ingredient households & what our snacks say about us | Internet Analysis
let's discuss ingredient households & SNACKING! // You can thrift my thredUP picks at tdup.co/TIFFANY and use my code TIFFANY for an extra 40% off and free shipping on your first order. (Offer expires 7/1/23. Applies to US & Canada customers only. See site for full terms). This video is sponsored by thredUP!
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TIME STAMPS:
0:00 - were you a snack or ingredient household?
3:39 - shout out to thredUP!
5:38 - is "ingredient household" an American concept?
7:36 - comparing US snack habits to European snacks
9:42 - my audience survey results
10:46 - what about snack households?
12:35 - food deserts and Dollar Stores
14:37 - shaming people for having "bad" food
16:16 - "you should cook from scratch"
19:02 - the politics of home-cooked meals
20:45 - how our upbringing impacts our future habits
21:58 - my personal experience, what kind of household am I?
RESOURCES & REFERENCES:
Do you live in an 'ingredient household'? - www.wate.com/news/watercooler...
I Don't Make The Rules: If These Were Your Go-To Snacks, You Were Raised In An "Ingredient-Only" House - www.buzzfeed.com/sarathompson...
Nielsen Snack Attack report - www.nielsen.com/wp-content/up...
As Dollar Stores Proliferate, Some Communities Say No - www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/bu...
Dollar General Is Putting Local Grocery Stores Out Of Business (VICE News) - • Dollar General Is Putt...
"All Of Our Foods Are Going Into Trash": The Slaton Sisters' Big Clean-Up | 1000-lb Sisters - • "All Of Our Foods Are ...
Supernanny | Mom Flips Out When Supernanny Takes Away Junk Food - • Supernanny | Mom Flips...
Grocery Shop France With Me (Markets and Stores) - • Grocery Shop France Wi...
Return of the Ableist Narrative: Why do we keep having to demand food accessibility? - crippledscholar.com/2017/03/1...
Tiffany Ferguson (she/her), 27 years old. #internetanalysis #ingredienthousehold #groceryshopping
Business Inquiries: tiffanyferguson@select.co
Captions / video transcription by: / slowxmoxpanda (She is looking for more caption work, so feel free to reach out to her on Twitter!)
FTC: This video is sponsored by thredUP. Links with * are affiliate, meaning I am compensated monetarily if you join or make a purchase.
hello, hope you all enjoy today's episode! I must ask, if you're eating while watching... what are you snacking on??
An almond magnum!!
Sour patch kids currently
Could you do a video on camping culture surrounding concerts? I'd love to see your take on it!
A Snickers bar!
Lunch! Bean salad and funyuns 💀
Growing up I’ve realised how important the concept of being “time poor” is. Getting fast food on a Thursday night meant my mum had time to take us to a local park & ensure we got exercise and time together. Ready made meals meant my siblings and I could make frozen lasagne/pasta and still have time to do our homework and chores when our parents weren’t home because they worked long hours.
That’s a good descriptor for it! My family was by no means poor growing up but my single father was certainly time poor. He was frequently gone for weeks and just trusted us to keep ourselves fed from pretty early on. With 3 older brothers, the day of the grocery trip was basically the only day we had snacks in the house. I used to eat canned soup or rice with assorted random steamed vegetables (after I figured out how to cook them) for dinner so many times… my dad just never got around to teaching me or any of my brothers how to cook anything, except pancakes lol
This is the stage of life I am in with my little family (me, husband, and 4yr old). My husband’s work schedule necessitates him working until mid-evening (between 6-8pm), whereas I get off work in the afternoon (3-5pm). I get to pick up our daughter from preschool, and I would much rather throw a frozen meal into the oven then read or play with her until it’s ready. Usually by that time, dad is home. We try to all eat dinner together. We do buy fruit/veggies for snacking, but we also have lots of snacks that my mom used to call “lunchbox fillers”: granola bars, squeeze pouches, cheese sticks, packaged crackers/chips, etc. I buy food that will not require me to spend more time preparing, cooking, and cleaning dishes when I could be playing with my little girl.
Yep. My dinners are all premade on Sundays so I can just heat and go on the workdays. But even that time to premake is something not all people have.
Wow, I really felt this. I grew up with a single mom who worked full-time. Never went hungry, but I realized as an adult that there were people who'd never eaten frozen dinners more than just a couple nights a week. I grew up on a lot of quick cook meals like frozen dinners with frozen veggies because they were easy and quick to prepare.
@dawert2667 oof ik your dad was strapped for time but that's borderline neglectful. None of you even knew how to cook
Still can't get over the fact that my mom called me at college last semester and triumphantly announced that we were no longer an ingredient household as she had just bought a bag of popcorn for the pantry
🤣🤣🤣🤣
😂😂😂
You mean people actually use the term “ingredient households”
That's so adorable😭😭
As a European, learning about food deserts in the US made a lot of pieces fall into place. Like for me one of the cheapest and easiest ways to fill my tummy is beans, carrots and apples. I had no idea that would be luxurious or even impossible to get, for some ppl.
@@hctompkins those aren't fresh produce though. I assumed OP meant fresh carrots, apples and (green) beans.
Not necessarily. Some rural towns still have rules against chickens and many people don't have the time or know how to grow their own produce. While I agree that it's more common for rural people to practice these things, it's definitely not everyone or even the majority.
It is strange, but yeah, different parts of the world have different scarcities. I've heard that most fresh fruit is really expensive in Japan and South Korea, for example.
@@bib4eto656 funny you say that as I'm living in Japan now and it's very true.:')
I'm from a small town in Arkansas (USA) and people had gardens but you had to know those people well for those people to share and most people are poor so not a lot of people had land for chickens and gardens. People help people make it for sure but I rarely had fresh produce. You could go to a Walmart and get veggies but it was so expensive. Since moving to an urban area outside of the south I have found eating healthier much easier and cheaper. I also noticed I lost weight without being more active.
Another important point: I have depression and often struggle to make food. Sometimes microwaving something is all I can do, and even that comes with dishes to wash. At my lowest, I have snacks or nothing
Depending on what it is, if you put a layer of toilet paper or a napkin on the plate under your food, you don't need to wash the plate.
i was literally going to say, some of y’all have never been depressed and it shows lol
Snacks will always be better than nothing
I literally buy cheap paper plates and cook with foil or parchment lining my pans and such. I rarely wash dishes and eat stuff like baked chicken and potatoes with roasted veggies and such. I may have to wash a fork unless I can afford some plastic ones. Not great for the environment, but great for my mental health. People say "wow look at all that delicious food, I wish I had the energy" but literally I've probably just tossed some frozen shit in a pan and cooked it till it looks browned and tasty and haven't washed a single dish.
I have similar issues. Weird as it sounds, sometimes my easiest solution when I can't even contemplate cooking for myself a "real dinner", is I make myself breakfast. Something about making scrambled eggs and/or pancakes both makes me happy and is an easier dinner than the thought of anything else 😅
My mom was always going between being on and off a diet, so we would have periods of being both types. It created this mentality of “get it while you can” that I still have lots of trouble with. I have to constantly reassure myself that I can get more if I need to, and that nobody is going to take it away.
Yeah, that was my experience too. Sometimes I go to my parents house and there's 4 different kinds of cookies and sometimes I'm snacking on raw almonds and seed crackers with tunafish. We also had more trouble affording snacks when I was younger - my mom gained like 30 pounds when she got a new job and could suddenly afford to go to Target and buy $100 worth of goodies that lasted 2 days.
Yeah, I feel this. We were poor growing up and had a few years of eating food shelf food. So having that combined with my mother’s journey with an undiagnosed unmanaged eating disorder… it was fun. Lol.
oh my god, this was my childhood to a tee. add on the fact that I grew up as the youngest out of 5 children, no wonder I feel a weird sense of urgency around snack foods.
Similar experience here, except my brother had type 1 diabetes so we rarely had “bad” food. Cake, chocolate, chips were all special occasion foods so they were placed on a pedestal in my little brain and I would consume as much as possible. When I started working as a teen, I would often buy junk food and binge. I’m still deconstructing these food beliefs and habits as a 27 year old. I’ve actually found following dieticians who specialise in children really helpful (shout out to kidseatincolor). I now try to approach all food and snacks as “no big deal” and “I can have more tomorrow”. Hopefully I don’t pass on my crazy eating habits to my future children…
Reading this made me burst into tears. I feel so seen
I grew up in an ingredient household as a kid, which led to me eating snacks like a crazy person whenever I went to sleepovers, and me being an adult with my own home that has a really hard time with impulse control. Whenever we did have snacks, we knew my dad would eat all of it that day so we were basically encouraged to eat it all that day before my dad did. It was terrible
It's wild to see the shared experience of dads eating the family food supply and the family having to work together to either hide the snacks or enjoy them before they eat it all is. I remember my dad would DEVOUR our "fun snacks" as soon as we got a food stamps food haul
Omg same. I remember one year I got a tin of biscuits for Christmas and I went away for a week to visit my Grandparents, and when I got back home my dad had eaten the entire tin of biscuits and didn't even apologise? I was maybe ten. I didn't get to eat even one. My brother is exactly the same, so whether we were staying with mum or dad, there were never any tasty snacks in the house. If we did get biscuits, they would immediately all get eaten. It was particularly triggering when I moved in briefly with my dad and brother when I was going to university, and all the food I bought for myself would also unapologetically get eaten. Needless to say, as soon as I could move out, I did.
Oh god this is so real
@@magentafox1657 not sure it’s in the realm of possibility to talk to a professional but that level of difficulty in eating foods because of a fear of contamination sounds disordered. As for not being able to eat a carrot or apple due to limited jaw strength, that won’t resolve itself on its own…
I grew up in a house with three voracious brothers. You learned to eat it quickly or you wouldn’t get any. It sets eating habits that last a lifetime.
As a Polish person ,I think a lot of households keep snacks such as cookies or sweets in general if any guests come over. The culture of hospitality is still huge here so from what I've seen sweet snacks are mostly kept for your guests. Salty snacks however are a sort of party snacks. Salted cucumbers are a thing here too and I personally love it.
Also like every chocolate that is deemed very good is stored ‘just in case’ you will go to someone to gift it (at least that was in my case) so you would wait until it was short of expiration date to eat this
I'm Serbian and it's the same over here, at least that's how I grew up :)
Im mexican and same, eveytime Im having friends over I got o the supermarket for some snacks and soda because otherwise there will be none, and its fine by me, it makes me feel like this more fun to eat snacks in company of other people, sometimes its even part of the day for me and my friends to go together and choose what we are gonna eat
I really really appreciate you mentioning disabled folks in this! I have periods of time where I’m so dizzy I can’t cook and I have to remind myself that there is no inherent morality in food. Convenience foods are so important for myself and many other disabled folks!
