Not everybody has the time or means to cook healthy meals from scratch, so let’s not pretend it’s that simple.
Healthy eating is an endlessly complex topic that often gets distilled into sound bites—some short directive that assigns a simple solution to a myriad of problems. For example: Just cook more. These days, home cooking is presented as the holy grail of healthy eating, and the way to meet every dietary ideal we're supposed to be working toward—whether it's what we should be eating less of or what we should be eating more of .
To be clear, nutritious home cooking isn’t a bad thing—experts generally agree that eating mostly unprocessed food can lead to better health outcomes, and it’s easier to control what you’re eating if you cook at home. But presenting it as an easy solution or even as a choice that everyone can make isn’t helpful. It might actually be harmful.
“People are already confused about what healthy eating is, and now a lot of people think it’s about re-creating all of the beautiful, trendy food they see on Instagram.” A lot of this food is very whitewashed, Melton says. It’s also expensive and often made by food professionals and influencers who are paid to cook and photograph it.
But what these lower-income households are cooking may not actually live up to the ideal of a wholesome meal cooked from scratch. In the book Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It, authors Sarah Bowen, Ph.D., Joslyn Brenton, Ph.D., and Sinikka Elliott, Ph.D.
Federal food assistance programs like SNAP are designed to help low-income individuals buy food they couldn’t otherwise afford, but these benefits can only go so far. Processed foods are generally cheaper than unprocessed or minimally processed foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and meats.
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