re: Do you cook meals at home?

Most of our meals are cooked at home

We eat out about twice a month

On real busy days we will eat chicken nuggets & macaroni type meals

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Tonight I'm doing meat sauce in roasted eggplant, for example

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Being Italian and type II, I'm always looking for ways to eat red sauce over something other than pasta, this is my favorite.

My wife and I have always felt that cooking at home, especially when you are raising children, is important. Me were both working a lot of hours, but the time invested in home cooked meals pays a high dividend, in a lot of ways:

Nutritionally. Every meal does not have to be brown rice and kale, however, we never, ever, fried food at home. Grilling, when the weather permits it, can be healthy, low fat, and it keeps the stove clean. Soups and stews with a lot of veggies, saves money and it is easy to get multiple meals out of one pot. Keep the meals simple so the cleanup time is at a minimum. This is very important!! Cleanup time is as important as cook time, keep it simple.

Socially. The time you spend at the dinner table with your family, even if it is just you and you SO, is high priority time. In our child raising years the TV was the opposition, today, there is a lot more going against you, good luck in the battle against the evil forces. Now when we are eating at home or out, no phones at the table.

The home table is where you establish many of your values, how often to you see a family saying grace or teaching table manners in McDonalds? One of my proudest moments was when my 16 y/o son told me his friends called him "the food snob" because of his disdain for fast food crap. He enjoyed the label. He has two kids now, he is the super daddy chef, his kids are the most "unpicky" kids ever, they will try any new food.

Today it is just the two of us, yes, we eat out some, together about once a week, but we eat 90% of our meals at home, together, at our table. I cook, she cleans, we both like our roles.

My mantra has always been, I may get tired of cooking, but I never get tired of who I am cooking for.

Sorry for the long post, but I just think this is the wrong way to look at things.

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Joy, pleasure, enjoyment, a sense of accomplishment and shared cultural values can stem from practicing traditional foodways that some deem wrong/bad.

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This implies that in order to have joy, pleasure, enjoyment out of meals that you have to be cheating. But why eat the unhealthy dishes for pleasure, when there are also healthy foods that accomplish the same thing? I don't mean tofu and kale salad, I mean steak covered in butter (from cows raised right). There's no shortage of extremely delicious pleasurable dishes to be made, the challenge is that 1) people don't want to be inconvenienced with preparing them whether it's because of lack of time or laziness 2) people are unwilling to give up specific certain things ("well I'd eat right but I *just can't* give up my spaghetti! haha!").

IMO this "treat yoself, live a little" attitude around food prevents people from finding food habits that are both healthy and pleasurable. Comparing healthy eating to bulimia is ridiculous. If I took my eating habits to an obsessive extreme it'd just be expensive and time consuming and I'd have no time for anything else in my life -- I wouldn't be hiding from family members throwing up all my expensive hard work in toilets when no one is looking.

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Live long enough, and you’ll come to know many thin, “healthy” people felled by genetic predispositions to heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions, etc. We have come to blame eating/obesity for every damn thing in this country…..while it’s a terrible problem, obsessively eating according to whatever nutritional gospel you practice is not the answer to every health threat.

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Live long enough, and you'll come to find that nutritional science evolves over decades and many conditions doctors previously looked at, shrugged, and said "it must be genetics" in the past are actually being better understood, and it turns out our relationships with some foods are less healthy than we thought and our relationships with other foods are more healthy than we thought.

Nutritionists call those thin "healthy" people skinnyfat or TOFI (thin outside, fat inside) because they're suffering the effects of garbage food without the obesity. They were never healthy, despite being thin. You're right, obesity itself is over-blamed: We hear too many people say "I'm thin, so I don't need to worry about what I'm eating"

When I did "everything in moderation" I frequently had heartburn and IBS. My doctor shrugged and offered me pills and I had probes down my throat and up my arse. It was even affecting my sleep, which made me feel miserable, but whenever I brought this up to anyone (family, friends) all I ever got was "Yeah. It's called 'getting old!' Haha!" or "Yeah, grandpa had that problem too. It runs in the family!"

It wasn't until I cut out these types of foods that my health completely reversed. I don't mean things like cutting out fast food, I mean cutting out things that people are in this thread defending with the "oh shucks live a little" defense. I cut those carbs. I cut out specific vegetables containing lectins (unfortunately nightshades do which are some of the best vegetables like eggplant and bellpeppers) or pressure cooking them to inactivate the lectins. I take no medication anymore and in my mid-30s I feel better than I ever thought I could. I can go months eating clean cooked meals and when I have a cheat or two, I start to feel like shite again. I really wish I would have listened long ago about food and not had the "oh, a little bread ain't gonna hurt nobody!" attitude or mocked people for being gluten free or whatever. I want to tell people that so much of this isn't actually because "we're getting old now" or genetics, but now all I ever hear from people is: "Oh, you're being an extremist. Live a little!"

Nah, I'll keep on going feeling amazing and enjoying my new lease on life, thanks. And no matter how much mockery I get I'll keep encouraging others to better their lives through superior nutrition too. When you've always felt bad because that was your "normal" you have no idea how amazing it is to be truly healthy.

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Plenty of ancient ppl in Italy eat the hell outta pasta and bread..... plenty of ancient ppl all over Asia eat lots of white rice.

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I'm Italian American... pasta here is not pasta there, almost everything in America is made with some kind of synthetic ingredient or shortcut during the production. American pasta is made from hybridized wheat that is easier to grow with better yields but contains higher gluten levels. Italian law has strict standards on pasta and anyone who has eaten it in Italy can tell you it's a very different thing.

You are right about white rice... I mean, overeating it is still really bad, but brown rice is actually not good for you. The bran and germ present in brown rice contains arsenic and other toxins.

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Why the US is fat is far more complex than just carbs/what we eat.

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It's 90% of it. We put way too much focus on the pleasure and satisfaction of food. We need more vigilance about our nutrition, not less.

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hungryone

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Name checks out.

The amount of carbs we eat?

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The amount of carbs we eat?

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I think that's part of it, along with a lack of physical activity.

But as efrad pointed out, I think a large component is the type of carbs that we eat now. With limited exceptions, the bread, etc., that we eat today is not the same as what our grandparents ate.

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Live long enough, and you'll come to find that nutritional science evolves over decades and many conditions doctors previously looked at, shrugged, and said "it must be genetics" in the past are actually being better understood, and it turns out our relationships with some foods are less healthy than we thought and our relationships with other foods are more healthy than we thought.

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Good post and we have a pretty similar outlook on the importance of eating real food and nutrition in general. I wanted to highlight this because it's so important. People place far too much emphasis on muh genetics. Genetics may load the gun but behavior pulls the trigger.

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What about eating rice on Monday, pizza on Tuesday, cereal for breakfast three days a week, a sandwich with processed deli meat and bread a couple days a week, etc, etc?

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Sounds about like what I do except I eat a lot more rice than that

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This thread made me realize I haven't eaten much rice lately. I'm going to have to fix that.

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Cooking pork chops with white rice and gravy tonight and some fresh purple hull peas. Can't wait, I'm getting hungry thinking about it

Yes, unless we have visitors in town who want to try area restaurants.

This year we've been biking to places for lunches or happy hours once/twice monthly with friends and that's been fun.

On those nights, I plan to have leftovers for dinner so I don't need to cook per se.