By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine
Sales of lazy foods such as peeled potatoes, chopped carrots and diced onions are on the rise. But is there anything wrong with us taking a culinary shortcutThink of the percentage of your life that is ebbing away as you peel a potato.
Get the potato out of the bag. Trim off any sproutings. Maybe turn on a tap. Peel it.
It is perhaps no surprise that potato peeling was a classic punishment for those on jankers in the Army.
“It’s not like chopping an onion requires any great skill, but people tell themselves they are too busy”
Lesley Ball, home economist
To many, peeling potatoes is a boring way to spend a few minutes that you would rather spend reading a book, watching a film or with your family.
In the UK, there are people who really can’t be bothered with the most basic of culinary chores. Figures out this week from the price comparison website mysupermarket.co.uk suggest there has been an increase over the past two years in the amount of money spent on a basket of “lazy food” products like grated cheese, sliced fruit and ready chopped vegetables.
Speak to a retailer like Waitrose, which has a varied range of “lazy food” and cooking “cheat” ingredients, and the picture is fleshed out.
The upmarket chain - which is rare in releasing very detailed sales data - has experienced a 40% rise in sales of peeled potatoes compared with a year ago. Diced onions are up 14%. Their butternut squash/sweet potato mix has seen a 29% increase. Across all prepared vegetables there has been a 17% rise.
It is all part of a wider trend - albeit one that might have been disrupted by the recession - towards more convenience food, says Ronan Hegarty, news editor of The Grocer magazine.
"It is just a question of people wanting a lot more choice. They are not being lazy but eating at different times, maybe looking for something easy to prepare at work.
"These are often more expensive alternatives, perhaps people aren’t as affected by the recession as many would have predicted.
“Retailers like M&S Simply Food and Tesco Express have a high proportion of people on the move. Convenience is definitely still on the rise.”
Lazy cooks
Some of the more extreme examples of “lazy food” might be seen to indicate a decline in culinary skills.
When in 1998 Delia Smith told viewers how to boil an egg, many pundits were incredulous, with chef Gary Rhodes accusing her of insulting people’s intelligence. And yet last year, the pundits got another chance to throw up their hands in horror when pre-boiled eggs went on sale in supermarkets.
“Lazy food” conforms to one of the classic socioeconomic categories of modern times - the people who are cash-rich but time-poor. But there are some people who rue the decline of chopping and peeling.
Lesley Ball, a Wiltshire-based home economist who teaches children about healthy eating and food provenance, says ready-prepared ingredients distort our perception of food and where it comes from.
"I work with children a lot and some of them think milk comes from a tiger or a chicken. Some products, such as ready-prepared mango, melon or passionfruit are great for giving to children to introduce them to new tastes without having to buy a whole one, but they then don’t have a clue what a whole mango looks like.
“This happens even with something as simple as an orange. They associate food not with something that’s grown, but with a shop.”
There is inevitably a certain disappointment that people don’t embrace the culinary process.
"I’m amazed that things like ready-chopped carrots and onions are even on sale. It’s not like chopping an onion requires any great skill, but people tell themselves they are too busy. Whenever I work in supermarkets, I look at who buys these products and it’s typically professionals, young to middle-aged.
“These ready-prepared ingredients have produced lazy cooks - they think they don’t have the time to make real food. But cooking is a bit of ritual, it’s a process to start from the beginning with ingredients you prepare yourself. Preparation is an important part of cooking. You get a feel for what you are making. And food tastes better when it’s made from scratch.”
And she has a pet hate. “Roast potatoes in the freezer. It’s not difficult to make roast potatoes - you can just cut up potatoes and put them in the oven with olive oil.”
There’s a clear environmental issue with the rise of “lazy food”. Diced onions come in a plastic bag. An un-diced onion comes in its own natural packaging - onion skin.
Rosalind Rathouse, principle of London’s Cookery School, isn’t surprised by the rise in sales of so-called lazy food - seeing it as a reflection of how people are distanced from the cultivation of what we eat.
Many of those passing through her cookery classes have little idea about seasonality and sustainability of ingredients.
“You can see for busy people why they choose these foods. It’s one-step before a ready-made sauce so in that sense it’s not as bad. It’s a short-cut and I think not for people who truly love food, but just want to fill their stomachs.”
Has she ever bought chopped carrots “Never. I wouldn’t ever buy pre-prepared carrots. You want the freshest possible carrots you can have. You don’t want it to have been through a machine and packed up in a plastic bag with gas to keep it fresh.”
But what about the nutritional side Are ready prepared vegetables and fruit not as good for us as the untouched real thing
“One or two vitamins are very labile. It means that they are very easily destroyed,” says Judy Buttriss, director general of the British Nutrition Foundation. “If you cut something like cabbage or green pepper, those cut surfaces will gradually lose the vitamin.”
But the good news for the convenience fans is that this isn’t every vitamin. Ms Buttriss notes that vitamin C and folic acid can be partly lost with exposure to the air, but struggles to think of any others that we might lose from our green stuff. And even in those cases, it’s better than nothing.
“If it’s causing them to eat more fruit and vegetables as a result it’s a good thing.”
The use of mild bleach to wash bagged salads has raised eyebrows in the past, but on the nutritional front at least it’s not easy to condemn prepared vegetables.
This is not the unhealthy end of convenience food. That space belongs to your typical high-salt, high-fat ready meal.
This “lazy food” is most typically a cooking shortcut, not a pierce-film-and-microwave bit of cooking avoidance.
And indeed it might be argued we all have a sliding scale between what we think is acceptable convenience and what we deem to be an unreasonably decadent expense.
Some people might laugh at the idea of a pre-boiled egg, but how many people insist on shelling their own peanuts
Peeled cloves of garlic may seem a little lax, but who currently wants their chickens with the heads still on and covered in feathers.
The whole idea of buying your food has an intrinsically “lazy” element. You didn’t kill it or grow it yourself.
The concept of the supermarket is a further slide into laziness. It obviates the need to trawl round the butcher, the baker and greengrocer.
But there will always be occasions when “lazy food” goes too far and becomes an object of mockery.
“One thing I’ve always balked at is a pre-sliced apple,” says Hegarty. “Who is too scared to approach a full apple”
Additional reporting by Megan Lane and Jonathan Duffy
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