Foodstuffs won the 2012 Unpackit Worst Packaging Award for its practice of putting fruit and vegetables on polystyrene meat trays and wrapping them in plastic.
Looks like my target is shifting away from broke, young students as from what I am gathering from my survey (a huuuuge proportion of respondents who are broke, young students)—they do cook quite a bit. Perhaps out of necessity. Perhaps my target is more wealthy, more middle class. Several other studies I have read also support the notion that the poor cook & spend more time in the kitchen that the better off. They are also probably healthier and happier in some sense.
Cooking is a chore. Challenge people to stand up & cook for themselves.
Chilled products have also grown in popularity and variety, with sales of ready-to-heat soup growing by over 25 per cent in the past three years.
Working Families Rely Heavily on "Convenience" Foods for Dinner, But Save Little Time, Finds UCLA Study
But the demands of serving as short-order cook only partially explained heavy reliance on commercially prepared foods. Other contributors seemed to include taste buds increasingly shaped by the food industry and dwindling reliance on grocery lists, Beck said.
"When you don't make a list, you don't know what ingredients may be called for," Beck said. "So you grab food kits off the shelf. Then you know you have everything you need."
Perhaps one of my executions could be related to having kit-type lists of whole foods.
Cooking Isn’t Creative, and It Isn’t Easy
“I hate the idea that cooking should be a celebration or a party. ... Cooking is about putting food on the table night after night, and there isn’t anything glamorous about it.”
— Christopher Kimball, the most influential home cook in America, creator of Cooks Illustrated.
That, too, is the reason he offers for mostly shunning issues like nutrition, obesity and food politics. “I don’t think anyone picks up Cook’s Illustrated to be preached at,” he says (ignoring the rampant contradictions).
“We don’t make the ultimate anything,” he said. “Were they the world’s best burgers — no, probably not. But if you get food on the table and it works, we’ve done our jobs.”
Just focussing on getting people to cook for themselves.
Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
Time-poor cooks look for 'lazy' food
But the demands of serving as short-order cook only partially explained heavy reliance on commercially prepared foods. Other contributors seemed to include taste buds increasingly shaped by the food industry and dwindling reliance on grocery lists, Beck said.
"When you don't make a list, you don't know what ingredients may be called for," Beck said. "So you grab food kits off the shelf. Then you know you have everything you need."
Perhaps one of my executions could be related to having kit-type lists of whole foods.
Interestingly, families worked from cookbooks on only three occasions, and they never referred to food articles in newspapers or magazine while cooking.
"There was one woman relaxing and reading a food magazine, but this information didn't make it into the weekday dinner that night," Beck said. "Cooking from scratch is seen as a hobby. It has become this other realm of entertainment."
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In simplest terms, Cook’s Illustrated focuses on preparing middlebrow American dishes at home with supermarket ingredients and omits everything glossy cooking magazines have come to be known for.
Really like the idea of disruption to this formula of presenting unattainable food, like some kind of idea of what home cooking is meant to be like. No columns, lavish photography, travelogues of street markets, heritage microgreens, no restaurants, no ads.
At the core of C.I.’s M.O. are two intrepid observations Kimball has made about the innermost psychology of home cooks. Namely that they 1) are haunted by a fear of humiliation, and 2) will not follow a recipe to the letter, believing that slavishly following directions is an implicit admission that you cannot cook
“Most magazines don’t write about failure, but we do,” Kimball told me later. “Disaster in the kitchen puts the reader at ease, and that’s why we start our recipes with it.”
Sense of transparency to gain credibility and likeability.
Critics also comment that his recipes stifle the home cook and the definition of 'perfect' is a loose and arguable one.
Punk-rockish, alternative attitude as it was just about the food and had no cool looking people or rustic tables. Constructed differently.
Punk-rockish, alternative attitude as it was just about the food and had no cool looking people or rustic tables. Constructed differently.
That, too, is the reason he offers for mostly shunning issues like nutrition, obesity and food politics. “I don’t think anyone picks up Cook’s Illustrated to be preached at,” he says (ignoring the rampant contradictions).
“We don’t make the ultimate anything,” he said. “Were they the world’s best burgers — no, probably not. But if you get food on the table and it works, we’ve done our jobs.”
Just focussing on getting people to cook for themselves.
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch.
Make cooking approachable, as a part of normality—not some super glammed up thing that only domestic gods and godesses can achieve. Cooking has gotten hyped up with the rise of celebrity and high cuisine. I like the 'celebrating real food' thing.
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
The chains had also seen an increased demand for pre-packed salads, which grew more than five per cent in the last year alone. Other quick-prep favourites were frozen meat products and pizzas, Foodstuffs spokeswoman Antoinette Shallue said.
Brown saw the majority of convenience food as less healthy than its fresh equivalent, and was concerned families using such ingredients might result in their children failing to learn about where their food comes from.
Regarding the children failing to learn where their food comes from, could be a point of entry to target mothers of families (I say mothers because they still do 80% of the cooking even though they are working. Gender roles dun dun dun).
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