Cooking? Don't look at me. But wait...

So often nowadays, whether it's at work or in the paper or on TV or wherever, there's a lot of discussion about the nation's health and how we're all rapidly turning American. As "convenience" foods have become much more readily available over the recent decades, people have forgotten how to cook. Worse still, they've forgotten how to pay attention to what they're eating.

When was the last time you looked at (and understood) the ingredients label when you buy something? Then consider the last time you just grabbed something and shoved it down your neck without taking any (or very little) notice of what it is or what it contains or how it was made or where it came from. There will be exceptions (our mate Danny for instance has woken up to this brilliantly and taken it a lot further) I'll bet in most cases the latter was a lot more recent and frequent.

It's generally accepted that the stuff we eat is not very good. It's full of chemicals (prompting the recent studies on whether we are "poisoning our kids" - not that I have any to poison) and often pre-cooked to oblivion so that most of the nutrients have been cooked out of them. Then we shove it in the microwave and blast it with radiation to 'cook' it. Before wolfing it down as quickly as possible so that we can get on with something else.

You can't rely on the government to look after us either, as a lot of people seem to do. It'd take a long time and a lot of red tape to finally and officially declare a particular ingredient or chemical (or even a particular product/company) as damaging, and meanwhile the damage has been done. Whilst it's not food, look at how long it took to offically acknowledge that tobacco can have serious long-term effects even though we already knew/strongly suspected it to be the case.

I sometimes wonder how nice it would be if we chose quality *fresh* (likely organic) ingredients and took the time to cook proper meals, then sat down with family and/or friends and treated it as more of an everyday social occasion. Quality, nutritional, enjoyable and non-damaging food? Sounds good. A time to sit down with the family and catch up with each other and talk about things? Sounds a good idea too.

Problem is it's easy to say - and many of us as a nation are indeed saying it, shortly before strolling to the microwave to shove another instant meal in. I'm definitely more guilty than most, making this seem a highly hypocritical article, as I just let everyone else do the cooking instead of taking the time and effort to practice it and do some myself.

A large part of it is of course time. In the oldern days the women stayed at home and did all the housework and had all day to prepare food. Now with the more modern society involving equal opportunities and most women working, that's no more. Now all members of the household come home after a long day's work (or school/uni or whatever) and the last thing anybody wants to do after a hard day at work is a chore such as cooking, we all want to relax. So what do we do, we chuck an instant meal in the microwave (or let our parents get on with it) and wolf it down so we can get on with something else.

With pressure from the other people in our social and professional networks to "hurry up and eat", it's difficult to take the time even if you wanted to. There's always someone waiting and pressuring for you to get back to work, or to get out to a social event earlier (or in our increasingly technological society, get back to them on IM or an online world) or whatever else so we just can't find the time.

So what can we do about it?

Is the answer to try and get the nation interested in cooking and proper food rather than treating it as a chore? How?

Feel free to discuss in comments.