was a kid

    See my mother's version of that was, "make a grocery list, I'll buy the food, you cook it while I'm at work". I personally don't think this was a good idea for a number of reasons. There were also probably ways that she could have done things differently as to not put the burdon of cooking the vast majority of my meals on me, but such is life. It meant that I learned how to cook but there were pretty major risks (how I didn't start a kitchen fire... somehow I only gave myself food poisoning once) as well as ill effects in the long run.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,925 Member
    Okay. If dinner=frozen garlic and dried rosemary sauteed in olive oil, to which one can drained diced tomatoes and one can drained chickpeas are added, then tossed with dried pasta (after it's been boiled), is that scratch or convenience? I say both! (And Hubby said, "Delicious!")

    I would call that from semi scratch.

    using some pre prepared ingredients to make your own meal.

    It isnt a TV dinner level convenience food, it obviously isnt take away and it isnt fully from scratch.

    Most of my home cooked meals are from semi scratch -some being more toward the fully scratch end and some more toward the semi end

    Like today - mince curry.

    Meat bought already minced (what you call ground beef, I think) fresh onion diced myself - brown those in pan, then add tin tomatoes, cup or so of frozen diced veggies, pre made curry paste. Let simmer for about 20 minutes.
    Use that 20 minutes to cook rice in rice cooker to have with it.

  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
    Okay. If dinner=frozen garlic and dried rosemary sauteed in olive oil, to which one can drained diced tomatoes and one can drained chickpeas are added, then tossed with dried pasta (after it's been boiled), is that scratch or convenience? I say both! (And Hubby said, "Delicious!")

    I personally consider canned tomatoes and canned beans to be convenience foods (ones in frequent use in my kitchen, I'll add).
  • jjpptt2
    jjpptt2 Posts: 5,650 Member
    Okay. If dinner=frozen garlic and dried rosemary sauteed in olive oil, to which one can drained diced tomatoes and one can drained chickpeas are added, then tossed with dried pasta (after it's been boiled), is that scratch or convenience? I say both! (And Hubby said, "Delicious!")

    I personally consider canned tomatoes and canned beans to be convenience foods (ones in frequent use in my kitchen, I'll add).

    That's funny... another example of "it's all relative".

    Anything that isn't set it and forget it (either in the oven or in the microwave) I view as cooking and not what I call convenience foods. That includes dry pasta with jarred/canned sauce.
  • VUA21
    VUA21 Posts: 2,072 Member
    Depends on what you see as "convenient" foods. Premade pasta? Personally, I often cook for one. Making pasta from scratch isn't very time effective, nor budget friendly. I use a lot of pre-made foods and ingredients. I know how to make my own tomato sauce, I just don't have the time nor space to make it practical for me.
  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
    I’m in the “it depends” camp. My great grandmother was a professional cook so when she was visiting it was all from scratch. Even so it was a mixed bag for my father who still shudders at the thought of stuffed/baked winter squash.

    I am convinced that a family suffragette eliminated alcohol in the traditional family Christmas cake recipe.

    My mother was not a natural cook and even in the seventies she depended on packaged spaghetti seasonings. That spaghetti was one of her signature Sunday dinners. Another was a sad grey stew as she hadn’t grasped the concept of “browning”.

    I like to think I recovered some lost art, absorbing myself in cook books like Fanny Farmer and the Joy of cooking.

    There are some convenience foods that we simply cannot make as easily or as cheaply as industry. Take old cheese for instance. If we had to depend on the family cow for our cheesemaking, it could take years of curing to match what we pick up at the deli. Industry can take advantage of economies of scale, and it can warehouse away products to age and appreciate relatively cheaply.

    Bread is cheaper at the store. I can pull out my breadmaker and with a little flour, salt and yeast make a fine loaf. But added all up its more expensive than the store bought.

    You can’t beat the time savings of pre made pasta. If you don’t believe me spend an afternoon making your own.

    ON THE OTHER HAND hubby picked up a frozen dinner that consisted of pasta in a little tomato sauce. With ten more minutes planning I could have boiled some dry pasta and poured on my own canned sauce. We also vastly improved it by adding frozen meat balls we had made ourselves.

    I also believe home made meatballs are far more cheap and convenient than the boxed ones. Because I run my own assembly line and prepare a family pack of hamburger meat all at once.