Food for Thought

I have noticed, over the last several years, that purchasing fresh food at the grocery store has become a difficulty. If you shop the perimeter of most stores you're mostly okay, except for genetically modified produce and hormone pumped meats, but we'll save that for another entry, on another day. Today, I would like to discuss the evil that is packaged-packaged food. That is, food such as canned soups, dehydrated potatoes, and pre-measured baking mixes that are then packaged again, together, to produce a Meal-In-A-Box.

Not only are people not cooking from scratch anymore, but the idea of a "home cooked meal" has gone from one made of fresh ingredients to packaged and processed foods. My current favorite example of this meal-in-a-box fad is the one marketed by Betty Crocker. Here is what their website has to say about this particular product:

"Betty Crocker Complete Meals® dinners come with everything you need to make a meal--even the meat!
You'll find pasta, Betty Crocker® potatoes, Bisquick® biscuit, topping or dumpling mix and specially seasoned sauce mixes, plus cans of Progresso® meats and veggies in sauce. You need only water and 5 minutes' prep time, then pop it in the oven for great homemade taste.
And most Betty Crocker Complete Meals can also be prepared in a skillet or the microwave!"

I find this all very disturbing. I know that people have been using soups as meal-aides for decades, however, never before have we been so creatively destitute to put canned food in a box and call it home cooking. I mean, what the fuck?

In this age of super sized bookstores, that stock more cookbooks than dictionary's, and the myriad people who "just can't stop watching" the Food Network, why are grocery stores focusing on this shit?

I believe this "food" movement to be tied up in some deviant money grubbing plot to keep the middle, lower-middle and lower classes from actually being able to eat in a responsible manner. Furthermore I find it abhorrent that there are people who consider this cooking, making it virtually impossible to relate to past generations and times where self reliance and accomplishment through hard work were actually something to be proud of.

I heard a story today, of a young woman, around my age, who had just baked her first cake. When asked if she had made it from scratch, she asked "what's 'scratch'?" She then said that it was a box mix. While I would like to reward this young woman for doing that much, it is a sad and sorry state of affairs when convenience and ignorance are the driving forces behind what fuels a nation. Literally.