Tuesday, July 15, 2008
I've been hearing and reading about how world food costs are going up, mainly because corn and soy are going to biofuels instead of the table. (Gasoline costs affect the US, but in the rest of the world gasoline has always been high.)
The other day I went shopping for what we used to call "TV dinners" - you know, those Stouffer's and Lean Cuisine things - because I wanted to stock up on food that took no effort. Lately, I have been going days at a time without eating at all, other than trail mix (fruit, nut, and oat mix), yogurt, tea, and coffee, and if I want to work on losing weight, that doesn't help, because it lowers my metabolism and puts my body into "efficient" mode. If I had some things I could throw into the microwave, and then throw the dish away instead of washing it, I'd have no excuse not to eat. Excuses are easy for me, because I don't often feel "hunger". (And yes, I do feel guilty about buying frozen dinners. I do know better. But we're working with a resistance to housework here, so unless you're willing to come and cook and clean for me, hush yo' mouth.)
I'm a big veggie eater. I want my veggies. I also need meat, or it's not a meal. So my shopping qualifications were "meat, and lots of green and/or yellow vegetables". I couldn't find much of anything acceptable.
I had a choice of like 35 offerings. Many of them contained no vegetables, just meat, cheese, and bread. A very large percentage of the ones that were supposed to be full meals had for vegetables only potatoes and corn.
Potatoes AND corn? Yeah, mashed, boiled, or roasted potatoes are good for you, and corn is good, but NOT together (they're both starches) and NOT instead of carrots, spinach, squash, eggplant, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, wax beans, parsnips, asparagus, cabbage, beets, peas, green pepper, ... all the other stuff they could have put in there instead.
It can't be that corn and potatoes are the cheapest things available, not if the biofuels thing is true. So why is all that corn there? It has to be that that's what the public will buy.
If the IGA frozen foods case is an example of what people are willing to buy, we're in trouble.
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3 comments:
About 15 years ago, Stouffer's had a wonderful line of dinners with meat and real veggies. (So fondly I remember the pumpkin side dish!) Now, I'm afraid you're stuck. You can try Amy's, which is very tasty although veggie, or the Indian MREs. The trick with that is that you have to find the rice pre-made or make it yourself. (I make it myself.) Again, the drawback here for you is no meat. Sorry, sister, believe me, I'm looking for an easy way out, too.
I think it might also be a function of ease of processing/freezing. Green veggies are harder for me to reheat with decent quality at home so maybe it's the same for food processors? I don't know.
Chris - only a few years ago it was easy to find dinners with a good variety of veggies. There was one I remember with fondness that actually had Harvard beets! Flash freezing technology is so good now that even roasted potatoes avoid that grainy texture home freezing usually imparts. The trick now is to arrange the various densities so that all the part heat at the same rate. (I don't actually use the microwave for anything beyond water - I prefer the oven.)
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