There are times in everyone\’s life that you are only cooking for yourself. What are the options? Buying take-away food or cooking yourself? The single person can’t cook too big portions, as most of the food will go to waste by doing so. Also, eating the same food the whole week sounds a bit dull, to say the least. Making smaller portions includes buying a lot of different ingredients, which are perishable.
There are obviously microwave ready meals, but if you have ever watched any cooking show or listened to a healthcare professional they will say that ready meals are low in nutrients and high in salt and well, price. The third alternative after ready meals (take away or store bought) and cooking yourself, is obviously to find other people to eat with. But this option is far fetched and very unlikely on daily basis.
By doing an internet search on possible easy meals for one, the user will find sites that emphasis more to the presentation and showing foods with exotic ingredients like “Manitoba Harvest Hemp Protein Powder”. The real challenge is to have a single person to make up new dishes every day, but if the difficulty levels are introduced to equation, the whole plan goes down the drain.
The main point should then be: basic meals from basic ingredients. This would make sure that the meal prices are low, ingredients are vastly available and are affordable (even if they happen to go bad) and most importantly that the difficulty level is low. It serves nobody\’s interest to have John Smith spending time in the speciality stores looking for whatever is cherimoya.
Basic ingredients for everyday food may not be as surprising or special, but the idea of everyday food isn’t to impress the neighbors. It is to get the nutrients and fuel for our bodies. And basic foods have been popular for years, and for a reason: they work!
In a broader sense this issue of foods reflects on how for example European and American lives have changed recently. The quantity of affordable choices has risen so much, that choosing a product is not entirely based on the amount the product costs, but how it reflects the person and how the person wants to be seen by others. If a manager still buys basic flour and eggs, it might be considered as him/her being uneducated or more particularly unsophisticated.
This article then comes to a key point: is it wrong for a person to keep old (basic) things like food, clothes, transportation, etc. even though there are many different (more fashionable) choices out there within arms reach? The choice of what the person buys shows now more of the persons character than ever before. If a rich person still wears old jeans all the time, it is considered as having a corky personality. Alternative, if a poor person does the same it is considered as a result of not having any other choice. Now the prices of goods are so low that many people can be in the choosing side of the equation and not in the no other choice side.
Next this affordability of goods will lead to the question: at what cost? Is it right (ethically) for manufacturing jobs to be underpaid in overseas countries, just to be sold (with a good profit) to western consumers? These questions have many answers and are the topic of another article.
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