Ready Steady Go
When we buy our food, these days, with all the wonderful preservation methods available it has become harder and harder to identify where the product has come from and when.
Ages ago when salt packing and drying were the top two ways to keep our food for longer than its natural life we still more or less ate seasonally. We ate foods raised/grown in our own country with little coming in from abroad. Invaders occasionally brought with them their own favourite snacks and ingredients such as olive oil and herring!
With the winter approaching our ancestors had to find ways to make it through until spring without starving. Food was hunted, gathered and stored with ingenious ways to do so being of top most importance.
As time progressed we slowly reduced our hunting and gathering, then we stopped producing all of our own food on our smallholding. We began to increase our variety of produce by bartering and exchanging goods. We now had a wide range of foods at our fingertips that we may not have been able to eat on the day we acquired them.
Housewives (house ‘people’ if we have to be pc here) through out time have been charged with bringing home food and keeping it in an edible condition. Fast forward to the 1900s, give or take a few years, and the daily slog to the village shop to buy only what you were going to consume that day quickly became boring! It behove these women (people) to make food last longer so they had more time for anything else rather than dragging on foot to the shop yet again.
Once we had mastered packing fish and meat in salt and drying out fruits and vegetables we fell upon canning, pickling and Kilner jars with a vengeance.
Keeping things cold was discovered to inhibit the growth of bacteria so eventually man invented the fridge – it was a slow process but today the humble refrigerator is often elevated to a work of art and proudly displayed without a nod to what is happening behind the door as we are so blasé about this wonderful box.
Now we can buy whatever we want when we want and keep it for as long as we want. Season or location mean nothing to us. Planes, trains, boats and trucks rush around the world bringing food from one country to another without respite. Any hint of difficulty with a certain food making it to the store and our reaction is to panic buy.
Despite all this bounty, that we should be grateful for, the fridges and freezers and copious amounts of fresh food on demand are not enough. We want fresh food that we don’t have to prepare at all. Chop something up? Get the Kitchen Aid out of the cupboard? Use three saucepans and the grill? Wash a lettuce? No thanks - give me a ready meal..
Ready meals are just that. Ready. You may read the label but do you really know what is inside?
Do you know where the fish or meat has come from? What did the animal eat while it was being raised? How was it transported and slaughtered? What were the vegetables sprayed with? Does the sauce have additives that may have adverse effects on your health? God alone knows how much fat has been used or what kind.
The calorie count is often the first piece of information we read. We should be more concerned with salt, sugar and additive content than how much weight we are going to put on.
Frankly it’s not a lot different from Russian roulette. Who knows if there is danger inside? ‘Smoking gun’ would be a better description for some of these ominous plastic boxes housed in their gaily-coloured cardboard sleeves.
Yes, don’t worry I know all about the ranges that purport to be organic or balanced or the ranges that exhort us to ‘count on them’ but I still feel these meals should be saved for emergency situations and not used on a daily basis. I have no doubt that many hours of research went into what goes into these meals, its what you don’t do when you eat them that worries me.
If you don’t cook or prepare food or follow a recipe you are short changing your children’s education. If you have no enthusiasm for eating well then you only have yourself to blame if chicken nuggets or other fast food horrors become the extent of foods that your children will try.
The very fabric of our society is in shreds if we are relying on supermarkets to tell us how to eat. What happened to learning at your Mother’s knee? We are producing a generation who have no idea how to eat to their best advantage.
We want food fast and we want it now. What happened to enjoying the process of making your own dishes, as the Americans like to say, ‘from scratch’? Twenty minutes has been determined as the amount of time that a ready meal should take in a conventional oven and five minutes in a microwave and not a second longer. Shouting ‘Hurry’ at the microwave is really sad.
The satisfaction that comes from a slow braised piece of meat is becoming a distant memory for a great swathe of our population.
There have never been so many cooking shows on the TV most of them with an accompanying book. These shows are not drama or light entertainment but are a way of learning skills and having a go at something new or old.
Has it come to this that we are incapable of or not interested in weighing flour or cracking an egg?
I have said before that what is happening on the inside of your body is directly reflected in what is happening on the outside. Good nutrition is the truly vital element of your beauty regime. A happy digestive system will result in clear skin and loads of energy.
Spending a fortune on expensive anti-ageing creams and procedures is a waste of time if you are eating like a university student on a budget that puts beer at the top of the shopping list.
You need to take in a full complement of all the vitamins and minerals your body needs to function at the top of its game.
There are two types of vitamins – fat-soluble and water-soluble.
Fat-soluble vitamins are stored in the fatty tissues and the liver then hang around waiting until they are needed.
This can be anything from a few days to up to six months.
Water-soluble vitamins are not stored and are carried around the body in the blood stream, going where they are needed. Any excess is expelled from the body when you go to the loo. These vitamins include Vit C, niacin, folic acid, biotin, pantothenic acid and all the B vitamins.
B vitamins are essential for energy and making the red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body. Find them in whole grains, fish, meat, poultry, dairy, green vegetables, beans and peas.
Foods that are fresh, seasonal and local will give you the best quality nutrients. We all have to eat so why not give it your best shot?
Happy Trails, Readers, Happy Trails.
First Published May/June By The Dart 2012
