Only 1 in 4 meals cooked from scratch....

adelight

People are lazy, they don't have time, they think they don't have time, they don't know how, they don't think they can, they can't be bothered to learn, they "like" the taste(aka not exposed to real food enough!!), they are ill and don't have anyone to cook for them(this is tinned soup territory for me!), they are caught short and have to reach for the back up dried cheese sauce.
Knowing the news they probably included meals using anything from a jar, stock cube, tin and frozen cooked meat/veg. Unless you have bags of free time or are harry potter, you're probably gonna end up using one of those every now and then. I imagine they also included people buying sandwiches etc from lunch shops. Just for the shock factor of a crazy statistic! Whilst statistics are incredibly useful and wonderful(would i ever say otherwise though? ), you can tweak your distributions, samples and be selective with tests and results to mislead people. That data might have been predicted from a sample size not indicative of the whole country. That little "1 in 4" nugget could have a 1% chance of being wrong or a 50% chance!

scheming_gypsy

kippers wrote: »

It's just said on the BBC news that only 1 in 4 meals are cooked from scratch.:shocked: How do people afford this?....All the salt and preservatives etc that are in ready meals.......and they don't taste very nice.

I'm amazed

Dead easy. I went to Asda yesterday and spent £19. I only went in to pick up a chicken and some veg for tea; if I'd got a pizza it'd have cost me a fiver. When I do a full shop it'll cost a fortune and I still never seem to have anything in to eat.

When you factor in all the fannying about cooking a meal, gas, electric, water etc and compare it to £1 a bag of chips, or four microwave meals for a fiver; then it's cheaper to not cook from scratch.
I don't actually own a microwave and enjoy cooking so I'm not using it as an excuse to justify what I do. I just tend to have a big lunch at work and often too busy (yes Adelight... too busy, just because you think, doesn't mean you're right), too cook so I might just grab some toast or a light snack.

FarmersWife_2

I heard this and I thought it couldnt be true... surely people are not that bad... I wonder if they class a boxed cereal as not cooked from scratch??

I work full time, all be it from home, I have 2 children, dogs, ferrets, chickens, and I race a car at weekends....

I bake my own bread without a bread maker, I never buy a packet or jar sauce... I admit to having a few tins of baked beans in reserve in case I have nothing for OH's flask for his lunch.

Home made chicken nuggets are SOOO easy and you know exactly what is in them.

I must admit I have a few problems when we go out for dinner because DD1 and DD2 have not been brought up on pizzas, shp chicken nuggets etc so if we eat out the have to have a small 'adult' meal..

There is no excuse really, some people dont know how to cook or dont feel they have the time... its not difficult to 'throw' everything .. and yes I mean throw... into a slow cooker and leave it on low all day... imagine how much nicer a smell that is to walk into at the end of the day than what OH and I call 'ping meals'


C x

HappyMJ

FarmersWife wrote: »

I heard this and I thought it couldnt be true... surely people are not that bad... I wonder if they class a boxed cereal as not cooked from scratch??

I was thinking that too. Breakfast cereal is a processed food so technically not from scratch. What about bread? That's pre-baked for our convenience. Baking a loaf from scratch is quite fun but can be time consuming.

Most of my meals these days tend to be slow cooker meals very easy to cook from scratch but does using a tin of tomatoes or sauce count as not from scratch?

JulieGeorgiana

FarmersWife wrote: »

There is no excuse really, some people dont know how to cook or dont feel they have the time... its not difficult to 'throw' everything .. and yes I mean throw... into a slow cooker and leave it on low all day... imagine how much nicer a smell that is to walk into at the end of the day than what OH and I call 'ping meals'

100% agree with this! DH 'threw' some veg and chicken in the SC yesterday morning (took about 10 minutes to chop the veg) and last night he pulled the chicken off the bone and got 7 really good size portions which will feed the boys for 3 days!

It's not hard is it?

scheming_gypsy

i'm not throwing anything in a slow cooker in the morning; I can barely throw myself in the shower! my alarm goes off at 5:30am and I'm not getting up at 5am just to stick something in the slow cooker to eat 14 hours later.

adelight

JulieGeorgiana wrote: »

100% agree with this! DH 'threw' some veg and chicken in the SC yesterday morning (took about 10 minutes to chop the veg) and last night he pulled the chicken off the bone and got 7 really good size portions which will feed the boys for 3 days!

It's not hard is it?

The problem is that a lot of people don't realise it's that easy, many don't even know what a slow cooker is! If someone hasn't grown up with home cooked food, friends who cook or taken an active interest in cooking, then the only exposure they are like to get to cooking is TV cookery shows which tend to have complicated prep and long lists of ingredients. Often people assume all cooking is like this and making spag bol becomes some mammoth task in their eyes.
Of course, watching jamie O throw some roughly chopped ingredients into a SC then walk off wouldn't make a very good show

There might be some crazy type of south american dancing that I've never heard of, I'm never going to look up how to do it because I don't even know it exists. Okay this is a crazy example but you get the jist

European_Citizen

Then who buys all these cook books that keep coming out? I try to cook from scratch but I always have a few whoopsies in the freezer for emergencies. I've also read that supermarkets deliberately introduce more offers on their processed foods as opposed to the fresh ones so that's another disincentive. Moreover, they often cater to the majority, which tends to choose convenience over price, so my local Tesco is full of chicken breasts and fish fillets but they only sell 2 types of whole chicken and no whole fish. Cooking with the latter two would obviously be much cheaper

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

Coming as this probably did from the same people who decided a toast sandwich was the only thing you could possibly ever eat if you were skint, well - I'd ignore it and put the radio on. The odds are that they're leading up to another TV series where you have to buy a chicken and make it last a fortnight for 20p (ignoring the £50 of spices, flavourings and grains you miraculously already had in the designer kitchen).


I made udon noodle soup on Friday - that involved salmon, prawns, onion, carrot and cabbage - but it wouldn't be counted as cooking from scratch because I bought the udon noodles, the stock cube, the mirin and tamari (tasted pretty good, though).

So they are talking nonsense, really. But that sort of sloppy 'journalism', along with ten minute promotional presentations in the guise of 'news' about some programme or another, is exactly why I don't waste my time with breakfast television.

LondonDreamer

I can certainly see why the figure is so low, I was actually a bit surprised it wasn't lower! But I think it depends on what they consider from scratch, and also a lot of the replies seem to assume that the only alternative is a microwave meal. There's a lot of technically "not from scratch" foods which are used as ingredients (e.g. curry paste, pesto, condiments, stock pots, bread!) which I would have no issue using in an otherwise homemade meal.

As for price, it can often be cheaper to purchase processed foods than the ingredients used in them. Again, a lot of people here (in OS, not specifically this thread) seem to compare homemade cost with the most expensive options when in reality, that's not what the majority of people are buying. As an example, a jar of value pasta sauce is cheaper than the tin of value tomatoes you would use to make it yourself. For people short of both time and money, there's very little incentive to make things like that from scratch.

But I do find it a bit rude that some people think that those who don't cook must be lazy. I know for some that is true, but most of the people I personally know who mainly eat ready meals and pre-prepared veg are elderly. They were very good cooks at one point, but no longer have the ability to cook safely (e.g. handle a sharp knife) to do it themselves.

ETA: Most of my meals are homemade but as I said above, this includes some processed helpers. And occasionally, it also includes some things like pizza or frozen chips. I'm happy with that balance.