I came in on the tail end of a PBS program about food the other day. As best I can remember, it theorized that the reason people are fat in this country is because they can't afford decent food. They can only afford to buy cheap food from the "dollar" menu at various fast food places.
As an example, they showed a family of four--Mom, Dad, (both overweight) a daughter who looked to be about fourteen and another child who was perhaps nine or ten. They went through the drive-through at an unnamed fast food place; the tab for four hamburgers, two chicken sandwiches and four sodas--fat, fat and sugar supreme!--all off the dollar menu, was over $11.
Then they showed the same family in the produce section at their local grocery store. My mouth dropped open when the two little girls found that 99 cents would only buy them two pears. "Too expensive!" My jaw hit the ground when the parents pointed out that broccoli at $1.59 a lb. was also so pricey that it proved they couldn't possibly afford to feed the family "good food."
Incredibly, the narrator of this documentary repeated this bit of idiocy as though it was gospel truth. People of limited means can "only" afford the lousy food found on dollar menus.
Bull. Pure unadulterated bull
Let's take their own examples. They could start by buying three pears for $1.50. That's a pear each for the parents and a half pear each for the kids.
One and one-half pounds of broccoli would be a whole $2.40 and be plenty enough for the entire family to have a serving.
I buy whole chickens for $4.50 or less at least once a week. One three-pounder at that price would easily provide a meal's worth of meat for this whole family.
A few tablespoons of iced tea mix or lemonade mix in tap water would provide drinks for all four people and cost maybe 50 cents.
Four servings of brown rice with a little butter would cost about $1.
So....a meal of roasted chicken, broccoli, brown rice and pears, with ice tea or lemonade would be much more nutritious, add up to fewer calories and cost:
$8.90.
More than a dollar less than the vegetable-poor, sugar and fat-laden "cheap" meal off the dollar menu.
Ah! But what about the time it takes to cook all this food! Who has the time?
Almost everyone.
We've also been sold the idea that it takes all sorts of specialized equipment and hours of time to cook food at home. Again, pure bull.
Yes, it takes about an hour to roast a chicken. But....here's something the TV cooking shows won't tell you....you don't have to spend that entire hour in the kitchen.
If you've planned ahead and bought the necessary ingredients on the weekend, here's what's involved in our sample meal.
Rice? Before you start on the chicken, put the rice and water in a lidded pot, put it on the back burner on high, and by the time you get the chicken in the oven, it will be boiling. Turn the burner off, leave the lid on and let it sit.
While the rice comes to a boil, pull the chicken out of the wrapper, rinse it, put it in an oven-proof pan (I use glass cake pans) and stick it in the oven. I use a large toaster oven that I bought years ago secondhand for a few bucks to avoid heating up my full size oven. (You should cook things at a slightly lower temperature in a toaster oven. Experiment and find out what works for you.)
All this takes about five or six minutes. When you're done and the chicken's in the oven and the rice is turned off and sitting, go off and do something else. A load of wash, a check of your email, whatever chores will take about an hour. Watch a TV show if you want. Just check the chicken at least twice during that hour and baste it.
When the chicken is done, pull it out and set it on a heat-proof surface to cool, while you take the broccoli, rinse it and cut off the lower part of the stalk. Then just put it on a microwave proof plate, upend another plate to use as a cover--no, you do not need a special microwave steamer!--and microwave it on High for two to three minutes until it's tender. While you're doing that, mix your tea and lemonade, carve your chicken, then call everyone in for a nutriitous and cheap dinner that only took about fifteen actual working minutes to prepare.
I've seen people spend more time than that creeping along in the drive-through line.
And by the way....if you cook double amounts of such food on the weekends, you can make your own microwaveable frozen meals to eat on weekday nights...at perhaps a third the cost of the ten bites worth of processed, over-sauced frozen food sold at the grocery store.
'Nuff said. I'm hungry. Time for a plate full of homemade spaghetti, full of tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and mushrooms, all bits and pieces that I didn't use on other meals. I chopped 'em up and put them in a container in the freezer over the last ten days. The spaghetti took me fifteen minutes to make three days ago (plus an hour of simmering, while I did chores) and I've got three more portions in the freezer....at a cost of about $1.50 per portion.
Dollar menu? Please. Spend a few minutes planning and a few minutes cooking, eat less and eat better. You'll be skinnier and your wallet will be fatter.
No comments:
Post a Comment