Title ticklings.

8 weeks in, I better choose something huh.

What?
Encouraging home cooking.

Why?
Increased enjoyment in foods.

More likely to eat more vegetables

Problem:
Increased consumption in takeaways and over-processed ready foods eg. pies/frozens.

Why:
Perceived lack of time/knowledge.

Problem with takeaway foods:

• Don't know what's in the food, additives etc. Not utilized by the home cook.
• Lack of vegetables and corporations' concern for your health.
• Cost.

Weird paradox:

• Food porn is a thing, signifying an increased interest in cooking/food.
• Time spent cooking is down.
• Focus on watching rather than doing.

Why eat more fruit & vege:

• Increased mood.
• Make others think you are better cook & person.

Evolution of meals from previous generation to now.

Disconnect with food: source, interest, taste.

Take back our foods/control of food.

Processed foods.

Cooking from scratch is an option—something you do when you are not hard-pressed by the demands of children and careers.

The Joy of Not Cooking

When my grandmother was growing up in the 1920s, the average woman spent about 30 hours a week preparing food and cleaning up. By the 1950s, when she was raising her family, that number had fallen to about 20 hours a week. Now, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, women average just 5.5 hours—and those who are employed, like me, spend less than 4.4 hours a week. And that’s not because men are picking up the slack; they log a paltry 15 minutes a day doing kitchen work. One market-research firm, the NPD Group, says that even in the 1980s, 72 percent of meals eaten at home involved an entrée cooked from scratch; now just 59 percent of them do, and the average number of food items used per meal has decreased from 4.4 to 3.5. That’s when we’re home at all: by 1995, we consumed more than a quarter of all meals and snacks outside the home, up from 16 percent two decades earlier.

We're pigging out on fast food
"It is sad that when faced with an economic recession, people are seeing takeaways as representing good value for money particularly when for the same price, and not much extra time and effort, a family of four could have three tasty yet much more nutritious meals."


Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali andMartha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

 veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.”

The formula is as circular and self-reinforcing as a TV dinner: a simulacrum of home cooking that is sold on TV and designed to be eaten in front of the TV.