As someone with arfid and other health issues that keep me from cooking, this is so important. I would literally not eat for days if I didn't have access to convenience foods that people consider "junk."
Oh yeah I have POTS and sometimes dinner is popcorn and cheetos 🤷♀️
I agree with this so much! I have POTS and other various things, so it's 9pm and I haven't eaten anything yet because I've had this killer migraine all day and if I were to get up I know I'd probably pass out. What I ate today was straight up a few frozen mini wontons and a small bowl of whipped cream because I was worried about my sugar getting too low. That's all I've had today. Also POTS is sometimes really helped by increasing your salt intake, so I NEED the saltiest foods I can get, and more often than not, I achieve that by eating potato chips, and it genuinely makes me feel better
I’m autistic and have what I call “ARFID tendencies” (I had ARFID ish anorexia for like a decade but I’m fairly recovered now) and sometimes my food fixations/ what I’m willing to eat arent “healthy”. I’d rather eat something than literallynothing
My best friend had a grand mal seizure so bad she cracked her spine. If she hadn't had convenience food, she wouldn't have been able to feed herself long enough to recover.
what i'm thankful for in the philippines is what we call "karenderya". it's a small market or roadside cafe or food stall restaurant. it has affordable home-cooked meals that helps a lot of students and office workers who don't have the luxury to prepare food from scratch. also it's a community because you see almost the same people everyday so you actually befriend the customers even the owners haha
as a Polish woman growing up in the 90s - there were only ingredients in my house. A cucumber sprinkled with salt was a snack for me OR apple slices or a tomato and onion sandwich (yum). Lay's paprika flavoured chips were a rare treat. edit: writing this as I am snacking on a pickle lol
cucumber with salt, loved that as a kid! i'm slavic too :)
Another 90s Slav baby, and same. I recently moved into a new apartment and my first purchase included emergency pickles in case i feel peckish. 😅 I'm also a rampant fruit addict because those were treated as snacks in my house growing up. I could eat my weight in tangerines.
I’m also a polish woman and 100% agree, we had ingredients only and snacks were often made by grandma from scratch. My fave were seasonal fruits sprinkled with sugar (strawberries, plums) or cucumber with honey, it tasted kinda like melon
Lol I still remember having my first kabanos (dry smoked sausage) when I was a kid 😊 It was the first time I've ever had a salty snack that was premade and ready to go. But I also got money for those watery frozen popsicles from time to time so can't say my childhood was deprived of snacks.
My grandfather was Slavic - these snacks are very familiar to me and a lot of times a go to! I love raw onion :)
As a European (Dutch), I think that the notion of having some amount of ingredients in house to make food is very much the norm. One thing I am stuck on (so far half way thorugh the video) is the term snack. I feel like a distinction between snack and treat might be helpful: do you eat it to fill up between meals (a tussendoortje or inbetweeny as we call it) or to hit a craving. Because bread/tortillas/fruit would be the former, while chocolate, candy or small pretzels would be the latter. And part of the distinction between Europe (or at least the Netherlands) and the US might be in which category different snacks fall. Because I don't think many people will eat chips to fill up here, you eat it as a treat. Except for like highschoolers, but there is something a little transgrassive in that. Im not sure Im making sense, and am from a very priviledged background, so maybe this is only true for the wealthy-healthy crossection of the mostly ingedient household
Yes, I’m from Northern Europe and I agree, we eat chips as a treat and rarely to fill up.
as an american i think it really depends on your financial situation. breakfast and lunch are free at my school so i know lots of kids who eat at school and then fill up on chips and cookies afterwards because that’s all they can afford for dinner. and as said in the video fruits and veggies can be very expensive here, so for some fruit, chips, tortillas, chocolate, and pretzels are all considered snacks with no distinction between two separate groups.
Yeah, I’m South African and completely agree, processed “snacks” like chips, chocolates, cookies etc are considered more like a treat (not exactly like dessert but similar), you eat it for enjoyment and usually not daily. Whereas a snack would be something small and simple to last you till the next meal, like toast, rusks, fruit, peanuts or yogurt. However we also have areas that would be considered food deserts where people eat a lot of process snacks due to the lack of fresh options, but this is obviously not great or preferred. Even in such places the corner restaurants will serve things like spinach and cabbage, maize porridge and traditionally grilled meats as people prefer “real” food. I think this is not just a Europeans vs Americans thing, as I see most commenters outside North America share similar experiences to you and me… As stereotypical as this sounds I think the highly processed / junk food / frozen food diets are a distinctly American thing. Don’t mean that in a bad way, its just interesting.
Yep, the main question is indeed what is a snack. Nuts, fruit, veggies/salad are all what come to mind when I think snack more than chocolate and chips.
Exactly what I was going to comment as central european
My boyfriend is Korean and to him bread = snack and rice = meal. We had a lengthy convo about this the other weekend because we got subway at around 4pm with plans to eat dinner around 8pm. I ordered a 6in and he got 2 6in specialty sandwiches and scarffed them down. I was shocked because I thought we were going to eat light and he looked at me and said "sandwiches are just snacks" 😳
A sandwich made with regular bread is MAYBE a snack, two six inch subway subs is a thousand calorie "snack"
@@oldasyouromens enough of any snack can quickly become a meal!
In France, bread is meal and bread is snack. Bread is everything.
yup, I'm indonesian and a common saying here is "if you haven't had rice you haven't eaten". probably cause steamed buns (even meat filled ones) are snacks so other bread products are snack adjacent
I'm so jealous of how some people can just... do that! They can eat two sandwiches and it's just a snack for them and they don't gain a ton of weight. I had a friend like that and I realized over time that he's not a scientific marvel or a freak of nature, he is just able to put away a ton of food at once, but the key thing is, ONCE. He was not a breakfast or lunch eater, so he would eat a LOT in the evening... Your bf is still built different and I'm jealous.
I lived in an ingredient-only household, and my mum thought it would be good to make me and my sister prepare our own school lunches from the age of 7/8. Spoiler alert. It was not good. I had no idea how to prepare anything (she never taught me, just expected me to figure it out, meanwhile my older sister did at least know how to make a few things), so my usual lunch from when I was 7 was a sandwich with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese, maybe an apple for morning tea and that's all for the day. When my sister told my mum that that's what I was having every day, I got yelled at for making unhealthy food. Then when I was 8-9, I would usually take nothing except an apple because I had no idea what else to make and I didn't want to get in trouble for making a bad unhealthy sandwhich. I got yelled at for that as well. "THE TEACHERS WILL THINK IM A BAD PARENT FOR GIVING YOU NO FOOD" well uhmmmm 🙃 Still to this day I'm a bit jealous of kids that got reliable snacks for their lunches, and got lunch boxes packed for them.
I'm sorry that was your experience. The nerve to yell at your kid for not knowing any better when you don't teach them any better and still expect them to just magically know. That sandwich sounds delicious, personally I think you were onto something good there.
As elementary a kid, my mom made my lunch every day: 1 peanut butter sandwich, or meat and cheese sandwich (usually a pb&j) one serving of fruit (cut up apples, a banana cut in half, orange slices, etc,) one serving of veggies, one small bag of a savory snack (a handful of ritz/saltine crackers, gold fish, cheezits, a small piece from a block of tillamook cheese, etc,) one serving of something sweet: a cookie, yogurt cup, or one donut/sweet pastry, a bag of fruit snacks a bottle of water, juice, or tea (a tea bag placed in a water bottle in the fridge,) every once in a while a can of soda. When I entered middle school my mom told me that I needed to make my lunch everyday myself, and explained to me what a lunch should consist of 😅 I kept making myself mostly healthy meals in middle school 😎 My mom was a stay at home mom & made a homemade meal for dinner almost every night 😊
@tomatozaretehlove56 Your reply means a lot to me 😭 I've been on the verge between "this was terrible parenting and I was done wrong" or "maybe a 7 year old really should have known to ask for help from their mum, dad or sister?" Hahah though I do recommend that sandwhich is worth a try if you like a strong taste 🤣 I think of it as a really weird comfort food now, as at one point it was literally all I had 😭❤️
@jonathonbaldwin-hansen443 I am lowkey triggered lol! That sounds great. That is a good way to show your kid what balanced lunches are too.
@@UltraViolet666 Get yourself a different kind of cheese, put a little mayo or butter on the outside, throw it on a pan, and you got yourself a banging pizza grilled cheese. You're welcome. Honestly though, your story is so painfully familiar to me. I was the scapegoat in my family most of the time, so I got yelled at and blamed for so much shit that wasn't my fault. You can't know what you don't know and it's your parents' responsibility to make sure you do. It takes a lot of strength and courage to try and parse out for yourself what's actually right and wrong after having those concepts so twisted up and distorted. I'm proud of both of us for trying. I wish you nothing but the best on your journey towards kindness and compassion for yourself.
I’m Mexican American so I see that difference a lot between those cultures, especially now that I’ve permanently settled in Mexico. Though “junk” food is easily accessible and widely consumed in Mexico, meals at home are cooked. In fact, it’s very common for people (usually moms) to go to the market multiple times a week to buy fresh produce. We also have small shops everywhere selling fresh produce, fresh baked bread, fresh made tortillas, etc. If you don’t have time or energy to cook, there’s typically a small restaurant nearby selling tacos and such for usually less than a US dollar each. Meanwhile when I lived in the US, I would go grocery shopping every two weeks or so and have to make that last until my next trip because getting to a supermarket is so inaccessible to me as a disabled person. I relied a lot on frozen foods and pantry items to get me through that because most produce doesn’t last that long. Each system has its pros and cons: I often miss the convenience of just having a hot pocket when I don’t have the capacity to cook, but fresh produce is so much cheaper and high quality here. So I try to meal prep when I have energy or intentionally make too much when I do cook so I can freeze the leftovers for when I’m unable to cook or go out to eat. Thank you for discussing the issue of disability, it is such a big party of the conversation that gets ignored.
yeah thats a big american/canadian problem. We have zoning laws and don't allow shops to be mixed in with housing so it forces you to drive. I even hate going to the store because its such an ordeal. This is why new yorkers are so obsessed with new york. I can't just walk to the corner bodega and grab some veggies or meat to complete a meal. We constantly have a ton of ingredients in a stock pantry and nothing that can be made together in a meal because going to the store to get 2-3 things for dinner is a huge time and gas waste. So we make a full shopping trip and the same issue repeats itself.
