A couple of weeks ago I was walking past a shop when a sign advertising bagged salad caught my eye: ‘Fresh and ready to eat. Salad you don’t have to wait for.’ Excuse me? What other kind of salad is there? Was the suggestion that if you don’t buy an airless bag of sterile, washed-in-chemicals, stays-fresh-forweeks radicchio, then you simply won’t have ‘time’ to eat salad this evening?It’s salad. By its very nature, it’s quick.
This airy cynical statement is typical of the ways in which food is marketed these days. Everywhere we look, we see adverts telling us we’re too busy to cook, offering us pre-packaged versions of recipes which, by implication, we’re either incapable of making for ourselves or lack the time to prepare.
We live in a society that glorifies busy. Listen to an average group of adults talking and chances are you’ll hear the familiar one-upmanship game: how swamped they are, how the kids are exhausting, how work is a nightmare. It’s no wonder the big operators in the food industry have tapped into this busy-ness syndrome and exploited it.
‘Hey, you’re time-poor, so buy this handy product and be grateful for it,’ so the line goes. But we must be wary of miracle food fixes. It’ll come as no surprise to learn that those pre-assembled ready meals are far more expensive than buying the raw ingredients. They’re generally worse quality, pumped full of additives, sugar and goodness knows what else. If they contain meat, the likelihood is it’s of dubious quality, cost being more important than animal welfare. Remember the horse lasagne scandal, anyone?