Health before wealth

Ever since I came across the phrase sanitas per escam, well, that is a motto that I have used a lot.  Even my food photographs on Facebook, before I took it all down, were in an album under that title.

My food photographs.  As in I made them. I took those photographs too.  And, yes, there was a separate album for foods made by M.

We continue to cook most of our meals.  And we continue to plate and serve in a manner that is pleasing to the eye as well.  We have simply stopped taking photographs.  We cook, we eat, and we enjoy.  Just like humans always did for the longest time.

Cooking and cleaning takes up time, of course.  No wonder I don't have time for Game of Thrones or whatever else that people are talking about.  Heck, I don't even get enough time in the day for me to play bridge online!

Well, yes, such tasty and healthy meals all the time means that I might live past 75, and die only at 99.6 years of age; but, that is a different problem for another day.

But, is spending time on Game of Thrones, or Facebook, or whatever else more important and valuable than cooking ones own meals?  Do people ask themselves this question?

The author of this op-ed argues something similar, by particularly aiming at what he refers to as The Prepared Food Industrial Complex.  Like the ones that young people rave about. Sometimes even the older ones.  But, ...

The $17 billion- a-year food delivery market is very flexible and well-intentioned like that. All these companies want to do is give me my life back by keeping me out of the kitchen — more time for YouTube, more time for CrossFit — and they’ve created myriad ways to do so.

I don't ever understand why time spent for cooking is a waste, and why time spent at the office or at a ballpark or in front of a digital screen is more valuable!

In fact, much of the P.F.I.C. pushes the idea that any time and any effort put into cooking is a waste. The goal, one meal kit company declares, is “saving time to make time — for everything else you want to do.” (Just so long as what you want to do isn’t “cook from scratch.”) Another meal kit service praises mail-order smoothies as a life-changing idea because there’s “no time to research, prep, buy, measure and blend before work.”

An acquaintance once joked that in most homes the kitchen is the most expensive real estate that is never used.  If only that was indeed a joke and not the reality!  Perhaps uber-clean stove-tops and ovens are no longer the result of prideful home-cleaning but merely a reflection of non-usage.

People who cook at home are conclusively healthier, consuming less sodium and fewer overall calories than people who mostly eat out. Cooking at home is better for the planet: it avoids the single-use plastics and paper goods that delivered food usually comes with, and with just a bit of creativity with leftovers, home cooking can be entirely free of food waste. Cooking is being studied as a promising tool for improving mental health, and even as a method for eliminating unhealthy behaviors such as smoking. And no matter what restaurant you order in from, there’s always a home-cooked meal that can be made for less money.

People seem to want to deny all these facts when they talk about the convenience of eating out all the time.  Crazy!

I am with the author when he writes:

Do I cook at home every day of the year? No. I love the burger at my favorite bistro too much to do that.

Yep. Same here.  Our burger bistros are different, however ;)

Sanitas per escam!