@@Zectifinwhy do you have those kind of laws? As someone who lives in Mexico they seem inconvenient.
In France, outside of big cities, it's also more common to go to the grocery store once a week. But I've seen people from the US who moved to France be amazed how much longer our produce can hold up than they're used to. Might be another reason why it's easier here.
Exactly what I was thinking! She talked about how some people buy groceries once a week or less often and I was like um, yeah, we do as well, but bananas and oranges can easily last for a week, apples for two weeks or more, many root vegetables as well, heck, even a lettuce lasts a few days if you put it in some container and water it like a windowsill plant. Kinda weird to think they it means no fresh produce in the house.
@@emisformaker yeah we mostly eat seasonal fruits and vegetables
I went to the US this summer and the “fresh” produce spoils so quickly it’s not funny
I was one of those people who was shocked at the stability of produce in Europe. In the US, especially in the North, fresh Produced is shipped long distances, from California, Florida, Mexico in refrigerated trucks so by the time it gets to the grocery store, it's already many days old and expensive. Corn, wheat, potato crops and Shelf stable goods however are often subsidized by the government, with localized distribution centers, making them a much more affordable option. Growing up in poverty, my household was an ingredient household, and any grocery store trip would take at least 3-4 hours by bus or foot, so grocery shop was done only once or twice a month. We had very little fresh produce because it would be too expensive to have spoil in a few days, Snacks tended to be high calorie chips, or sweets because they were accessible at the local convivence store. It also was the 90's and processed foods were king.
@@Earthboundhavens We have a BIG seasonal fruits and vegetables culture here in France. In the winter we'll consume tangerines and kiwis, then in may everyone's all about strawberries. It must have been hard not having access to a lot of fresh produce as a kid. Although I'm wondering if it's something you realize you were missing much later in life? In any case, food deserts should have been addressed a long time ago, and I'm sorry it was such a hassle for your family to sustain yourselves
As an adult who developed disordered eating due to the food habits grown from childhood, your ending thoughts on this topic were healing, and a breath of fresh air :)
Wishing you support, self-love, and recovery. 💗
@@AmaraJordanMusic right back at you friend!
me too! my ingredient household made me binge snacks when i grew up and that was hard to get over, still working on it!
@@foamsoap41 same friend 😓😫😅
growing up, my parents always put our halloween/christmas/etc candy in the "candy drawer" - it was super easy to access, and my sister and i were free to take whatever we wanted out of it. ironically i like to credit that to why i can eat intuitively pretty well, because the constant availability of junk food prevented it from being seen as this special, unattainable treasure. it was just a thing to have whenever you felt like it, and i didnt have to worry about never getting to have it again contrast that to our neighbor's kid, who lived very restrictively and would literally break into our house to take from said drawer and it became something that i think about a lot
Yes. This. My cousin restricted her two kids as far as what they were allowed to eat so at holidays when she was not watching the food table her kids would binge eat until they threw up.
my mom didnt buy alot of sweets or snack either so i would take as many snacks from other places like school or other houses and eat them all at once
In my household, snacks were basically always available and we were free to grab any as long as it wasn't right before a proper meal (basically, I could eat a candy bar after lunch, but not right before lunch, so that I didn't fill myself up with processed foods instead of eating my veggies and stuff). Now I'm the kind of person who can grab a single cookie and put the rest of the pack away. In my mind, these foods aren't seen as "special", which is why I don't feel the need to overeat them. For example, I buy my own peanut butter, as no one else in my household eats it except for me. It's always in sight when I sit at my desk, but I have never binged on it. I can imagine that if I was raised to see peanut butter as a "fatty, high calories, bad food, very occasional", I'd probably secrectly eat a whole jar as soon as I had the money to buy one. Instead, a jar lasts me weeks; I'm aware of the calorie content, but it doesn't matter, since I already eat it in moderation. To be honest, I feel like people who heavily restict their teen's food decisions are setting them up for failure. If someone never allows their teens to have chocolate, and then goes to a cinema for the evening, what is the teen gonna do once they're home alone? They will buy 3 chocolate bars and eat them in one sitting since it's such a rare and special occasion. Or, whenever they go somewhere and there's chocolate, they'll eat a lot of it... And one day, they'll become an adult who has a problem with binging chocolate whenever it's in sight, and will never allow themselves to keep any in the house, which will only worsen their problem of seeing it as a "banned" food.
With me it was the same but I was allowed to have one piece of candy a day. When I was older, I graduated to 2 pieces a day. I loved it because it was guaranteed no matter what and no one could take it from me. I have friends with households where desserts or candies were brought in randomly and shared by everyone in the household and it created a mindset of "I need to eat more now before there is none left." They'd be worried that siblings or parents would finish it all before they got another piece. So, they'd overeat.
I am a bad cook and I struggle with depression and a history of anorexia/bulimia. I finally have given up and just eat Purple Carrot (prepackaged meals mailed to my house). I am lucky that I can afford it. I feel a lot of shame around not cooking my own meals but this finally works for me and I am consistently eating actual meals and not skipping meals all together. Before I would just skip meals and that just starts a mental health downward spiral.
do what you have to do !!! prepackaged meals are great for disabled/mentally ill people and there's no shame in not making everything from scratch, especially if you wouldn't eat otherwise
Yes! Healthy can mean so many things, and a lot of the time, that means doing what actually works for you.
Proud of you for making that decision! Sounds like it has improved your life a lot.
I know a lot of people who are well-off (and some people who aren’t) who always go out to eat or order DoorDash/UberEats/etc. - they literally never cook. And they do not feel the least bit ashamed. You do you!
Thank you for sharing, I know how much shame comes with eating and problems associated. We appreciate you and I’m glad you are able to eat what you can🖤
I am German (from Bavaria) and I've never heard of this distinction in my life! In my parents house we had "ingredients" (pasta, rice, potatoes, tomatoes, oninions, fruits etc) but we also had like... one, maybe two frozen pizzas in the freezer, ice cream, some chips or Smarties or M&Ms or something and some nuts to have a little snack while watching TV etc. It's so wild to me that you'd be an either-or household
thank you for being so kind and empathetic about poor households with snacks 🥺 I grew up in poverty (and am _still_ in poverty despite working a "good job" as an adult) and my mom was just so exhausted all the time from taking care of the house, my brother and I, and working off and on that we had a lot of processed snacks to stave off hunger throughout the day. She almost always cooked us a good meal for dinner, but we had to make due with what we had, and I would never fault her for that. However it has lead to an aversion to snacks as an adult. I just don't buy them because it feels bad when I have HelloFresh so, presumably, fresh food that comes to my apartment every week. It's like, why would you eat this "unhealthy" snack when you have "healthy" food right there?
Kinda same for me. Except fast food instead of cooked meals most of the time. And sandwiches instead of snacks. Now I hate cold cheese, cold meats, bread, and in general sandwiches. I can never feel full from cold food even if I technically eat an entire meal. But I can't afford hellofresh so I'm mostly living off of rice and beans, peanuts, and spoonfuls of peanut butter. I'm trying to not stay dependent on bread to survive.
Where I live ultra processed snacks are actually more expensive than actual healthy snack foods like bread and yogurt. So whenever my parents were tight on money we would only eat healthy foods. Looking back I'm thankful but then it sucked that we didn't get to eat as many treats throughtout the week as we wanted. We got candy and chips on weekends though. No one should have to eat ultra processed snacks as food. Those are treats, only meant for enjoyment. Real snacks are sandwiches, yogurt, nuts and fruits, smoothies, healthy stuff like that.
I was raised by rural European boomer age parents; very much ingredient focused with snack foods only as occasional treats and no ready-made meals ever. We started learning to cook as literal toddlers standing on a step stool lol
My experience is much the same.
I think it's so interesting how much our infrastructure and zoning affect our diets. It makes sense that Americans and Canadians are more interested in foods that have a longer shelf life, because going to the store more than like, once a week, is really time consuming. Most people have to do upwards of 30 minutes of travel to and from a store (after spending an hour a day or more commuting 🙄), and that's if they have a car. Zoning in America in most places, especially newly developed areas, prevents commercial use from being mixed with residential use (which is almost always single family homes with minimum lot sizes that encourage sprawl). So there aren't corner groceries and specialty food shops mixed into neighbourhoods. Not only does zoning legally segregate people, it forces people to rely on having a car, because we also don't have adequate public transit services that are convenient. So it takes longer to do ANYTHING in the west. We just don't have as much time. Which means we're less likely to cook elaborate or balanced meals. In European countries that have more walkable/bikeable infrastructure and less rigid zoning rules that keep corner stores and neighbourhood groceries away from residential areas, it's much easier to make multiple market trips a week.
I literally fantasize about living in a place where I can just easily walk or bike down to a bakery of grocery store and get what I need every few days. Even when I lived in a city with good public transit (by American standards) grocery shopping was a project that required planning
Not an American but my city is turning it an urban sprawl dystopia. I think of them as human storage suburbs. I lived in one in a share house for a while and it was a completely different experience then my mixed suburb I grew up in. The biggest hurdle was traffic. They sprawl was so poorly planned one single lane road was all we had to get in and out. The grocery store was relatively close by but a 5 minute trip turned into 20 minutes twice a day. We couldn't walk their either because it was on the other side of that road which was dangerous to cross. Traffic like the middle of the city and nothing worth driving too anyway. Soul sucking place to live. I never understood those suburb horror movies until I lived there.
@@Jess-rn5kp I never thought that American cities were that bad. I live in a town where I can walk from one end to the other in an hour but I don't have to because no mather where I need to go I can rely in public transport to make the trips quicker. I chose to not learn how to drive because I never felt the need to. Like even if I need to go to a different town I can take a bus even if I need to go to a different country I can just take a bus. Also e-scooters are a very popular way of transport here besides bikes. There is like 6 grocery stores in 1,5km radius from my flat nearest being 150metres away. I was shocked to find out how car reliable Americans have to be.
I’m French and I must thank you for opening my eyes on this matter. I never realized how practical this aspect of my "French life" was. I have literally 3 bakers in my area at a 5 minutes walk, same for drugstore, fast foods (pizza and stuff), I can bike in 5 minutes to a supermarket with a gas station etc. That’s actually amazing. I still do the grocery shopping once a week but If i forgot something or don’t want to cook it’s really easy to find another option.
