Scratch That! Tips for Cooking Real Meals at Home

By Liza Baker

Want some good news about the pandemic?  Apparently, it’s finally gotten us to cook from scratch and eat at home more often. 

No mean feat since in 2013 the data points I used in my meal planning classes looked like this:

In 1900, 2% of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50% were eaten away from home.

Most family meals happen about 3x a week, last less than 20 minutes, and are spent watching television or texting.

Often, each family member eats a different microwaved “food,” or as nutrition professor Marion Nestle says, a UFO, an unidentifiable food-like object. 

In 2010, more meals were eaten in the minivan than the kitchen, and 1 in 5 breakfasts came from McDonald’s. 

What are the benefits of eating family meals—for kids and adults? According to Dr. Mark Hyman, MD and The Family Dinner Project, they are numerous:

Better academic/job performance

Higher self-esteem

Greater sense of resilience

Lower risk of substance abuse: Kids who eat family meals regularly are 42% less likely to drink, 50% less likely to smoke, and 66% less like to smoke marijuana.

Lower risk of teen pregnancy

Lower risk of depression

Lower likelihood of developing eating disorders

Lower rates of obesity

In summary, children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better health to better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. 

Why cook from scratch?

According to Sophie Egan in Devoured, March 2015 was a watershed moment in the eating lives of Americans: for the first time since the government began tracking our spending habits around food (1970), we spent more money on food prepared outside the home (restaurants, takeout, etc.) than on groceries that we cooked at home. 

Let’s take a look at some of the dangers in our reliance on processed foods, whether we’re talking about fast food or highly processed dressings, marinades, mixes, soups, and others:

Food prepared away from home—including processed/prepared ingredients that you cook with—is higher in saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol, and lower in dietary fiber than food prepared from scratch. 

Americans increased their away-from-home share of calories from 18% to 32% in the last three decades.

Calorie intake rose over the last three decades from 1,875 calories per person per day to 2,002 calories per day. That’s 127 calories extra per day, about 1 snack pack, or about 1 lb per month if we consider 1 lb is equivalent to about 3,500 calories.

Now let’s take a look at some stats from the CDC: 

From 1999–2000 through 2017–2018, US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 42.4%. During the same time, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.

Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, some of the leading causes of preventable premature death. 

Read related article: Healing with Nutrition

Did you know that 85% of our non-communicable diseases are lifestyle-related? That means that we can improve 85% of what ails us through diet and lifestyle.

The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was $147 billion in 2008. Medical costs for people who had obesity was $1,429 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight.

For any HR people out there, the annual costs of obesity-related absenteeism range between $79 and $132 per obese individual, so if you have 1,000 obese employees, your productivity costs could be between $8,000–$132,000 per year. And that doesn’t include “presenteeism”—lost productivity even though they are at work! Makes you rethink that vending machine…or at least what’s in it.

I think you can’t really dispute that the rise in obesity and related health issues is traceable to our eating habits. Can we agree that cooking from scratch and eating family meals are two very important health goals? 

“But it’s so harddd.”

When I ask people why they don’t cook from scratch more often, that’s the response I normally get. If we can move beyond that answer, the top reason most people list is time. As in lack of.

Developing a home cooking practice requires us to rethink our relationship with the kitchen, with cooking classes, with social media (@Pinterest, @Instagram), and with food.

As a country, we do love those cooking shows. We’ll spend an hour—or go down a rabbit hole and binge for hours—on our favorite while on average, spending less than 30 minutes on making dinner.

Ask any cooking-show-streaming Americans who their kitchen idol is, and they’ll immediately toss out a name—from Julia Child to Guy Fieri, Anthony Bourdain to Mary Berry.

Let’s take a look at what these idols dish up “right in front of our eyes”—with hours of pre-prep and a large number of staff. Or did you think reality television means it’s real?

Oh, you don’t get your inspiration from cooking shows—you go to Pinterest and Instagram?

Why is that a mistake? Because that tells me that when you need to make dinner, you’re going to browse all those beautiful photos (and probably go down another rabbit hole for hours), find a recipe, go to the grocery store (more time and money than you planned on more things you don’t need), come home, unload the groceries …and then realize you either forgot something or you’re just too tired to start now. Besides, takeout is so easy. I kid you not: I tend to get takeout the days I restock my fridge. I know.

If you do make dinner as planned, there’s a pretty good chance that it won’t turn out looking like the photograph that caught your eye: there are way too many people posting recipes who are better photographers than recipe writers. 

I took an entire class on writing recipes and menus in culinary school, and unless you’re savvy enough to catch the mistakes and make the adjustments on the fly, you’ll be very sad that you “failed”—and really unwilling to try again.

Top tips for cooking from scratch at home

Cooking from scratch really does get easier: think of it as a practice, like a yoga practice, a mindfulness practice, a gratitude practice, like practicing the piano, like practicing for a presentation at work.

If you have kids who are picky eaters, finding a (healthy) meal they love is a gift, not a curse. Repeat it. Often. 

Where can you find simple, repeatable recipes? My favorite place (other than in my own cookbook, Flip Your Kitchen) is in the older cookbooks—the ones that were given to women when they were getting ready to set up their own household: Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker…. Focus on the older editions, though—avoid anything from the 1960s on, when processed foods suddenly became “ingredients.” The added advantage of these cookbooks is that their instructions are very basic, and they don’t assume you have all the latest appliances.

The biggest advantage of having a repertoire of simple recipes is that your grocery shopping becomes simpler, and you can stock up on dry goods that you will need every week. Once you have them in your pantry, you won’t have to run to the store each time you want to cook.

If you find a recipe that can be made ahead in whole or in part and frozen, that’s a double bonus: save yourself more time by making a double or triple batch—it won’t add much time, and it’ll save on dishes.

Be gentle with yourself: you don’t need to develop this practice or even your list of recipes overnight—just keep them handy in your kitchen or on your tablet and keep adding to them. 

Consider designating each day of the week so “What’s for dinner?” becomes less of a challenge when your fuse is short at the end of a working day: Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Pasta Wednesday (isn’t that Prince Spaghetti night?) And don’t forget to include a night where you finish all the leftovers in the fridge and a night for takeout—you deserve it after cooking all week!

Save the Iron Chef/Pinterest recipes for the weekend, when you don’t have hungry hordes breathing down your neck as you wrestle with unfamiliar ingredients and methods.

Liza Baker is a health coach and employee wellness consultant. You can learn more about her at simply-healthcoaching.com. Learn more about her class offerings and register at eventbrite.com/o/simply-health-coaching-35250356233.

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