Eco audit: cooking your own food

Back to food. (No surprise there.) I’ve just been watching a video which talks about how influential food buying habits are, because of the frequency of them, for all of us, every day.

So it seemed as good a point as any to come back to food, and what we do with it.  And equally, the times when we expect to arrive, all ready, as though our kitchen was a replicator on a space ship.

In my teens, it’s fair to say, I wasn’t cooking much of my own food.  Doing rather ambitious amounts of subjects at school, music in lunch times and after school, some part time work, some babysitting even…no, I was firmly in the role of being a food consumer only.

But on the occasions when I had space to put something together, I could. A brunch for one on a Sunday, snacks after school.  I might consume rockbuns with as much alacrity as my (then rapidly growing) brother, but I also knew how to make them.  The recipe was internalised, I could operate the mixer, and so on.

I was in the generation which had cooking at school.  That helped.  I was also in the generation where you could buy some stuff ready made, but that tended to be around biscuits and cakes.  You might open a tin or a jar, on occasion, but you would still expect to cook an evening meal pretty much from scratch.

Jump forward a few years to starting university.  Having had a year out between school and university, I was put in a student flat  with others who’d (mostly) done the same.  Six of us.  One regular sized fridge.  One cooker.  Not much money.  Time to cook.

And so the cooking continued.  As these things do.  Day by day, year by year.  When you’ve got your head over a saucepan, you may not realise the revolution taking place in the supermarkets in the meantime – where it becomes easy not to cook.

Ready meals may have been there when I was in my teens – I don’t know.  And I’m sure many wise words have already been written about the generation that wasn’t taught to cook, and the impact for them, and their children.

I also know how much food education is part of schools now, way beyond what I knew at school – where crops are sown and harvested, and the children learn to cook with what they have.

I admire the effort to connect it up – even while I struggle with the increasingly heavy-handed vetting of food that they eat, via Five a Day Committees and Healthy Snack wallcharts in classrooms.

My teenage self would be astonished at just how many foods you can buy that require no cooking, just heating up or assembly.  Not just the tins and bottles, but the pre-cut veg, the chicken breast cut to stir fry size.  The pre-grated cheese. And the ready meals, stretching off into the distance of the supermarket aisle.

When I started this series, I declared that I was preaching at myself, not others.  I suspect the declaration has slipped a bit.  Some of my eco habits have waned, and can cope with a bit of a dusting off.  Others I suspect have remained, and grown stronger over time.

But. I am also a parent. I have been a full-time office worker.  So I do get why it is convenient to have things that are quick to prepare when you are exhausted – not just for me but for small tummies that suddenly turn ravenous.

The thing that feels harder about all the pre-prepared stuff is just how much of it is swathed in plastic. (Yes, back to my packaging hobby horse.) And, quite frankly, how small some of the portions are.  There’s no point avoiding cooking when you get hungry and practically need another meal after the first one.

There is a scene in the film The Fifth Element where the female character is learning about the new world she’s in.  To fuel all the learning, she puts a plate and some capsules in what appears to be a microwave, presses a button, and take out a full plate of food, steaming hot.

Some days, when my culinary sap is not rising, I wouldn’t mind.  But the further along that route we go, the less we understand what we are putting into ourselves – let alone caring where it comes from, how far it’s travelled, how it was grown or farmed, and so on.

In my childhood, you might still get chided for not eating all your food: ‘think of the children in the world that don’t have enough food’.  I’m glad we’ve moved beyond these comments as an unsubtle way to get children to eat (whether they like the food or not).

But there is an echo in those comments of wartime experiences, of life often being one where food is not so plentiful. And yes, when we walk in the modern cathedrals that are supermarkets, it is hard to remember that there are many places where food can be hard to afford, or even to find, in the first place.

I can still challenge myself again to look at what’s in my supermarket trolley, and work out how many of the items I could make for myself.  And see whether I tip the balance a bit more. I may not knit my own muesli – but at least I think I could have a go.