@@Mali_Ah there are some walkable parts of some of the larger cities, but those are all the cities that are much older and only in certain areas. I live in Phoenix and we were basically nothing until AC became a normal thing and ever since we've had a consistent population boom. We don't have a downtown city center area where you have a ton of multiunit dwellings next to skyscrapers and businesses. Our "downtown" area is mostly businesses in skyscrapers, fancy hotels, and government municipal buildings. there may be a luxury apartment skyscraper or two, but it would only be for the ultrawealthy and those areas aren't meant to be walkable, its for people to go to work at, shop at, or go get government business taken care of. the rest of the city is a suburban grid. Even the oldest parts, mainly because you couldn't have large buildings here, it was waaaay too fucking hot, up until air conditioning it was basically the wild west. then when the population boom happened the american dream suburb was already a thing. Look on a map. its suburbs all the way down.
This video speaks to me on every point. I grew up in a snacks household, but was forced by illness to transition to a 100% percent ingredients household. Having to buy all your staples, good pots and pans, learn how to cook properly - even meal planning and proper grocery budgeting was a challenge. It's five years in, and I'm still struggling.
Yesss seriously! I remember being shocked how expensive it was to buy a full pots and pan set, plus all the other little devices you need in a kitchen
I'm in the same boat as you Janice, but I'm also poor, so basically all of my meager income is spent on good quality, healthy ingredients. My life quality has improved massively but I have no money for anything else
@@tiffanyferg is it not usual to get hand me downs by family when you move out? I got all my kitchen supplies from my family when going to university and bought more when I needed it. I never thought about people having to get all kitchen supplies from scratch.
keep trying your best, you are worth it and i know its hard to be ingredients only...i had to switch for my ill hubby ❤
@@happytofu5 keep in mind that many people in the US buy nonstick cookware which wears out in a few years. So there's often not much that CAN be passed down. I got some plates, silverware, and baking dishes from my mom when I moved out but everything else had to be purchased. I was getting married when I moved out so it worked out because I could just register for cookware and other kitchen stuff that we needed.
My parents blessed me with learning how to cook since I was in middle school. When I entered college I ended up teaching other students how to cook when some of them (due to lack of teaching/households who refused to teach boys anything “feminine”) said they would burn water. We graduated to broiling steaks in the oven and making ice cream bars. That was the best part of freshman year.
Ingredient household dweller all the way here! I had no idea there was even a name for this 😂 I believe my mom did it for health and economic reasons. As an adult, I’m not a snacker at all. Usually if I’m hungry, it’s just time to eat a meal. My brother however is addicted to mindless snacking because we never had access to them. It’s interesting how we both turned out.
I grew up in an ingredient household and we didn't have free reign on food either. Always had to have permission to eat or drink anything. I'll never forget I had a friend come over one time with a bag full of snacks and when I asked why she was like "You never let me eat here" Like girl I'm not allowed to either 💀 So yeah, it's safe to say I have a great relationship with food as an adult lmao
I grew up in that type of situation too. It most definitely affects how you view food, I still struggle not to binge eat simply because I can.
This is something I didn't really think about until now. My family was poor and there were 4 kids, I was not allowed to just eat whatever I wanted. We had snacks but they were for school lunches or else I had to ask permission. That shit was expensive!
Huh... I think your parents had issues!
Snacks house here, but we had to ask permission for snacks too, no free feeding.
I just realized my household growing up was a snack house, but as an adult I’ve become an ingredients-only household…not 100% per say, but I tend not to buy “snacks” bc I don’t like the waste a lot of processed food involves. Like it’s a lot of single-serving packaged goods that is calorie dense while also being not very filling…also I know myself, and if I have a ton of snacks I will end up just eating snacks instead of actual meals 😂😂
Right? I was thinking of all the self control these ppl must have with all those snacks at home!
Same experience! I had to teach myself how to cook because my parents rarely cooked and didn't teach me much besides how to boil water and butter toast. Now I cook more often than not because I really enjoy fresh homecooked meals, which is something I didn't get much as a kid.
This is such a difficult topic to address since there is such a morality placed behind food choice. I grew up making food for myself quite often and, between work and school, I often just ate microwaved meals and processed foods. Once I moved out, I found myself gravitating towards those foods more since I was a poor college student with executive dysfunction. I would much rather eat a home cooked meal and often view them as a personal luxury since I have so little time to cook as well as the fact that I live in America without a car, so grocery shopping is often infrequent. Whenever I hear health nuts or people from other nations criticize my type of food consumption, I often feel like a complete failure for my "inability to feed myself properly." This shame usually leads to either binge eating comfort foods or essentially starving myself. I'm also autistic so it's a common occurrence in my life that if I don't eat my "safe foods" I just can't/won't eat. Placing morality behind snacking and what types of food people consume is dangerous and led to disordered eating within my life.
I agree 100% and also experience the same thing as an autistic and disabled adult.
My household went from a snack household to an ingredients household once I became a SAHM again. I had no time to cook while working, but now I have the freedom to be able to make sourdough, keep an eye on the produce so it doesn’t spoil, and even grow some herbs in my window. I don’t blame snack households at all. Even though it was part-time, work sucked up all of my free time and willpower to make “healthy” choices. Not to mention how expensive even basic groceries are right now!
Ingredient only household for sure. But, ingredients are also used to make snacks lol. And stuff like fruit too was always there. Maybe it has less to do with "are your parents health nuts" and more to do with "do your parents have time outside of work to plan meals and snacks, prep and cook them, shop frequently to keep fresh food, etc"
I love that you referred to the fridge in the garage as the suburban dream. I've been trying to explain to my rural family about how luxurious the idea of a "fridge in the garage" is to city folk like me
As someone who grew up mostly in small towns this concept still seems so foreign to me.
When I was a child (in Ireland) I used to be fascinated at all the snacks in US sitcoms and films. We just got them at birthday parties or at Christmas.
I remember the first time I saw a bag of Lay’s (which I had seen in a documentary about the Hanson brothers) , I felt so glamorous 😂 it was super expensive , and me and my sister had to wait for weeks , until our dad finally bought it to us. I’m from Brasil , by the way , grew up in the 90’s / 00’s
Subscriber from India, here we had a 20% packaged food and 80% ingredients while growing up. And here having a lot of snacks meant that you were rich. So when I grew up and finally started earning, I used to snack a lot untill few years back I realised the importance of homecooked meal. Now I do not have any snacks except fruits and veggies but no packaged food. In India it is cheaper to cook meals at home instead of eating processed food from outside but it is slowly changing as lot of fast food options are cropping up.
I grew up in a US snack household -- my parents always made us consider fruit as a first choice for a snack, but they also grew up with food scarcity, so they stocked the house abundantly because they could do so. One thing about European food culture though -- when I was living in the Netherlands, the entire philosophy around grocery shopping was very different than in the US. Because the cities are walkable/bikeable and there's a small grocery store every few streets over, people only shopped for food for two or three days at a time, because they could always swing by for ingredients after work or on a walk. So you wouldn't really keep as many snacks (or even a lot of ingredients) in the house anyways, because it was just a given that you could go get more quickly when you needed it. (Edit: got to that point in the video. Exactly, hahaha.)
That does depend on the person and the area you live in though. Were you in Amsterdam or another big city, de Randstad? Because I grew up in The Netherlands and even though my parents did shop on several occasions a week, it was different stores because the stores didn't all carry the same things. But each store was once a week and preferably on the same day. Now I'm an adult and I tend to procrastinate shopping for food as long as possible. It's usually once a week or thrice a month, sometimes twice a month if I'm eating at other people a lot. Most people around us did a weekly shop. We were, however, easygoing on missing ingredients. I remember my mother asking us to go to the store get a few specific ingredients she'd forgotten to buy earlier that day. And I was maybe 10. And my 5 year old sister just walked along happily. This was normal. I was on the street going places by myself walking or by bike all the time. A 6km bikeride together with a friend or alone? Why not. It's not as if my mother could make time every time we wanted to do something
@@ammalyrical5646 Good point, I was living in a decently large city (Utrecht), so there was a lot more access to food. And I assume it becomes more of a hassle to have to get food more often when you have a whole family to feed -- my corner of the city was predominantly younger adults and elderly couples living alone, so we could be more flexible with meal planning.
I feel like it must also have something to do with the size of kitchens and fridges. I'm basing this off watching House Hunters International so I could be completely off though lmao. But in European countries a lot of the times the kitchens they show are tiny compared to the US, and have fridges half the size, so you couldn't keep a week or more worth of food in them even if you wanted to.
I’d say that in the UK is similar, larger cities would have all kinds of corner shops and speciality shops that you have access to, smaller cities, towns, villages would struggle to find such things, but I think the size of the European countries helps a lot when it comes to finding supermarket, farmers markets, village shops, as within an hour (or less) drive you could be in a city. I think most people would be able to do a shop once a week for the bulk of their shop and just fill up the gaps as they go. Something else that’s not mention in the video, is the size of the fridges European sizes are smaller than American ones, same with houses so we can’t sometimes store all we would need for a whole week in one fridge particularly if you are a family of more than 2 people. Food standards also come into place here in the UK and the EU, as the level of sugar, fat, additives has a different standard control than in the US. As an example of the average lunch in the UK sandwich, crisps, and a soft drink, I notice many people having a pot of fruit instead of crisps.
Thank you, I get it now. The only reason why I would ever have any food not meant for breakfast/lunch/dinner at home is because I went on a massive binge and couldn't fit all the junk food in my stomach at once. But maybe I'm wrong, I snack on cheese I buy only for snacking.
As a German who also lived in two different US families I feel the times for snacks are different. For Germans it tend to be more a "after dinner" thing while watching TV, eating chips and sweets and my hostfamilies always had snack in the afternoon. When I got home from school my mom would give me some fruit, the american families tended to have more granola bars, mini cakes, chips, popcorn etc. Also so many different kinds of crackers in the US
I think this is the case for most of Northern Europe. During the day I think most people would opt for fruit, yoghurt, maybe a granola bar.
@@Beaverthingoh interesting. I live on northern Europe and this was not the case for me. Afternoon after school was treat time. In the evenings before bed my mum would peel an apple or pear for me to munch on.
