Consumers Union, now Consumer Reports, in the USA went into the 2nd half of last century continuing to extol the virtues of home made from costs to quality. From dinner to making clothes that fit to making rugged wooden toys for tots to … They almost became a satire on themselves that they would comment a houseperson could ‘save $1’ and get a better meal by spending 3 hours cooking from scratch rather than 20 minutes with a ‘shake and bake’, same with home made breads, or sewing a shirt for a fraction of the cost of buying one. Or … I hopefully don’t need to go on …
CU got an increasing number of letters accompanied by a slowly reducing audience that the choice was not always about saving a $1, or turning housepersons into chefs, carpenters or seamstresses, but was increasingly about having dinner or not having dinner since all the adults in households increasingly had to work to pays the bills, and nobody had 3 hours (not including the shopping or growing times to source ingredients) to make dinner after a days work and commute.
It is a good point that readers need to reflect that those who can often do, but they should not expect everyone to be able to do, or be interested to do, and more people today are interested in a broader range of foods in a time poor world and if one has all the ‘pantry ingredients’ required for a pinch of this and a splash of that, they may expire long before the purchase is used when in a small household; one often acquires what they can how they can and is satisfied.
For this topic, the latter put a demand on the market for 365 days availability of seasonal products, hence through the year we may get raw ingredients from local sources or wherever in the world they are in season and meet the manufacturers cost profile.
Idealism that something can be done is not misplaced, especially when ‘it’ is technologically possible, but never underestimate the costs associated with a disruption of traditional supply systems and additional layers of information where the political powers understand most of their constituency is more concerned that the ‘food’ is $3.00 as labelled, but might be $3.25 if additional information was mandated. Why? The first time a company got it wrong and was caught out, they know somebody would sue for misrepresentation or worse, and build that into their P/L.
Like others, I would like to know where every last ingredient came from. Maybe I have been assimilated but I along with some others do not accept it is practical to do so save for particular products, coffee beans or bulk rice being examples, where they come from limited places and are packaged as coffee bean or rice, not as complex foods with 10-20 ingredients, many seasonal and all subject to lowest cost sourcing.
