While skimming Australia’s version of Women’s Fitness magazine (which by the way is so much better than our American counterpart, IMO), I was shocked to find the following advertisement by Lean Cuisine:
My initial reaction was, to be dramatic, flabbergasted. I was so disappointed in where the future of nutrition, cooking, and specifically home-cooked family meals is headed, as symbolized by this ad. If all a successful women requires is a microwave, where does a healthy, home-cooked meal, served and enjoyed at the dinner table by her whole family, without the television blaring in the background, fit in?
I have always placed high importance on enjoying meals with your loved ones, both for the influence this has on nutrition and quality bonding time. Yes, in this instance, I am advocating for social food. (Just don’t confuse this with sitting around a bowl of French fries and potato chips with friends just for fun.)
While I certainly recognize that our world and the role of women in this world is swiftly changing (shout out to all those female breadwinners out there!), we must still continue to honor and remember the tradition of healthy home-cooked meals – whoever’s cooking. What happened to sitting down to a freshly baked chicken, discussing everyone’s day, current events, politics, etc.?
Secondly, if we disregard the importance of real food and real mealtime together, we will instead start a tradition of laziness, inability to cook, and an addiction to processed, fake food. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty bleak future filled with overweight, sick and lazy people, robotically popping in another microwave TV dinner, forgetting where real food even comes from. Do we really want our future generations to be so ignorant that they assume food comes from a plastic box, rather than a local farm? What if your kids thought chicken nuggets are made from Ronal McDonald rather than from a free-range chicken on a family farm? Actually, sadly this is already probably true of many kids today. We need to remember what food really is, where it comes from, how to prepare it in a nutritious way, and how to share it with our families. That way we can not only stay healthy, but stay industrious, rather than ignorant!
Furthermore, besides creating a culture of food-ignorance and laziness with microwave meals galore, what about the impact on our nutrition for future generations? Did you know that everything you eat, your drinking habits, your obsession with chocolate and your infatuation with Pringles will be passed on to your children? As a child’s body develops inside its mothers, it’s experience with the mother’s environment, with regards to her food intake, metabolism, etc. will be learned and adapted to. If your body has adapted to a less-than-desirable diet of microwaveable pasta dinners and sugary Starbucks drinks, your baby’s body will develop accordingly, because that’s all it knows. Now that’s a way to feel guilty about eating something unhealthy!
Now let’s take one last look at this Lean Cuisine lady. I am well aware that everyone holds a differing definition of success, but to me, accomplishment and hard work is a universal component. It seems quite contradictory to attempt to say that a woman who goes through the drudgingly painful effort of grabbing a Lean Cuisine meal from the frozen section of the grocery, poking a hole in the plastic so her cardboard meal doesn’t implode, and setting the microwave to 2-3 minutes, is the image of success. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe some people really do feel a deep sense of accomplishment from using microwaves to cook their factory-fresh food. However, I know personally that resorting to a card, frozen dinner would most certainly elicit feelings of extreme laziness and un-healthiness. All I am attempting to convey is that I don’t believe we should condone or value this type of woman as the image of success today.
Let’s embrace and embolden those women who manage to not only succeed in the workplace, but those who succeed in the kitchen as well, with home-cooked, real-food meals. Let’s get back in the kitchens, back to real foods, and back to the dinner table. Let’s get back to the basics – as a real successful woman would do.
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