@@amara560 A lot of it is super personal to each family. Like most Germans tend to cook a warm, large meal for lunch and then only have bread for dinner. Which is one reason why many Germans call dinner "Abendbrot" = evenig bread. My family always had it switched since my mom worked in the afternoon and I would only have a light lunch when I go home from school.
This is so fascinating! I grew up in the UK with an immigrant mum from Malaysia (Chinese) and a depressed alcoholic (English) dad. Mum worked long hours while dad drank all day in a closed-off room. Our household was genuinely around 90% snacks and processed foods - even though we were financially very comfortable. Our meat came from tins - chicken in white sauce, meatballs, all tinned. It made it easy for me to cook my own dinner from age 8. My dad died when I was a teenager, but my mum never broke the habit of buying heaps of processed convenient foods. Her kitchen cupboards are wild. Now my own kids visit her house and they eat plantbased and gluten-free 😂 they don't recognise most of the foods she buys. I have to pull myself back from being too extreme the other way, though, because I want my kids to have a happy medium. Without corned-beef hash.
I had a single parent who worked a lot. So a lot of what was purchased was convenient food’s because the food had to be prepared by a child since my grandmother who was watching me was getting to the point where it was not safe for her to use the stove.
I'm European (German) and Ι wouldn't say that highly processed snacks are "special-occasion-snacks", they're just normal snacks. Almost all of the German households I know have highly processed snacks and it's normal to eat them on a regular basis.
I'm from France and I was about to comment something very similar. I wonder if generation plays a role? Having been born late to my family I definitely remember that while it was considered normal for my friends and I to have our favourite highly processed snacks at home, whenever I would visit family I would be treated like I was weird and too much of a glutton for asking for snacks. My aunt would give me cocoa powder over salted butter on dry bread and act like she didn't understand how that could possibly not be to my taste lol.
My bf is German and his mum cooks all the snacks so they always have a jar of cookies cooked by her and like 🤤🤤🤤
When I lived in Germany whenever I went over to a friend's house they'd buy snacks before I came over. My house hold only had a few snacks at home. Although I lived in Berlin near a major train station so quick foods weren't hard to find.
I grew up in Germany, and my parents always had a mix. Apples, bananas, oranges, fruit yogurt, chocolate, cookies, and chips were always on hand for snacking. My friends often had radishes and kiwi and loved it, while I never got into them. Now that I live in the US, apples and bananas are so expensive that I often don't even buy them as ingredients.
yeah, same here, some snacks, many ingredients, very little convenience food. When it comes to sweets, I’m convinced banning them, in particular keeping them out of reach for kids, isn’t really good either. We have friends and their daughter, about the same age as my son, had zero access to sweets when she was under 6, while my son has access any time he would want something. So what happened, whenever the girl went to see friends, or was invited to a kids birthday party, she ate any sweet she could get hold of. My son is thin like a needle although he always had access to sweets, and while she is not fat, but a little bit on the chubby side. And don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with that, but the lesson I learned from that (and apparently did right), my son learned how to handle sweets, while she didn’t.
I'm Swedish. When I was a kid, things like cookies, chips, ice cream or candy were not considered snacks in our house. They were treats that we only ate 2-3 times a week (a bit more often during holidays). So an everyday after school snack for me would usually consist of a sandwich with a glass of milk, plain yoghurt with high fiber cereal, or a fruit. Would I have preferred to have cookies or chips instead? Definitely. But I really don't think it's good (especially for kids) to consume too much highly processed foods.
En ostmacka & ett glas oboy var det bästa efter skolan 🤣
a Finn here, it was the same for us too!
same for me in germany.
I think a big part of why some people struggle with "junk food" is because it's delicious, but American society demonizes it to the point where people start feeling guilty for enjoying it, but that type of attitude misses the mark. Of course it's not nutritious to eat ice cream, candy, potato chips, etc every single day, in excess, but that's because those things lack nutritional value. But a lot of media in the US and Canada doesn't acknowledge that, they just say that it's bad. They don't bother teaching people about nutrition or moderation, they teach restriction and fear. It's one thing to think that it's not good to consume too much highly processed foods because they lack nutrition and people, especially kids, should learn how to nourish their bodies, but it's a whole other thing to teach them that these things are inherently bad and have some sort of moral value attached to them. Yeah, that's basically it - food is highly moralized here and it's incredibly sad.
yeah, those aren't snacks, those are treats. Snacks are for when you're hungry between meal time, Treats are for when you want something nice.
I'm Spanish so my childhood home is mostly ingredient based, and I also have an almond mom, so I still have a lot of issues with allowing myself to eat snacks or more processed foods in general. I literally though I didn't like eating/ food for years because my mom would paint it as a thing you had to do to survive but wasn't enjoyable and it made you fat/ unhealthy if you enjoyed it too much. And I didn't even get the worst part because I was the skinnier one, my sister hears comments about her thights everyday and my father gets his food restricted (for no medical reason at all) more and more by the minute. At least she allows me to eat a bit more even if it's because of skinny shaming. Now I'm moving out with my boyfriend and will have to reaccess my whole relationship with food and cooking.
As a food marketing major, these are the things I love to talk about! So much of life is connected to food, and we've all had such different food experiences that made us who we are today
Growing up in a Mexican household living in south Texas, I was in the in-between but mostly ingredients because any food can be a snack. Quesadillas were a snack or a literal tomato with salt and pepper. I was really confused about the whole discussion on TikTok until someone made a "Mexican ingredient household" TikTok which was funny lol
Also Mexican Texan, dude I love tomatoes. We just started growing our own, I be eating them like apples atp
californian mexican and I would throw anything in a tortilla or just eat straight up bolillo
@@adamhasissues5625 grew up a long way from Mexico, but I also used to love eating tomatoes like an apple as a snack!
My grandma (from Mexico) would cut up tomatoes for me and put sour cream and salt on them and it was my snack lol
I'm from Italy, and my household has always been very in the middle. My snacks have always been very varied: kinder bars, fresh fruit, a block of parmesan, yogurt, bread amd jam, a ham sandwhich, cookies, the occasional home made cake and sometimes one from the store ..
Same for me in southern Germany We always have fresh food/ingredients at home in my family, and a drawer full of snacks/sweets, plus the occasional baked goods and a few packs of quick food like these ramen packs
Same for me here in Portugal.
I grew up in the US but my mom is still pretty heavily Scandinavian and I'm realizing that I grew up with a pretty strong European influence after talking with other friends who grew up the same or different. I was really confused by the ingredient only house talk and your video made it make so much sense! Processed snacks were saved for special occasions like when we had guests over. Other than that, if we craved something sweet, my mom would make berry dishes for example. Or she taught me how to make a simple egg sandwich if I needed something more filling
I have a very similar experience. Moved to the US when I was 11 and as I started to learn and experience the lives of my classmates and friends in the food realm, I learned just how different the culture of eating was. What was considered a meal and what was not. The times, the importances. I keep a eating schedule that's very like the one I had growing up, which In a way, is cultural preservation. Eating dinners at 6 pm, for example, was something I never got used to. I ate light when friends invited me over and had a proper dinner with my family later. It is interesting to compare, especially with the rise and prevalence of immigration, how the food cultures are shaped, changed, and preserved.
This is so interesting to me! I just realized (I live alone) that I have an ingredient only household. I derive a lot of joy and relaxation from preparing my meals, from chopping and washing and then cooking and flavoring the food, I really enjoy cooking and I consider it part of my daily self care. I also am not a snacker or a grazer, I feel most satisfied when I sit down for three large meals a day. I recently started dating someone and he came over and was in a "snacky" mood and began to raid my fridge and pantry for something to satisfy his craving. I realized that I didn't have anything he was looking for. No chips or cookies or popcorn.... he was so confused. I used to occasionally buy snacks like that, but realized that after I opened them they just ended up going stale in my pantry because I almost never reached for them. So I live in an ingredient only house hold purely on accident. My boyfriend now knows to bring his own snacks. 😅
Been living on my own for about 10 years. Used to maintain an ingredients household and cooked when I needed something. Now I'm a lot busier and recovered from an ED, my husband and I take joy in having a small cabinet of snacks that stays stocked. They're relatively healthy snacks but you still get the hit of dopamine alongside something to eat, lol
And as a kid in a household run by a single immigrant mom, we def didn't have too many snacks around, if anything they were the Walmart Great Value brand which was.. not great after all. Now that my mom has grandkids and her kids are grown, her place always has hella snacks.
Wow, same. Exactly the same.
I couldn't help but think about the book "Tastes Like War". It's an exploration of how personal and deeply ingrained our relationship with food can be. The author interweaves her story of identity, culture, and family with the meals that have defined her life. And since you mentioned you'v been thinking of food related videos, I think it might add another layer to the conversation about food's role in our lives.
Great recommendation! Very intriguing. Thank you
That book was a trip. I really enjoyed reading it, gave it a 4 star rating on goodreads, and the author's sister-in-law commented on my rating with, "By the way, this whole book has been fabricated and exaggerated." (It wasn't even a rewview, lol). Grace's brother has a 5-page essay up discussing all of the issues he had with the book and her negative depiction of their family and community.
people’s food habits says so much about how they think and i would love to see more of this content from you!! i eat the food in my fridge in order of oldest to newest bc i’m terrified of food waste and letting food go bad; i’ve even forced myself to eat definitely expired food before. it still shocks me when my fiance looks at me in bewilderment and says “…just throw it away it smells bad what are you doing i’ll go pick up some subs” and my brain just has such a hard time with that. definitely have scraped the top layer off things or seasoned things so i don’t notice the flavor or texture being slightly off. just the other day we had to throw out a whole 12pack of instant ramen bc it was 2 years expired and i asked him “are you sure we have to throw it away? how bad could it be?” and he said “this was like $8 at walmart from 2 years ago… we can throw it away” i just feel such a responsibility for the food i buy and hate food waste and get intense waves of guilt if i eat something new in the fridge vs old. still working on it :’)
I also hate food waste and will eat expired food, but that’s because of my grandmother.
would it make you feel better to compost most of it? might be worthwhile, not worth getting sick.
