Convenience foods cause more problems than you thinkCommentary by Terry Plowman, published in Delaware Coast Press
While popping a frozen waffle into the toaster oven the other day, I had a revelation about the decline in American social values.That a mere waffle could spark a revelation so deep is not really that hard to understand.
That waffle became the trigger that started a chain reaction of thoughts which tumbled one after another into my still groggy 8 a.m. state of semi-consciousness.
I realized that without so much as a brief mention in Newsweek, Americans have stopped eating homemade waffles.
Suddenly it occurred to me that the "convenience versions" of many foods have started to completely replace the made-from-scratch real thing.
As a member of today's fast-paced society, I have no complaint with convenience versions of what should be homemade food. Take canned soup, for instance -- of course made-from-scratch soup is better, but nothing's wrong with a can of soup for a quick lunch, as long as you, or someone you know, still makes it from scratch.
But I am worried that the convenience versions of some foods are altogether replacing the honest, healthful "real McCoy" -- for example, gravy (now comes in a can), icing (now comes in a tub), spaghetti sauce (now comes in a jar), and don't forget waffles (now available by the box).
I wonder about the effect this will have on members of younger generations, who are unfamiliar with the real homemade foods that have virtually been replaced by these convenience versions.
I checked to see if my mom still has the old family waffle-iron, and she said my sister Barbara still uses it. For those of you who think this is a silly ancient ritual, please note that homemade waffles are made from mainly flour, buttermilk, eggs and butter, while the store-bought impostor throws in partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oils, artificial yellow number 5, artificial yellow number 6, and other assorted multisyllabic ingredients.
Real gravy is made from only meat drippings, a little flour, water and salt and pepper, while the canned version contains modified food starch, soy protein isolate and caramel coloring.
My mom (who even makes cakes from scratch), still makes icing from only sugar, butter, vanilla and milk. I admit these are not exactly health foods, but check out these additional ingredients in tub icing: acetylated monoglycerides, polysorbate 60, xanthan gum and red number 40.
The sad thing is that now restaurants are using the term "homemade" for foods that people rarely, if ever, make at home anymore. What they mean is that it's made from scratch, not from a pre-packaged mix -- certainly a valuable product to serve, but one that is hardly "homemade" anymore.
Well, every generation bemoans the passage of certain things that remind them of their youth. My parents, for example, have mentioned how much fun it was to see the cream rise up out of a frozen bottle of milk in the days before it was homogenized.
Of course, today there's no such milk, no more milk bottles, and no more milkmen to deliver them.
But my nostalgia for honest homemade foods goes deeper than its taste. It seems that home-cooking is going the way of other things that have traditionally brought families together -- sitting down to dinner at the same time, storytelling, even going to church together.
If these things seem old-fashioned, maybe that's the point -- if families spent more time together doing such ordinary things as cooking, we might be able to recapture some of those old-fashioned values that seemed to make the world a nicer, more civilized place.