Instant turkey, anyone?
America gobbles up pre-pre-prepared convenience food.
By Mary Ellin Lerner
Feeling guilty about ordering a cooked turkey for this Thursday? Wondering if you can sneak pre-blanched potatoes, salad in a bag and peeled baby carrots past Grandma? Well, you'll have plenty of company on Thanksgiving.
As millions of Americans head into the kitchen for the biggest culinary challenge of the year, many will take shortcuts with a cornucopia of pre-washed, pre-chopped and pre-cooked ingredients.
Easy edibles are where the action is. Convenience foods are the biggest trend to hit the supermarket since the light and healthful food fad of the '90s.
Grocery stores are overflowing with the fast fodder known in the trade as "meal solutions": squeezable yogurt, tuna in a pouch, pre-cooked strips of chicken breast. Shelf after shelf of one-dish meals for 'waving, boiling, baking or frying in minutes: Uncle Ben's Rice Bowls, Campbell's Supper Bakes, Borden's It's Pasta Anytime. Gustatory globetrotters can choose from prepared dinners with Indian, Mexican and Asian flavors, while vegetarians can opt for meatless potpies, pizzas and pockets. Gourmet chef Wolfgang Puck, who already offers frozen pizzas, is expanding into ready-to-serve soups and frozen entrees.
Bag salads are a $1.4 billion business, up 80% over five years ago, according to statistics quoted in Food Engineering magazine. In the same period, annual sales of refrigerated dinners and side dishes more than doubled.
"Convenience permeates every category of the supermarket now," says Lisa Allen of the Grocery Manufacturers of America. "Who would have thought it was inconvenient to wash a head of lettuce? Now we can't imagine doing that; we open up a bag."
Pre-fab produce is teaching a new botany lesson to the next generation, she says. "Kids aren't going to know that a carrot grows in the ground with a little green stalk on it. They think it comes peeled, mature and ready to eat."
And indeed, new food is being invented for convenience. "We used to think that cold cereal was convenient," she says. "Now people are eating breakfast bars."
Portable foods cater to a burgeoning group of one-handed eaters who use the other to grip a computer mouse, push buttons on a cellphone or steer a car. Kalorama Information, a New York-based research group, predicts that food with handles will be a $2 billion business by 2002. That is good news for Breakaway Foods of Columbus, Ohio, inventors of IncrEdibles - an innovative one-dish meal of either pasta or eggs encased in a wrapper; the food is pushed up and eaten like an ice cream cone or popsicle. Think macaroni and cheese on a stick.
Experts trace the popularity of foods that meld comfort and convenience to the growing number of single-parent households and two-career families. "It isn't that we have less time," says Harry Balzer, vice president of NPD Group, a consumer marketing research firm. "We just want to allocate it differently."
We crave the warmth of an affable repast but don't want to work for it. "People want to be able to sit down at a meal together but not spend a lot of time on preparation and cleanup," says Tim Hammonds, president and CEO of the Food Marketing Institute. The group's research shows that the very definition of cooking has changed from making meals from scratch to assembling prepared ingredients. "The baby boomers [born between 1946 and 1964] were the last generation that really learned to cook. My daughter, for instance, who is 29, likes to prepare something I call Ding Chicken. She puts it in the microwave, and ding, it's done."
That ubiquitous chime is an alarm to Peter Berley, caterer, cooking teacher and author of The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen (Regan Books, $35). He considers convenience food dehumanizing. "Not to cook, not to receive nourishment from someone who has cooked with fresh ingredients, is to lose an essential part of ourselves," says Berley, who is working on a book of easy seasonal menus and recipes to help harried people create fresh meals in less than an hour. "We're losing our awareness of our dependence on nature, our tactile connection to the environment."
Nutritionist Jayne Hurley, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, worries that we are missing out on important nutrients as well. "Do convenience foods help or hurt your diet? It depends on what you pick," she says. Although she gives a thumbs-up to prepared fresh vegetables, she notes some convenience foods, such as certain breakfast bars, are high in fat and sugar.
Beth Olson, who
teaches nutrition at Michigan State University, believes smart shoppers
can have it all - convenience and nutrition - if they:
 Look for prepared foods high in fiber and vitamins A and C but low in fat and sugar.
Choose fresh pre-cut vegetables, frozen vegetables, canned fruit packed in juice, lean pre-sliced meats, quick-cooking brown rice and one-dish meals that contain vegetables.
Add fresh vegetables to prepared entrees.
Mary Ellin Lerner last wrote for the magazine about the great American pumpkin.
collage: Food by Tim Webb, Laughing-stock; wand by eyewire
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