Everything in its place and a place for everything. That way, it takes minutes to go from creative chaos to calm, and the uncluttered mind can fly free

Aug 24, 2016

How To Control Your Life

Part 93

It’s a real shock to see the lack of food in the kitchen.

Participant in Eat Well for Less, BBC One consumer programme

In Eat Well for Less a family’s food is ‘debranded’ - the foods are taken out of their packets and jars and put into storage containers simply marked with what the food is: ‘bran flakes’, ‘tomato ketchup’, ‘rice’ and so on. The debranded foods are then replaced in the kitchen and, to give the programme an extra fillip, some of the family’s usual foodstuffs are put into cupboards which are then taped up. These cupboards are then out of bounds to the family and they have to prepare meals without using them.

It was when one particular family returned to their kitchen that one participant made the remark above.

What she was looking at was a kitchen largely denuded of ‘ready meals’, pre-prepared food. There was plenty of food in the kitchen - it was just in its basic state: no oven chips but plenty of potatoes, that sort of thing.

In the UK we barely cook from scratch any more. Our total annual spend on ready meals is higher than in any other country in Europe - far higher. In fact it’s in excess of £2.6 billion a year.

Does it matter? And what does it have to do with you and your life and the way you live it ?

“There’s nothing in that trolley that needs cooking.”

Eat Well for Less presenter on seeing the results of one family’s weekly supermarket shop

When it’s suggested to people that they could cook meals from scratch rather than using ready meals and takeaways, the most common objections are:

“Eating ready meals saves time I can spend doing other things, like spending time with my family”

“ I don’t have time to cook”

“Buying lots of ingredients is more expensive”

“We all have to eat different things and we can’t cook three/four different meals”

“ I can’t cook”

and in most cases, none of these are true.

♦ “Eating ready meals saves time I can spend doing other things, like spending time with my family”

Buying a ready meal in the supermarket (on the way home from work?), stabbing it a couple of times and putting it into the microwave, waiting ten minutes and then putting it onto a plate is quick. Quick, if that’s all you’re having. Heating up is certainly quicker than cooking. However, if you have to shuffle several different items around in the microwave, or cook or heat other items separately to go with the main one you’ve put in the microwave, you’re soon in the same time realms as cooking from scratch.

You’re not, of course, one of those people who hangs around in the kitchen waiting for the microwave to ping are you? You use those valuable minutes doing something worthwhile. As we all do.

Perhaps if you were to cook a meal from scratch, other family members could join in? Or at least sit and sip something cool while you chop and sizzle and do your thing. That’s when real conversation happens, when one or two people are engaged in doing something else as well - it’s so much easier to talk real things then. And where better to talk about life than in a kitchen with a meal magically taking shape, lots of things to see and smell and taste, and a sense of anticipation about the meal to come?

♦ “ I don’t have time to cook”

You have time to do the things in life which are important to you. Do you remember when you were a child and had an all-consuming hobby? You would rush home from school, make excuses about homework, hare around and do everything in double-quick time, just to get going with that hobby again. There was always time for it, you almost literally made the time. The secret is to find a way of enjoying anything you need to do - and you do need to cook.

♦ “Buying lots of ingredients is more expensive”

Cooking from scratch is cheaper than buying ready meals. Actually it’s hugely cheaper because ready meals are unsatisfying (admit it - you’ve often eaten a meal marked ‘Serves two’, haven’t you?…). You’re paying people to prepare the meals and, while it should be cheaper because they’re preparing a meal for thousands, perhaps millions, and you’re preparing it for one, or two, or four or however many, food manufacturers know they can put a premium on ready meals and so they do.

♦ “We all have to eat different things and we can’t cook three/four different meals”

We have more allergies and food intolerances, here in the UK and in all countries where ready meals are eaten, than we’ve ever had before in the history of the human race. The rise in these digestive problems is completely commensurate with the rise in eating ready meals. Coincidence? The answer cannot be to eat more ready meals.

The good news is that there is more information about food and there are more (free) recipes available, on a computer near you, than there ever has been before in the history of the human race.

More good news is that after a while of eating good food cooked from scratch, you might well find that digestive problems lessen or even disappear.

♦ “ I can’t cook”

That’s fear. One of the participants in Eat Well for Less said, when she saw the dearth of ready meals in her kitchen: “The comfort blanket’s been taken away”. (Turned out she could actually cook very well.)

Perhaps you can’t speak French, or cut a mitred corner, or play bridge - but you can learn. Basic cookery isn’t hard, and you can soon learn the more sophisticated stuff if you want to. And you will, because you’ll get interested. What will pique your interest is when someone sees a meal you’ve cooked and says “Ooh, yum!” or when they’ve finished asks “Can we have that again soon?” or something. It might be years before you get to take an exam in French and pass well, or go to France and have someone congratulate you on your accent (a very long time, if my experience of the French is anything to go by…), but you get instant feedback on every meal you cook.

A friend of mine, let’s call her Jean, cooked her first meal when she was suddenly left on her own, with a boyfriend ill in bed. Everyone else in the house share had gone their separate ways for the entire long weekend. Having successfully got out of the cooking rota until that time by dint of not actually living full-time in the house and by buying lots of chocolate cake and wine, Jean was suddenly confronted with the nasty reality: she was going to have to cook. She had plenty of food in the kitchen because the house sharers bought everything in bulk from the London markets. The only problem was that she didn’t have a clue even how to peel an onion.

There was one recipe book in the house, a promotional booklet-type thing given free by Knorr to promote their packet soups (every recipe required a packet of Knorr soup). With this booklet in her increasingly messy hands, Jean ran up and down the stairs to consult her boyfriend at each step of the way as she prepared and cooked her first ever meal.

“It says here one onion. What do I do with the onion before it gets to the stage where I put it in the frying pan?”

“Peel it and chop it.”

“Can you go through that step by step for me?”

When it was all done the dish was served, beautifully presented on a tray (Jean could do that bit, she’d been properly brought up), to the boyfriend upstairs. Being a decent guy he praised the dish, liver and onions in a cheese sauce, with fervour and thanks; several times over.

That relationship did in fact flourish, enabling the boyfriend to wait a year or two before telling Jean that he didn’t actually like liver and was allergic to cheese.

Once she could prepare an onion, Jean prepared lots. It was very satisfying to her that she could prepare an onion, from scratch, so she did. It was quite a while before Jean prepared any dish that didn’t include at least one onion (and a packet of Knorr soup). She became known for it.

Finally someone showed Jean how to prepare a few other vegetables, and it went on from there. Jean is never going to be a master chef (she doesn’t want to be, for a start), but she can cook a meal and she does - lots of them. People enjoy her meals, and everyone she lives with is healthy.

Everyone she lives with is healthy.

You can’t control your life if you’re not healthy. You can’t be healthy if you don’t eat good food.

You don’t need to read labels, or count calories, or worry about saturated fat, or salt. Look at the picture up there - do you really need to think about it? We’ve been eating all that vibrant stuff since we started out on this planet, and we were fine when we were eating that. Then we started all this processing business, all these ready meals and fast food, and look what happened.

Instead of reading labels and desperately counting calories, visiting the chemist’s for antihistamine tablets or the doctor for anticholinergic medication, cook a meal. From scratch.

Take control in the kitchen.

Twitter: Maryon Jeane