Chef or Consumer?
The Hidden Costs of Convenience Meals
Food and eating. It’s so central to culture, to enjoying life. If you are lucky enough to live in a place where food culture is celebrated, cherish it.
In North America especially, it’s often treated as a bother, something to be got over with as quickly as possible before returning to the real passion of life: earning money. Food has been analyzed to death for “health,” but at the same time, the foods that are most easily available to us are often not the most healthy options, and despite the advertising, often not the most pleasurable ones to eat, either.
Increasingly long commutes, food deserts, and the frantic pace of life make finding time to cook far more of a challenge. Many choose to opt out of preparing their own food and pay for a meal service. That way they get home-made meal nutrition with take-out convenience, according to the advertising. And every day, just in case, they can pack dinner to eat at work if they have to stay late. But if they don’t wind up staying late, just heat it up and eat it when they got home.
It’s what we keep getting told. Get a meal-oriented grocery service so you don’t have to go to the supermarket. Or take things a step further and get a meal service with everything already made and ready for the microwave. Surely that’s more convenient, and convenience is everything.
But is it? As someone with diabetes, I have a special interest in anything which claims to provide an easy-to-prepare healthy meal. So even before I got the idea for this article, I was already researching meal prep and packaged meal services. The first thing that jumped out in my research is that none of the major meal prep companies in Canada provide carbohydrate information for their meals. They’ll say a given meal is “carb-friendly”, but not what that actually means. And diabetics also need to be strict about salt and fat intake, using hard numbers, not just hand-waving about how it’s under a certain arbitrary amount. Basically, I need the numbers which are printed on the sides of cereal boxes, and nobody was providing that. I did find a diabetes-friendly meal service based in Montreal, but what they offered was basically hospital food delivered to your door. Diabetics can still eat herbs and spices! If I wanted flavour, I was going to have to do the cooking myself.
What’s available
Eating out for all your meals is a time-honoured tradition going back centuries, but it’s also one of the most expensive ways to feed yourself, assuming you have a way to cook at home.
Frozen dinners are one of the oldest forms of meal “service”, available from any supermarket since 1953. They’re also known for being neither healthy nor filling. They used to be designed to reheat in an oven, but these days they are made with more fat and sugar so they microwave well.
Packaged meal services are basically selling frozen dinners, except keeping them fresh. While they are good for reducing food waste, they create a lot of packaging garbage, and can be very high in salt (because salt keeps the ingredients fresher over the week). They can also cost over twice as much as making a similar meal from grocery store ingredients.
The “make” alternative
The traditional “at home” method for cooking meals involves cooking each meal at home from ingredients. This can lead to a lot of food waste, especially if all the adults work outside the home. Instead, consider rethinking how to cook at home to make cooking less of a chore, but also with less cost and less time.
Prep ingredients on your day off, including vegetables to be eaten raw. This is especially handy in the warmer months, because you can just assemble a meal from already-chopped vegetables. I have veggie sticks and hummus in my fridge for this week, plus all of the ingredients for a salad of Boston lettuce, orange segments, fresh herbs, and chicken. That’s enough for six meals during the coming week, and now that I’ve done the prep, is as convenient as a meal service.
If you have a lot of people in your household, collect “thaw and dump” recipes for the slow cooker. You put the ingredients in a large freezer bag in the reverse order to how you would put them in the crock pot, and then put them in the freezer. I add a label telling me how long the dish needs to cook. 24 hours before you want to cook one, put it in the fridge to thaw.
Smaller households may find it easier to freeze dishes by the serving. This lets you mix & match dishes to make a variety of meals. You can use Souper cubes, but I find that silicon muffin trays also work well. Just freeze overnight, and then pop the frozen servings into a freezer bag the next morning. This method has the advantage that you don’t need to do a big meal prep on a weekend — just make an extra dish whenever you’re cooking anyhow, then portion it and set it in the freezer. You can thaw these in the microwave, then do a heat-up pass, but if you can plan ahead, you can also put portions in the fridge to thaw overnight.
Frozen food gets a bad rap for having an unpleasant texture, but the key is to remember not everything can be frozen. There are a lot of free recipes which a freezer-friendly, and can be freshened up by serving them with freshly-made sides. This is exactly what many chain restaurants do!
The key thing, for me, is that we all need to acknowledge our lives have changed, and the recipes that worked well back when there was someone always at home (probably a wife) don’t always work anymore. Even when there is a stay-at-home spouse, they are often so busy with childcare, housecleaning, and volunteer work, it makes sense to have some meals prepared and available.
I’m curious: in this specific category, do you lean more towards buying or making? Have you had a “make” project that went spectacularly wrong (or right)? Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear your experiences.
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