Each family has staples. Often things naturally become staples to a family because of the availability, affordability, convenience and popularity. Typical examples are bread, breakfast cereals and peanut butter. They are affordable, convenient, ‘healthy’ (compared with, say, French fries or candy bars) and well accepted by the family members.
Some of those who want to improve their life quality try to change their eating habit. Often they start making own foods for better quality. Sometimes it is more economical, too.
I personally think it is a great thing, especially if the family is raising the child(ren). I am encouraging people to make their own foods more. However, I am also aware not everyone can make it so easily.
When you try to make more foods more regularly, you will face to these challenges: financial justification, availability of ingredients, time management and storage space. They are often related each other.
For example, the speed to consume the ingredients changes significantly. You realize a small bag of flour or salt doesn’t last as long as it used to be. Naturally you source out larger sized products that usually have a better price per weight. Then you face to the storage challenge. Your stock of foods all of a sudden becomes double if not more. And it is not uncommon to spoil some before you finish it.
Or to save the work, you make a large quantity at once. As you increase the quantity, you may realize the tools you have are not large or powerful enough. You purchase larger size mixing bowl, pot, food processor, etc. The storage challenge comes again (also watch out the financial challenge). Electric machines are quite useful for large quantity processing, but the more you get, the more room you need to store. Some are quite heavy or hard to clean up. Making a larger batch often takes much longer than a small batch. Although it may save time as the total, you spend a long time intensively at once. It can interfere with other regular activities such as regular meal preparation, spending time with children or possibly sleep (believe me, I have been testing on my own!).
My interest is how to improve the regular eating and overall life of an ordinary family. An ordinary family doesn’t have a commercial grade kitchen. The storage, workspace and/or equipments are not designed to handle 200 jars or 10kg meat at once and regularly. An ordinary family has a busy life as well. The family cook is not likely in the kitchen for 8 hours a day 5 days a week.
After all, making foods from scratch is work. To make the work more enjoyable and stress free, you need to know how much you want to do. A small change is easier to handle than a large one. If your goal is to improve the life quality, let’s make a small change consistently than try a large one and get discouraged. You may not make everything from scratch, but start from a small thing you can do. It may be simply adding chopped green onions into canned soup. It is a small but positive step!
My food making and eating habit is not perfect but has been improving. I am still going back and forth frequently between not-ideal products to ideal products with financial, time managing and/or entertaining reasons, but that is okay. The most important thing is to keep trying to eat as well as possible. More accurately, keep trying to live as well as possible. How you want to live is more important than how you are supposed to live.
Besides, making foods from scratch is fun! I hope you enjoy food making and eating as well.