![]() ![]() Used with sense and moderation, the best ready meal can form part of a healthy balanced diet and be an expression of parental love as rich and complete as any home-cooked meal.Īnthony Warner is a development chef by day and blogs as The Angry Chef by night.I write about food for a living. Convenience foods have set people free from domesticity, helping them to live full and rich lives. There are games to play, battles to fight, books to read, races to run. For many people there are more important things to do than craft lovely home-cooked meals. If we damn all processed foods, we pour scorn on the millions of people who happily consume them every day without harm. Your great-grandmother could expect to live barely half as many years as you (in 1891 average life expectancy was around 46 years), largely because you’ve benefited from advances in the safety and quality of our food and water supplies (yes, tap water is a ‘processed’ product too). The lack of refrigeration meant that fruit, vegetables, milk and eggs were all but unavailable for large parts of the year. But ask yourself, would you really want to return to the dinner table of your great-grandmother? A time when deficiency diseases and gastro-intestinal disorders were rife and often fatal? By berating food manufacturers, we are harking back to an imagined paradise lost, when all was pure and uncontaminated by modernity. Plus it rejects the breathtaking advances of the modern world. ![]() Our desire to dismiss convenience food is driven more by a retrograde distaste for progress than a quest for perfect health. When those chemicals are swirling around inside us, our body cares nothing of where they came from. If I choose a tin of soup, a pasta sauce, or even a packet of crisps, will that choice be less nutritious because it was made in a factory rather than a home? The way food affects our bodies depends not on its source but on its composition – the complex mix of chemicals that comprises everything we eat. They will be delicious, but they won’t be healthy. It’s perfectly possible to take some organic potatoes, cut them into chips and deep-fry them in lard rendered from the finest rare breed pigs. A meal’s provenance doesn’t magically make it healthy or unhealthy. Manufactured products aren’t automatically unhealthy just because they’ve come from a factory. As it happens, I do work for manufacturers, as a development chef – which is why I can confidently stand up for factory food. It’s not fashionable to break from this widely held consensus without risking ridicule and accusations of being a shill for the manufacturers. ‘Eat real food, not fake processed junk.’Ī simple message that will free us from the diseases of affluence that blight our modern lives. This message unites celebrity chefs, self-appointed wellness gurus, nutritionists, even dietitians and medical doctors. Cook from scratch using fresh ingredients, nourish your family with home-cooked meals and try to return to the values and ideals of our great-grandmothers, before the evil food manufacturers made us fat and sick. If you want to eat healthily, the answer is simple. When it comes to food and health, if there’s one thing everyone seems to agree on it’s that processed and manufactured foods should be avoided. ![]() Instead of insisting that we hand-craft all our own meals at the kitchen table, Anthony Warner says we should take a fresh look at the food that freed us from drudgery to lead more fulfilling lives. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |