An article from the USDA titled “Higher Incomes and Greater Time Constraints Lead to Purchasing More Convenience Foods” reveals that modern Americans spend a large chunk of our food budgets on foods prepared away from home. Busy people are willing to spend more for food if it is already made from employees at the grocery store, from fast food restaurants, and from quick-service and full-service restaurants. The authors state, “…more Americans today appear to value convenience over money when it comes to their food purchases”. Even during these busy times, however, there are still “ingredient households” that we can learn something from. Regardless of what the media argues about ingredient household vs snack household—that ingredient households may promote disordered eating—ingredient households are generally good. We can use some lessons from behavioral science to nudge us toward becoming an ingredient household.
ingredient household vs snack household
There are snacks households and then, there are ingredient households. In ingredient households, there are few ready-to-eat foods, but plenty of ingredients to make snacks or meals. For example, you won’t find a Chips Ahoy package, but you will see chocolate chips, flour, butter, etc. At dinner time, there are no Tyson Any’tizers Honey BBQ chicken bites but there are fresh chicken breasts in the freezer and honey and soy sauce in the cabinet.
Youtuber tiffanyferg breaks down what our household snacking patterns mean to us. From the comments under her video, there are a few reasons why some households are ingredients-only (from being too poor to afford packaged foods to being rich enough to afford quality ingredients). But what interests me is not why some households are ingredients-only, but rather, why some are full of ready-made foods. Anecdote after anecdote within the comments section if the video reveals it: time scarcity. Modern American adults spend significantly less time cooking than we did in the past. (In 1965, the average woman spent about two hours of her day on food preparation (Smith et al., 2013))! The problem with this, of course, is that foods prepared away from home generally are more calorie-dense, more sodium-dense, less fibrous and contain fewer vitamins than foods prepared at home (Guthrie et al. 2002).
With this in mind, it is no surprise that people who eat more foods prepared away from home have higher BMIs than people who eat more home-cooked foods (Seguin et al. 2016). The more ready-to-eat, ultra-processed food you eat, the more likely you are to be overweight.
Convenience is key. A lot of folks claim that cooking healthier foods at home takes too much time. Yes, cooking at home does require some effort, but generally speaking, it is easy! Check out my article about how to make cooking at home and being an ingredient household easy.