I got over my fear of waste when I got sick and spent two working days out of work because of bad food. I was thinking, “all this pain and two days of money from work is gone because I wanted to save a couple bucks worth of food. It’s cheaper and less wasteful to just toss and buy a smaller amount next time”
Same😭 I will feel immense guilt for even letting leftovers go bad and will often try to salvage them like trying to save stale pizza with weird Internet tricks that hardly make it better. I have such a hard time letting go of things.
ahhh i feel you - it's not even because of a specific childhood thing I can pin down, I just feel BAD for wasting anything! unfortunately I always end up wasting things like salad bags (spinach, ffs) because I forget they're there or have lunch outside everyday so never get around to eating it. ugh! and I obviously cannot eat a leaf that is literally slimy and smells terrible but i will STILL put the bag of spinach in a bowl, wash it all, and pick out what I can save to use that day (and maybe tomorrow) before I compost the rest. as for eating newer things vs old, i do not have specific advice but please do not feel pressure if you accidentally let some cheese go stale, or some bread go mouldy. although *you* did not eat it, nobody else will in this state either. you have not taken something away from anyone who desperately needed it - grocery stores are plentiful enough that other people will have got what they were after already. sometimes whole freezers have to be tossed out, so... yeah. nightmare!! one thing that might help is tossing things in the freezer if you feel like you're going to force yourself to finish it otherwise. obviously do not do this if it's already gone bad, but if it's like... an array of mixed veggies that are nearing the end, you can freeze them in a resealable bag and chuck them in a dish when you actually fancy it. helps me a lot - i FINALLY conceded and started freezing my spinach and kale sometimes hahaha
I grew up in an only ingredient household in a small Peruvian town in the 90s. I guess, at the time, I can remember that processed snacks such as chips and candy were only consumed in special occasions like a birthday party, other than that I remember my grandma having a box of chocolate bars that she would give us once in a while and always special occasions. Snacking meant for us fruits or some sort of homemade dessert like mazamorra ( purple corn pudding) or fruit salad. I grew so used this food that nowadays I also cook and keep snacking fruit and mazamorra or some other homemade Peruvian dessert 😅
We were too poor to buy real snacks other than cereal and crackers. Even when we were able to buy anything bougie they’d get eaten up by my brothers so I had to resort to opening the pack to save a couple for myself the second my mom and I got home from the grocery store. Now that me and my siblings are all adults (still in the same house bc it’s more cost efficient), we are able to buy our own. I have a space in my closet for my own snacks and I’ve never been happier 😊
I cannot be trusted with snacks in my house, which is why I definitely am an "ingredient household" -- I remember during the pandemic I decided to buy the big bags of my favorite Salt & Vinegar Kettle Chips because they were on sale 2 for the price of 1, and I ate them both within like 2 or 3 days 😂 So yeah, aside from a couple frozen meals (because if I don't have some easy microwave meals for lazy days then I'll end up ordering delivery or getting fast food), I have no snacks or ready-made items in my kitchen for my own safety haha.
Oh my gosh, I'm the same way! If I have popcorn in my house I'm popping like 2-3 bags and day and hvac-ing them when I eat. 🤣🤣🤣
I grew up in a household that leaned more toward snacks. I've always had emotional eating and body image issues. So it was easier as a kid who wasn't responsible for my own meals and who had P.E. in school to not gain too much weight or over eat. As an adult, I have to keep things out of my house because I have trouble self-regulating.
Same. Not buying it is easy. Not eating it is hard
This is me.
Same! 😅
My family was poor and we were sort of an ingredient household. We relied on food banks, food stamps, help from friends, etc. So we didn't have much choice. Even when we had tons of snacks in the house, we pretty much never had fresh fruits or vegetables, because people don't donate those things (for obvious reasons -- they go bad in just a few days). We ate a lot of mac and cheese, quesadillas, sandwiches, etc. Technically things you need to cook, but that didn't make them healthy or filling
Just got to the end and your eating habits are literally the same as mine. I still have to learn how to experience new foods and cook for myself. I would eat nothing but frozen meals if I could 🥲
@BrandiG31 did you just reply to yourself????
@@zvezdoblyat Technically yes but I was referring to the video, not my own comment. I just didn't want to make a new one for something so small
As someone who also learned cooking/preparing snacks late in the game one of my favourite snack options is what I think some people call "adult lunchables". Basically you just combine some easy-to-prep foods you like (e.g. grapes, crackers, maybe some cheese, etc.) onto a plate and that's your snack. It's pretty low-effort and still satiating, and it's also incredibly customizable to what you have lying around. Personally, I like to put mine on a charcuterie board because I like to feel Fancy™️
When I lived in the UK as a flight attendant, I had a really hard time doing any substantial meal prep or home cooking beyond simple 20 minutes dishes bc I simply had no time and was always exhausted. And it was just me cooking for myself with a hectic schedule, imagine like a working mum for example. People who shit on convenience foods just sound incredibly privileged.
For real! I love to cook, but it is a time commitment. If you work a long day, you just don't have time and probably don't have the energy.
When i moved out, i was actually really excited to go from a snackapalooza household to an ingredients only household, because i wanted to eat healthier so bad and i had huge temptation issues (and also was constantly stressed living with my parents and it made me eat more) but my mom didnt let me get groceries because id focus on ingredients. My partner and i got a costco membership and we went half on groceries. I was so excited and bright eyed. That initial grocery run was over $400!!! it took out my bank account and i was happy with having food stocked,but i was also so sick with worry because i was just starting out as an artist and having nothing in my account made me sick. We are okay now, but absolutely its expensive but cost per meal is certainly down. I like ingredients only but no one tells you how much time you will be spending cooking!! 2 hours a day cooking/cleaning after, at least. it works for me because i work from home but absolutely i understand the desire for convenience. its tough out her for us Americans!
I love this discourse! I developed an ED in my teens, which made me literally afraid to eat. Keeping snacks around would only invite binge-eating which was not okay to my ED mind that time. Now that I'm ten years older, I have the ability to buy snacks now, but don't really want to because I wanna spend it somewhere else (toilettries for example) and I carried the habit of refusing one from my ED days.
I love that you mentioned the free or reduced lunch at school, so I thought I would add my personal experience with this. I grew up fluctuating from poor to lower middle class (one of my brothers was ill so my mother couldn't go back into the work force like we had prepped for). We most definitely qualified for free or reduced lunch, however my mother would never apply for it. She was super overly paranoid that people would treat and perceive us differently (i.e. badly) for needing the help. So instead of having probably free lunch for my brothers and I, we had less options in the house because we had to pay the full school lunch price for 2-3 children depending on the year and circumstances. This also bled into other portions of our lives, moreso with my brothers than myself. My mom would spend extra money that we didn't have to get my brothers one or two nicer or name brand clothing items for the school year. She didn't need to do this with me because I was a hand-me-down magnet for many, many years. But she did it to try to prevent them from getting bullied, and that to me is horrifying
As a german I always find it weird how europe is seen as this one big entity like the US lol. We have so many different cultures and therefore eating habits all over europe that a statistic that mashes us all together seems odd. But on that note: making yourself a sandwich (aka "ne Stulle") is a peak german thing. My parents did like to keep chocolate and cookies as well tho. I think mainly because their parents (my grandparents) grew up in the midst of WWII and sweets like these were very rare and expensive. So now that you get them pretty easily and cheap, you buy them to satisfy your inner child that couldn't get them back in the day. Also when Germany got divided there was an uptick in the popularity of western (US and UK) food since parts of Germany belonged to them. But the other half that got occupied by Russia had completely different brands of food and still have today
It's as useful as seeing the US as one big entity. From an American's perspective the size, population density, and culture variations are very similar when considering Europe as one giant entity. I've lived in America my entire life. I've driven 1000s of miles and yet I've never been to the west coast. Half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home. Despite Hollywood's interpretation, and despite the three big tourist spots of CA, NY, and Orlando (the last mostly appealing to the Brits) American culture varies dramatically. Which is why our politics is nightmarish. Imagine absolutely everything being represented and ran entirely by the EU without anyone internationally recognizing your more local opinions, successes, or failures.
@@Zhiperserwait until you find out that European countries have states too with different cultures in then you're about to get your mind blown
@@treesea6843 it's wrong cause it reeks of american exceptionalism. A lot of countries have problems with federal politics and diverse cultures. It's not wrong that it happens in the US, but it's not soley an US problem
I think it tends more to be that america has a much more homogenous culture that sets it apart from most of europe, and you're all so different from us we just tend to lump you together. America and Canada have weird zoning and residential laws that prevent stuff like stores being built in residential areas, the size of lots, and where multiunit dwellings can be placed, and its on purpose to seperate the poor from the middle class. Its hard to go to the grocery store without a vehicle and even with a vehicle it always ends up being a much bigger deal, and most cities are not walkable. this changes how we shop and eat at on. And as for US exceptionalism, I don't know any countries besides the US and canada that have this huge problem where all new suburbs must be build seperately from multifamily units and stores. It causes a real class divide here.
I mean, we do the same with the states, we're kinda just looking at the overall laws and cultural values that contribute to food I think.
As a European it always makes me feel incredibly classist to watch food-related issues from a US POV. Like… I knew how to make my first easy pasta dish from scratch when I was in third grade. And that’s not incredibly uncommon over here. There honestly should be cooking classes in school so everyone gets to be taught to sustain themselves without being reliant on highly processed food. Also from my experience cooking and having at least dinner together as a family is a social event in Europe. It‘s an important get-together with everyone talking about what‘s happened during the day.
I would agree! There was no eating alone, we always wait for everyone to get home to have lunch or dinner together. It would actually be considered quite rude to eat before everyone got home.
Agreed, sometimes things like this just hit me like- I actually did have cooking class in school? It's one of the core subjects in Swedish primary school (ages 7-15). It's called "hemkunskap" (basically 'home skills'), I think it's supposed to be about daily life in general, and include things like nutrition, economics and cleaning, but it's focused on food and cooking. We were paired up and then given a recipe to create within 1-1.5 hour or so, which we then ate together. Occasionally we discussed topics like food waste. Doesn't mean everyone had a good teacher though of course. I still have loads of friends who don't like to cook or are kinda bad at it, but just to have that opportunity? Like the cost of all that food and equipment has got to make it an expensive class for a school to have
@@Hellsing375 Schools in the US traditionally had that class (they called it "home economics" and girls would take it, while boys would take "shop") but there has been a big push to eliminate it because it is seen as merely preparing girls to be a housewife and thus sexist. I personally never had either class.
American here, I had a home economics class in middle school that taught us how to cook and read recipes but the meals we made weren’t very balanced. One time we had to make scrambled eggs paired with Kool-Aid with ungodly amounts of sugar. Not exactly the healthiest of meals but, at least some basics were taught. I’m very lucky that my mom loved to cook and taught me how to cook from scratch even when we had processed food and snacks in the house.
@@sparrowskeleton1831 eggs mixed with kool-aid?
