Too busy to cook?

Let’s face it, most of us can’t afford to eat takeaway every night of the week, and even if we could we wouldn’t want to. I’ve only done it once, and after five days of the incredibly cheap pizzas, burgers, cheese steaks and other delights that the city of Philadelphia has to offer I felt terrible, like a hangover but worse, with my body demanding proper nutrition. I was devastated to hear that the nearest place to obtain fresh vegetables was a supermarket that was ten miles away. Fortunately the local dollar store sold bananas; no other fruit, just bananas and rather a lot of them for a dollar too. Indeed, there were so many on the bunch that I was concerned that they would ripen too much before they were eaten, particularly as it was early summer, with humidity levels of over 90% and temperatures that made it feel like a tropical rain forest, but with more pollution and less trees.

I needn’t have worried, for even though my friends were used to this lifestyle they too seemed to be missing out on some vital nourishment and the bunch of around twenty bananas was gone in a day. So I bought more the next day, and the day after and so on. It is possible to tell when one’s body requires specific nutrients, but more on that later. My point is that being ‘too busy to cook’ is an excuse, and before you read this and throw something in rage, I’m not suggesting that cooking requires no effort or time at all. It just doesn’t need quite as much as you think.

Look at it this way. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that in your busy lifestyle you don’t seem to have time to cook and can’t afford takeaways. The next step down from this is ready meals, what they used to call ‘TV dinners’. Supermarkets, knowing we are too busy to shop, let alone cook, present a vast and diverse array, usually not far from the entrance, making it possible for even the busiest of mums, dads or professionals to grab something and make a quick exit. From lasagne and cannelloni, to pizza, burgers (in buns with cheese for heaven’s sakes), shepherd’s pie and stew and dumplings. It’s all there. Every meal in a box, cleverly designed and priced to make them affordable, quick to heat through and what’s more you can eat it out of the container, in front of the TV if you so desire. Want to go a bit more up market? Why not buy a ‘takeaway bag’ – a whole takeaway meal, authentically packaged and presented just as it would be from your local Chinese or Indian takeaway.

What nonsense. Now, it would be too much to imply that we should never buy these meals, although we really should never buy these meals. In reality sometimes we genuinely are ‘too busy to cook’ and there’s a place for them. But consider for a moment just exactly what these ready meals are. ‘Freshly Prepared’? Well, yes probably they were, five days ago, but that doesn’t make them fresh. The preservatives keep them kind of ‘fresh’ and give them a shelf life. ‘Made with the finest ingredients’? Perhaps, but to be honest once you’ve stewed carrots to mush it doesn’t matter how fine they were to begin with and they’ve now journeyed from an industrial kitchen to a warehouse, to the supermarket shelf and to your house. They are a very very long way from any freshness or finery they possessed originally.

There’s also the excessive packaging to think about. All right, so we can all feel a little less guilty on that score, as we separate the bag from the foil containers, putting the cardboard lids in one bin, the boxes in another. Recycling is better than throwing away, but it still costs money and resources that wouldn’t be necessary if we’d cooked the same thing ourselves at home. Then there’s the ingredients. I managed to find one ready meal in my freezer – macaroni cheese – and the box states proudly that not only is it suitable for vegetarians, it also contains no colours, flavourings, preservatives or hydrogenated fat. All good so far. On the down side it may ‘contain traces of nuts and/or seeds’ and it definitely contains gluten, milk and wheat. A look over the ingredients tells me that my macaroni cheese is 27% pasta and 16.5% cheese in total – less than half my macaroni cheese actually consists of macaroni and cheese. This meal in a box, 580 calories, contains half my daily salt and fat allowances, hardly surprising as there is additional salt in the ingredients, when cheese itself already contains a substantial amount.

Consider this: if you don’t hate cooking yet you’re too busy to do it, then your life is running away from you. If you hate cooking then of course you will always be too busy to do it. Yet cooking gives you so much control over what you eat. Ingredients can be replaced by alternatives (milk with soy milk, butter with low fat products, salt with ‘lo-salt’ if necessary). My box of macaroni cheese takes almost 10 minutes to heat up, which is about the same as it would take to cook dried pasta, during which I could make a cheese sauce from scratch and still have time for a quick sit down. Time how long it takes to order and collect / wait for delivery of takeaway, even if you know exactly what you want beforehand and preparing a basic meal will still win hands down.

So don’t give me ‘too busy to cook’ excuses. I work. I’m a wife with a house, two children and two dogs. I’m not a saint, nor do I have a time machine, but I can find the time to cook – sometimes! Why? Because there are plenty of things we can make that take about the same amount of time (or less) than it does to get a takeaway. Plus it’s cheaper, healthier, tastes better and it really is ‘freshly prepared’.