Having More Food Choices Actually Gives You Less Time

As a busy working mother, do you regularly struggle with the demands put upon you by your family at mealtimes? Gone are the days when there was a ‘one-pot feeds everyone’s situation, and although progress is a wonderful thing, in reality, the choice of food, diet, and with advanced technology, the choice of ways to cook it all, certainly creates more problems than it solves. Does having more food choices give you less time?

The Many Types of Food Choices

Everyone is different and makes different food choices, whether they have to for their health or they are trying to follow a specific diet. Take the average family, two adults, and two children. Within those four people, there could be someone with health issues with special dietary needs, a vegetarian, someone who dislikes vegetables, and someone who can only eat gluten-free food. What a nightmare for the person who does the cooking.

Trying to prepare a meal that will suit absolutely everyone in the house, seven days a week, is enough to drive you mad. The problem doesn’t just end with the evening meal, either. If your family also relies on a packed lunch to see them through the day, then you have to be somewhat inventive to ensure everyone has their diet catered for twice a day!

The food industry is rising to expectations for many consumers. There will be new food technology trends for 2020 that will see a lot of interesting new ideas coming to the marketplace.

Then Vs. Now

There are whole shelves in supermarkets for nothing but Gluten-Free foods, whole refrigerators just for Vegetarians, and virtually every supermarket has its own brand range of Plant-based ready meals. Yes, convenience food seems to be able to tick far more boxes for special diets, than good old fashioned organic food can. Yet arguably, fresh food is more healthy.

It wasn’t too long ago that our grandparents, and their parents before them, created virtually all their meals from homegrown and home-reared produce. Ready-made meals and convenience food hadn’t been invented yet, and there seemed to be far fewer diet-related illnesses in our society.

If you suddenly decided not to eat meat anymore, there really was no alternative. When a hearty stew was served at the table, you simply had to either eat it or eat around the meat. No luxurious substitutes were around back in the day.

Bread was always homemade in the traditional way, with traditional ingredients. It’s possible that the gluten wasn’t even recognized or understood. You made your bread with flour and yeast, and nobody questioned the outcome!

Have these advances in food technology been of benefit to us, or because of it, do we now give people too many labels? Do our children really become allergic to certain foods, or is it an excuse for saying that they simply don’t like the taste of them?

If you are the mom of a family who is following different diets, how do you feed your family and keep everyone happy at mealtimes?