For my family, the convenience food was (and still is) about time; between work, school, and errands, an oven-ready meal in a foil pan was a lifesaver. Kids could easily heat up microwave meals when parents got home late, and frozen meals could cook with no fuss while homework was finished.
the ending section was really healing. thank you for including it. my household was distinctly an ingredient household (out of health concerns/willingness from my parents to "eat healthy") - but they still didn't teach me how to cook, which i've been ashamed of for the longest time. my mom shamed me every time she saw me eating some candy or cookies i'd bought for myself, so i ended up hiding them when i bought them. hell, she'd shame me for putting some salt on my food, so i only did it when she wasn't looking. she'd pester me all the time for eating too much sugar for her liking. and sometimes, there was no dinner, because neither of my parents wanted to eat that night. all while not teaching me ANYTHING about cooking. i'm now 21 and can throw together a few decent-ish meals (although my repertoire is still very limited), and i bake once in a while. i often watch cooking videos. learning how to cook by myself is really helping me gain confidence in myself. i still have a lot to learn about cooking - and a lot of shame to UNlearn - but it's so much better now that i'm away from my mom.
I grew up in a 90% processed foods household. My mom was a single mom working two jobs and especially now as a parent I can feel for her just not wanting to cook most of the time. I am so lucky to be a sahm who can cook more for my family. But it took years to learn bc the only thing i knew how to make was hamburger helper or ramen. I consider myself fortunate to have fresh foods but we also have convenience foods bc you just gotta sometimes.
Same here. My mom used to get just a few hours of sleep before having to go to her other job. I feel lucky to be able to have the time to prepare things now as an adult.
To me it's not ingredients vs. snacks, but more ingredients vs. convenient foods. I'm from Eastern Europe, and my parents definitely had more "ingredients" than snacks/convenience foods. It was both because of trying to eat "healthy" and also cooking a lot from scratch. Now having my own household, being busy at work and struggling with my mental and physical health, I've become very reliant on having convenient food option which basically take no time to prepare. I also tried to normalize snacks in my household, not to consider them as "bad", just very neutrally :)
It was pretty interesting to see my fellow Americans go through snack withdrawals when I lived in Italy. I lived in an 80% ingredient house so it didn’t bother me as much, but many people had to go cold turkey on chips etc. because there weren’t many good ones and our food budgets were quite limited. The only snack I wanted was candy and there’s a LOT of that in Italy haha
I’m so grateful that my mom has always been reasonable about food (or at least, her kids’ food - she’s a little bit almond-coded herself). We definitely leaned towards Ingredient Household overall, but the kids all took a packaged snack or two, some kind of fruit or veggie, and something like a sandwich or leftovers to school every day. My mom made smart choices within that framework, e.g. always buying whole-wheat bread, to make sure we were getting what we needed nutritionally. (Though she didn’t get those sad 100 cal snack packs… she and I agree that those are worse than no snack at all lol) Her advice to me is always “eat what makes sense for your lifestyle” and she never makes me feel bad for eating like a college student. She taught me to cook when I was a teen but she also understands that it can be really challenging to plan meals and cook as a single adult, without wasting a ton of food or letting things go bad. She shares her strategies with me from when she was in her 20s and learning to cook on her own. Plus, my dad is a Grill Dad and is competent at cooking too, so my mom doesn’t even have to do it all herself. I didn’t realize until recently how much of a privilege it was for my family to have all this. Shoutout to my mom especially.
For me, a lot of it boils down to some fun fun executive dysfunction. I flat out do not register that I should be making food BEFORE I get hungry, so that I will have it WHEN I'm hungry. It doesn't occur to me as a possibility, no matter how many times I try to reinforce it. Therefore, by the time I realize I need to make food, I'm so desperately hungry I can't wait an hour for a meal to be done. I need something I can make in five minutes or less, ten if I'm really ambitious. I would love to be able to Actually Cook more, but it's just not feasible when your brain isn't capable of remembering that food exists until it needs it right then and there.
I'm the same way, but its not actually true that you CAN'T wait for an hour to eat when you are hungry. Personally I force myself to cook by simply not having any convenient options on hand and then if I wait until I'm starving, well then I'm just finally motivated to actually cook. (though a lot of lazy, one pot food results)
I precook ingredients and freeze them. I always have little bags with a couple servings of precooked seasoned taco ground beef so I can have dinner ready for me and my husband within 5 minutes by just tossing it in the microwave and pulling out some tortillas, lettuce, cheese, salsa, whatever. I’ll make it a couple of pounds at a time and it’ll last months eating “taco Tuesday” each week. Or cook a huge pot of shredded chicken, season it in a bunch do different ways and freeze it in portions and eat with naan, hummus and veggies, in a teriyaki bowl, with bbq sauce in a sandwich, etc. I work full time and I’m a full time student and I just don’t have time to spend a bunch of time cooking, so I use this method to keep 5/7 nights per week between 5-10 minutes to get dinner on the table.
god i know this feeling so well. im always underestimating how much time things take (partly because multitasking is so so stressful), and it just feels illegal to have to start at 5pm to have something done by 7pm, so when by myself id often have dinner at 9pm.... anyway my solution is to always have what i call "kitchen snacks": i have a lil bag of crackers or a bowl of grapes or something to nibble on while waiting for my dinner to cook. that way im not uncomfortable with hunger, and whet my appetite for my dinner. kinda like an appetizer ahaha, so it can be anyhting u like to munch on.
I grew up in a pretty well off household but having 5 siblings meant that as soon as any snack entered the house they got just utterly devoured instantly, as if descended upon by a swarm of locusts. So I'd say we were an ingredient household because snacks just didn't last
Lmao same. I’m one of six. All the good snacks were devoured before the groceries were even finished being put away
So relatable. And then throw on top being the youngest and the only girl and you really learned darwinism fast…
I'm super curious about the connection between ingredient/snacks households and how the parents grew up. For ex, I think my parents grew up in "look at these midcentury convenience foods so cool so helpful the mom's can work if they want--but don't forget to also cook for your family" households and their house is mostly ingredients with some packaged snacks, and we ate mostly mom-cooked meals but often takeout or leftovers too. Definitely a much deeper topic to discuss!
i grew up in east asia and one of the things about being in a mainly ingredient household but hardly ever feel like i need snack is that, we spent a lot of time outside of the house where freshly made snacks are available (from either vendors or just fruits and veggie), instead of being trapped in suburbia, limiting snacks to the weekly grocery runs
grew up in an immigrant household. my mom started to refuse buying snacks bc we would eat em all so my snacks become olives, cheese, hummus etc. in my own place i do buy snacks but most of the time even with the option of a snack, i still reach for a olive or 5. brine included :P we did have "snacks" or treats when there was a celebration or gathering and something was baked. once in a while obv gas station snacks
Cheese and hummus are normal snacks though, and they’re both processed foods not raw ingredients.
@@annw7843 Hummus made at home it's no more processed than a home cooked meal. It's literally just chickpeas, lemon, sesame paste, garlic and spices blended together, and is easy to make and keeps in the fridge. If that's considered processed, then pretty much any dish is unless you're eating raw fruits and vegetables.
I grew up in an immigrant household too, I remember having a mix of pre-prepared food and ingredients. I think when we were kids, my mom bought us packaged snacks, but we ate homecooked food for our meals and a lot of fruit. After my dad ended up with some health issues, we started to be more of an ingredient only home, though my dad would get snacks from the desi store or costco. They were relatively healthy snacks, but I remember making a lot of cursed combinations as a kid bc there weren't snacks in the house. I also remember eating a lot of shredded cheese in the middle of the night haha
@@jenniferwalker9616 Yes, I agree that any dish that requires preparation is processed. “Processing” just means that food is no longer in its raw form. All cooked or prepared food is processed. Processed food isn’t inherently unhealthy, but industrially processed foods will often contain ingredients people will take umbrage with. I was just pointing out that hummus and cheese aren’t raw ingredients they’ve already been prepared (processed) into their form.
I did not grow up in a household with a lot of snacks outside of occasional frozen meals pizza and corn dogs so it was a major culture shock to move in with my girlfriend and be exposed to the world of snacks that aren't a celery stick with peanut butter on it
I just started the video but I’ve been living abroad on my own for 8 years and haven’t been back to my parents house in 3 of those years due to covid. I went to my parents house and was appalled because ALL they had was snacks. I’ve definitely become an ingredient house, not because I’m trying to be, I just like to cook! Even snacks! I make my own bread for the week, and my own air fryer croutons and honey mustard dressing EVERYTIME I make a salad and my parents were like 😳😳😳 “Just buy the dressing!!” Edit: Now that I think about it, it could be because I’ve gotten used to living abroad and having to make things that I can easily find in the US that are harder to find out here 🤔
I'm Polish. I was an au pair in Norway and gave kids one candy each. Father was angry as if I was supposed to know about their Norwegian custom. On the other hand, I'm so puzzled by the British who think packed lunches for schoolchildren must include crisps. I work as a teacher in Poland and the vending machines do contain crisps or puffs, but specifically made for childer. One kid came up to me asking to open her mini can of corn.
i don’t think i lived in a strict “ingredient only” household growing up but id always remember going to my friend’s houses and literally stealing a bunch of candy and packaged snacks from their pantries 😭 aside from money and dieting, i think part of it is how much a child has a say in what their parents buy from the store, bc i barely went grocery shopping w my parents and was hence just left w whatever they decided to bring home that week. also, i think it has to do w storage space! i never had a pantry, and most of our cabinets were full of pans, cups, and pastas/soups/beans, so we literally just had no space for all the packaged ready-to-go snacks we usually think of (which is why i ate so many croutons lmao, which makes sense cause i couldn’t rly cook anything as a child)
Great point on storage space! I think that played a big part for me growing up and even now.
All your videos, especially the ones that center on/talk about marginalized communities and nuanced upbringings. It has been so beneficial to my mental health and I feel like a person. I tear up during a lot of them. Thank you!
omg this made ME tear up, that means a lot! Thank you for this ❤️
For surrrre, also when you consider the impact of growing up with parents that have TIME available to them to teach their kids to cook and be comfortable preparing meals from scratch, compared to other families where parents might have to throw meals together quickly, even if they are cooking from scratch. I feel like that has a big impact on whether those kids will grow up and seek out ready-made meals and snacks. Learning to cook as an adult when you're starting with very little skill is super intimidating.
