Home Cooking is better for us and the planet!
Ready made meals became popular in the 70’s when more people bought freezers for their homes and more women went to work.
BBC – The rise of the ready meal
Convenience foods save us a lot of precious time and can be a lot cheaper than homemade.
But… there is an environmental cost as well as a cost to our health for this convenience!
- Many contain ingredients that exploit our environment such as palm oil.
- Ready made foods take a lot of industrial space, resources and energy for manufacturing facilities, distribution centres, shipping, lorry parks and lorries on the road.
- More packaging is needed which uses resources, space and energy to manufacture and to transport.
- More refrigeration is needed.
- Convenience foods are unnaturally cheap and easy to eat so we buy too much, we eat too much and we think nothing of wasting what we don’t want anymore.
- Find out about soft drinks and our environment from Ethical Consumer magazine.
- Find out more about our complicated food systems and their effects on people, animals and the environment Ethical consumer.
Do we need to know how to cook when we have a wide range of foods easily available to us?
Recent events such as the pandemic, extreme weather events and wars around the world have shown us how quickly our food supply can be disrupted. Sourcing our food more locally and cooking more ourselves will protect us from some of these shocks.
Food that’s healthy for your body is healthy for the planet too.
Eatwell’s Planetary Health Diet – the optimal diet for people and planet.
Our diet is damaging our health and the health of the planet. EAT-Lancet brought 37 scientists together to devise a diet that can help both. If we followed Eatwell’s Planetary Diet, we could reduce the planet cost by 30% while feeding 10 billion people by 2050.
The planetary health diet is a global reference diet for adults that is symbolically represented by half a plate of fruits and vegetables.
The other half consists of primarily whole grains, plant proteins (beans, lentils, pulses, nuts), unsaturated plant oils, modest amounts of meat and dairy, and some added sugars and starchy vegetables.