Writing for Money Health Central has had me thinking, first of all, about what I do and enjoy as a cook and the economic benefits of cooking real meals for my family. Pulsing through my head have been all the things I know at my core about how much cheaper real, home cooked, largely from scratch, meals are. The reverse of that coin is that for the same price as others pay for packaged, frozen, precooked food, my family can eat an order of magnitude better if I buy ingredients and cook.
But this morning’s production of Class Action on my local NBC station featured Robert Lustig, a University of California med school childhood endocrinologist whose premise is that sugar in processed foods and the reduction of fiber in the diet have caused a fundamental metabolic change in our bodies that leads to overweight and all the health ills that follow. His point was that no matter how active our children are, as long as we feed them overly sugared, processed foods, their changed metabolism gives them no choice but to be unhealthy. Wow! For me, an even more powerful reason to cook at home.
Lustig pointed to the government’s subsidy of corn farmers made corn-based sweeteners cheap and omnipresent in the food at the grocery store. So, as a body politic, we pay farmers to grow gobs of this stuff, then have to pay as a society for the health ills it causes. You can watch an earlier presentation by Lustig called Sugar-the Bitter Pill.
While there may be something downbeat about “economizing” or living on less out of necessity, when seen through the lens of absolute positives for your health and that of your children, it’s pretty hard to shrug off the importance of cooking.
So, hang on. I’m going to be talking here about shopping for food, fixing it, and ways to incorporate good cooking and eating in the real world because it’s important, not just for the money saved, but for its role as the foundation of good health. May you be healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Image courtesy of Thor
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Our family meals feature food that is as close to “the source” as possible. We rarely eat pre-packaged food or anything with a lengthly list of ingredients. It is amazing how much sugar and salt is added to packaged food. I agree that the best food is what you can purchase and prepare yourself.
I also prefer organic. It may seem that there is a higher cost of organic purchases but I believe that isn’t really the case if you think in terms of cost effectiveness. I can’t help but factor in the costs of cleaning up pesticides, the cost on our health and the damage done to the planet. From this perspective, organic food is a great deal and tastes so much better too.
The best produce is fresh organic from the local farms. http://www.farmfreshtoyou.com is a great source in the SF Bay Area. Mention my name and the promo code 6164 for $5 off a delivery. This is some of the best produce I’ve ever eaten! Bon appetit!
Good tip about farmfreshtoyou.com. But your point about the bigger picture costs is what resonates with me….the cost to acquire a processed product is only a fraction of the environmental and health costs. That’s a trade off for the financially strapped that we’re going to talk about here over time.
[...] meals at home is much less expensive and better for you. My friend, Cathy Moran, wrote about the benefits of her cooking real meals for her family. She loves to cook, her family eats better food and she saves money doing [...]
[...] The sugary threat popped up even on the frugality sites: writing about her quest to grow and preserve more of what her family eats, Mrs. Get Rich Slowly reports on making jams, jellies and syrups to make fruit storable. Those products are made, typically with equal parts fruit and sugar. Sugar, made cheap by subsidies, and potent as a preservative by nature. [...]