I related so much to how you described your household. Not learning how to cook anything until I moved for college has made it much more exhausting to have to do it every day as an adult! I was also always jealous of my friends who always ate dinner as a family because we didn’t. In hindsight my parents were definitely just doing the best they could and it had nothing to do with their effort or care for us, but it’s so interesting how much food shapes our perceptions of ourselves and others.
when i was a child, i lived in an ingredient-only household. however, i was very lucky: my mam baked snacks for us regularly (multiple times a week). when she started working, she started buying us snacks from the grocery store. i am from europe btw
Thank you for being compassionate and for opening up about your own cooking/food situation! Too often people can't help but insert fatphobia and ableism into these conversations, so it's lovely to hear a considerate discussion.
I'm from Sweden and the "special occasion" thing is definately true. Same with the Saturday treat thing is very much true (mostly this is what kids are taught, grown ups obviously do what they like but this is the culture we are taught from a young age)
I think the dead center of the snack to ingredient axis is frozen; still requires cooking time but not prep, fairly long shelf life, and a variety of "health" options. We weren't a huge snack household but we also didn't cook more than once or twice a week, so we went to the freezer. Some ready meals, some frozen leftovers, and some that we made from scratch and froze for later On another note, cooking classes are still commonly offered in school in the US, it's just usually an elective you sign up for (vs requiring home ec). I did go to to a 4H day camp as a kid but idk how accessible those are now
I'm mostly an ingredients household as an adult, but I do like my frozen food. I like being able to fill the freezer with different options without being pressured to eat them all within a time limit.
I live in Finland and was honestly shocked to learn that Saturday sweets aren't a universal thing. My family isn't nearly as strict with it as when we were children, now we have things like cookies and ice cream more often, my parents still offer to buy us candy on Saturdays lol
I grew up with both, but now that i live alone I definitely am ingredients. It's mainly because I lack self control, and honestly it gives me peace of mind because I know that when the cravings get REALLY bad, I can go out and get a little (or big) treat and have it be worth it and not feel guilt. (I was a chibby kid so I have some food stuff but not to the level that it's medically relevant) Right now I just had a couple spoons of cottage cheese 🙂
Great content as usual, thank you so much. As an European, I have to add something. I love Bill Bryson's books and he talks a lot about American culture and its history on all his books, but specifically Made in America made me think a lot about this subject. I learn when shopping centers, fast food, pre-made food, etc was available in the US and it was way earlier than in Europe, specially on some countries like my own. For example, TV dinners were a thing in the US in the 50's and 60's. In the 60's, in my country, I'm not even sure my dad had a freezer or a tv and he grew in what is considered a bigger, developed city. My mom grew in a small village and they only installed electricity infrastructures in the late 70's. So, pre-made foods were not really a thing. I am 43 years old and I remember the first shopping center being built were I live (and, again, I live in a bigger and more developed city). When I was a kid, ready made food meant a can of beans and beef or mixing a tuna can in some rice leftovers. Snacks were few and expensive. I believe that mine was the first generation to really know snacks as we know them now. I was a kid when Lay's, Cheetos, Coca-Cola, Oreos and such things were available and they were a rare treat because of the price. So, being a "ingredient household" was the norm. Yes, the price was a factor but mostly because we didn't have much available. I was in college when pre-packaged foods began to become more available. My kids also grow in a mostly "ingrediente household" because that's what happens here. And since the wider availability of snacks here happened at the same time people were becoming more conscious about healthy eating, pre-packaged snacks are often avoided as school snacks, for example. Kids are told to take ingredient snacks for school, such as fresh fruits, cheese, sandwich. And schools have food vending machines and cafeterias where students can buy lots of snacks but recently some less healthy snacks were banned from schools in favor of more ingredient based snacks. Kids can no longer buy snacks that are too fat, too sugary or too salty . They also no longer sell sodas in schools. Snacks as chips, pre-packaged cookies, juice boxes and similar are a treat that kids usually take to a school party or a field trip. Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing people's choices and I also buy pre-packaged foods (I am a mother of two with 2 jobs) but culturally it's just different. Yes, we also like the convenience of pre-made food but a just made rotisserie chicken with good bread and a pack of pre-washed salad is probably more available in groceries than a frozen dinner and people like it a lot more. Sorry for the long comment, I hope this helps to understand the difference in our cultures regarding this subject
Can I ask which country you grew up in?
@@apfelmus1747 By username and lack of electricity infrastructure in the periphery into the 70s it sounds like Portugal or Spain. They also had authoritarian dictatorships until the mid 70s and did not get into the EU until the later 80s so that explains why international imports and Western-style consumerism came later. That lines up with freezers and televisions being uncommon even in cities in the that period. Spain had only 192 TVs per 1000 people in 1977, less than some of the Socialist states like Czechoslovakia which had 267 TVs per 1000 people in the same time period.
just wanted to say i love your huge knowledge of history. such an aspiration!@@serebii666
I have definitely become an ingredient only snacker but I realise this is because the only snacks my parents bought were sweet treats and I'm definitely a savoury girl, so cubes of cheddar and plain tortillas are defo a snack of choice for me haha
After growing up in more of a snack household than ingredient household, adjusting to being a more in-between kind of household is definitely difficult at times. We ate fast food more often than most partially because it was an excuse to get out of the house and partly because both parents worked while a lot of what we typically think of as women's responsibilities still fell to my mom to handle on top of working every day. This isn't to say that I never had home-made meals but it seems like the stuff I had growing up was usually not very time consuming (to me, a stove top macaroni and cheese or hamburger helper was a Nice Home-Cooked Meal and I was confused when people called instant mashed potatoes "fake"). As an adult, I now find myself stressed out by just how much time it takes to prepare, cook, and eat dinner when making food from scratch. (Not to mention how quickly dishes pile up when you aren't eating mostly microwaveable foods). And I live with one other adult plus pets. I would never judge someone trying to raise children for opting for convenience even if the convenient option is technically more expensive.
I'm glad you were kind and passionate to everyone in between. I personally come from an environment where there's a lot miscommunication and a lot of ingredients that take way too long to cook. I had a meal with you since I personally have a very poor relationship with my mother. Thank you so much for this video. I wanted to add some pointers about inflation being different in many countries. Proteins for example which are essential for the body and brain are some most of expensive to come around and in some countries fresh fruit is very expnesive. I'm personally European and the preferences that were listed in the statistics were applicant to me. Chatting to you in my head made me much happier, philosophizing is a passion of mine. Thank you for this this piece of media. This is a heart felt comment.
Both my partner and I grew up in heavy diet influenced households, we both also have such bad ADHD that eating and food has been something we have to work tirelessly at. We both only know how to cook a handful of things, and even then cooking it self takes so much energy most days, we love pre-packaged and frozen stuff, we very much just try and feed ourselves whatever we can day by day
Anytime I see an almond, the only thing I think of is Gigi's mom telling her to eat almonds when she's hungry.
I grew up in a house that always had popcorn kernels, crackers, and chips on hand. I wasn't eating those things all the time and they weren't for special occasions either. They were just there if I wanted them. A lot of people who always have snacks in their house don't always eat them very regularly because having them is normal to us. For people who grew up with no snacks at home when they are given the option to eat snacks at a friends house or something they will probably take it because they won't get snacks again soon. It's not that I eat those kinds of snacks more. I just have them more available at home.
I was raised with the idea that packaged food is expensive and dental care is even more expensive.
I grew up with a well rounded diet. Healthy meals with the occasional fun snack or fast food. My husband grew up with a lot of food scarcity and he still struggles with eating balanced, or eating enough at all. Ingredients or processed snacks, just having food in your house is such a blessing
my german grandma always had seasonal fruit sliced up for me when i got home from school ❤️ i remember my adults never rly bought "fun" snack foods unless we had a big field trip, road trip, birthday party, or standardized testing coming up, and going to my very american peers' homes was always a TRIP lmfao
I feel so validated!!! I never knew this was a topic or even a thing, I definitely grew up in an ingredient household with an almond mom, it was always crazy and even embarrassing to have friends over and they'd immediately notice how we had absolutely no snacks
I think it's safe to say most households in Austria are mixed. We had a small pantry for lots of snacks, my grandma has always some a few snacks around. same with friends from families with a different income.
I´m also Austrian. We always had a candy drawer, but my mom would bake cakes or cookies almost every day for Jause. We rarely had snacks other than that, simply because they weren't needed. It's quite interesting to reflect on that ^^
17:24 another hidden cost of buying in bulk includes transportation! part of the reason Europeans buy food more often is because they can easily walk or take public transit to the store. I'm an American who lives in a city without a car and so when I buy food, I usually just buy what I can carry, but I go to the store way more often than when I was a kid living in a rural area. It's a lot easier now with delivery services and online groceries but I still prefer to just walk to the store. I'm glad you also talked about disability and preprepared foods. I wish there were less restrictions on food stamps so people weren't forced to buy ingredients that they might struggle to prepare. People should be given money to eat what they want! And they should also be able to access that food easily as pedestrians or by taking public transport.
along the lines of being latchkey, I had to cook for myself and my younger sister since age 7, so the foods had to be quick and easy for me to feed us (single mom household and she was working two jobs and going to college)
as a central asian we usually had cookies (that no one wanted) and candies left for guests, snacks (as in choco, jelly, chips, fast food, sweet soda, juices) are celebratory foods. For new year most kids get a bag of assorted sweets and like 70% is left unconsumed since eh, doesn't fit the kids palette. If there was something delicious like lemonade we (4 children) would gulp that down in minutes. We didn't have regular meals but even as a kid you could always boil some grain, or spaghetti, or crunch some vegetables (carrots, tomatoes) or fruit, canned peas and corn are a go to as well. In most post ussr countries fruits and vegs are cheap, always cheaper than canned or frozen food (except the triple priced "exotic" import") The neighbouring elders/grandparents usually give some snacks such as kisel or savoury pastries, they also ferment and marinade tons of stuff, or make fruit concoctions when it's the season and then you store it all year round . Since adults are always out of house boiling stuff is go to. From the stories of my parents/friends parents/acquaintances etc their go to dessert was a slice of bread with sugar sprinkled onto it, if lucky with butter, there are also salty sweet snacks made out of dried horse milk, you can suck on it like a lollipop. Favourite ones are probably salted cucumbers, nuts on rare occasions, tomato onion salad and apples, tons of apples since it's the towns specialty. 👍
love that you talked about your experience at the end- as someone with sensory issues and who stuck to beige foods a lot (and still now)... it just feels better knowing other adults are the same