How parents remove hurdles to cooking at home
I don’t know how to cook, but I have found solutions to this problem.
In my last blog, I listed some of the main reasons parents can’t and won’t cook at home, including having picky eaters at home. However, as childhood overweight and obesity skyrocket in Australia,1 Europe,2 and America,3 cooking at home can become a tool to improve diets and health. The reason is that home-cooked meals are often healthier and more nutritious than takeout and frozen meals,4–6 which are usually laden with sugars, salts, and unhealthy fats.6
In this article, I’m going to explore some of the solutions parents have come up with to remove their perceived hurdles to cooking at home, and I provide some tools and resources to help action these solutions. These parent-given solutions have been identified mainly through interviews and surveys. Whether they will work for most parents (depending on their demographics, geographic locations, and lifestyles) is likely to be answered by rigorous studies in the future. So here they are.
Solutions to tackle time constraints
Let me start with the issue of insufficient time and fatigue.7 Parents often feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the number of work and other responsibilities they have each day. By the time dinnertime rolls around, they’re too spent to cook. Hence, some parents say they feel too "lazy" or unmotivated to cook.8,9 Even breakfasts are challenging with time being a primary constraint, especially for working parents and children attending educational institutions.10,11 Parents suggest three main strategies to combat time restraints: using cooking gadgets, cooking together, and meal planning and preparation.
1a. Using time-saving cooking gadgets
Using a slow cooker (crock pot) or air fryer can reduce preparation time while providing healthier meals.9 Compared to deep-fried foods, air fryers result in consuming significantly less fat and calories and create fewer carcinogenic compounds like acrylamide.12 Nevertheless, the high heat levels used to cook with air fryers mean that other carcinogenic compounds, such as heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, may still form.12 If you're wondering what these gadgets are, what to cook in them, and why they are beneficial, then try reading these articles about air fryers and slow cookers.*
1b. Cooking together
Teaching children to prepare meals, and parents cooking together can spread the workload more evenly.9,11,13 Cooking with parents helps children's development by teaching them eating habits that maintain health.4,14 For example, research shows that learning to cook increases children's self-efficacy to eat fruit and vegetables while eating less fried foods and drinking fewer sugary drinks.9,15 Additional benefits include children liking to cook as a means of spending more time with their parent(s), and children experiencing independence, ownership, pride and self-esteem even after a single meal prep!15
A great site to kickstart cooking with your children is Jamie Oliver’s cooking with kids YouTube videos. The videos teach kids how to prepare a variety of basic but yummy, child-friendly recipes with the chef being a child!
1c. Pre-planning and preparation
Instead of shopping and cooking daily, which can be time-consuming, proactive parents suggest planning and executing ahead of time. They say completing meal planning, grocery shopping and batch cooking (including freezing meals) on the weekends can reduce food preparation times during the week.9 Alternatively cooking enough food to have leftovers for the next night is a similar strategy.9
Pre-preparing elements of breakfast the night before or earlier can also save time and ensure everyone has breakfast. For example, parents suggest cutting up and refrigerating fruit, pre-boiling eggs, using microwave cups to cook eggs, and having pre-prepared foods like pancake batter.10,11 or on-the-go options such as dry cereal, and yoghurt.11
Solutions to tackle the high cost of healthy foods
Another barrier parents face in cooking at home is the high cost of healthy ingredients like fruits, vegetables and meats. This cost is a reality many families face post-Covid. But savvy parents offer solutions to tackle the higher cost of healthier foods including avoiding temptations and using different grocery channels. Health researchers also add a third strategy of avoiding food waste.
2a. Planning to avoid temptations
Parents note that planning the week's menu and using a shopping list helps them to stick to the grocery budget and avoid impulse shopping.9 This strategy makes a lot of sense because grocery stores are set up for consumers to buy impulsively. Everything from soft, ambient music to a comfortable store temperature aims to slow shoppers down while browsing through aisles so that they can spend as much as possible! Americans spent about $5400 annually on impulse purchases before the pandemic, and this increased by 18% during the pandemic.16 Other research showed that Australians who shopped for groceries online instead of browsing supermarket aisles saved on average $1300 a year.17 Therefore, buying based on needs and not wants reduces the food budget, avoids food waste, and is more environmentally friendly.18 To sum up, try shopping online using a shopping list.
2b. Where and how to buy to save money
Other strategies parents give to reduce their food budget are shopping at a Farmers' market14 (which is usually cheaper and has seasonal produce) or buying meal boxes (such as Hello Fresh9). A survey showed that one in five Australians used meal boxes and those who did, saved about $1505 a year as a result.17 Buying meal boxes has several benefits, including catering to varying dietary needs, providing nutritional information, meal inspiration and meal variation, reducing food waste, getting seasonal produce, and reducing shopping frequency and the temptation to buy more food.14 Unfortunately, meal boxes were only recommended by parents from higher socioeconomic segments while other parents disagreed with this strategy, noting that it is expensive, time-consuming, and not very child-friendly.9,14
However, a useful website that strikes a happy medium is the free LIVELIGHTER website, developed by the Cancer Council Western Australia. LIVELIGHTER allows the user to choose from a variety of healthy recipes to plan and design a menu for every night of the week (see family meal plans). It also gives the user a printable/shareable shopping list. So, LIVELIGHTER is like the commercial meal kits, except that it doesn't include ingredients delivery. The upside is that it is free and gives a healthy and affordable seven-dinner meal plan (not just five, which a lot of commercial meal boxes provide).
2c. Avoiding food waste
Now avoiding food waste was not a strategy to save money that was recommended by parents; but heath researchers recommend it because it will reduce the grocery bill.1 For example, did you know that Australian households throw away 2.46 million tonnes of food each year? This amount is equivalent to throwing out one in five bags of groceries or 312 kg per person.2 This is grocery funds going to waste!
Food waste can be avoided in several ways such as eating the entire cauliflower, including its leaves, or putting some veggie scraps in a jar and growing them anew. Avoiding food waste is the ‘in’ thing so finding out how to stop tossing out unused veggies or foods will save money. Here are a few websites I like. One useful resource is ABC ‘Everyday’ which gives examples of how to reuse your veggies. Alternatively, you can visit the FOODWISE website and use their RECIPE ROOM tool to get recipes for the ingredients you have left over in your fridge. Finally, you can download a web/mobile App called emptymyfridge – recipe by food which provides a similar recipe finder as the FOODWISE tool.
Solutions to tackle the confidence problem
A third barrier to cooking at home is that some parents don't have the confidence to plan and prepare meals. But parents also suggest that this problem can be overcome by the right information tools.
3a. Access to tools
Parents note that their confidence to cook would improve if they have access to the right information tools. For example, having access to mobile apps that provide both healthy recipes and corresponding grocery lists, would help to increase meal/snack variations and inspirations, provide opportunities for more healthy eating, and make shopping easier.14 Social and traditional media are also noted as helpful ways to access healthy recipes.14,19
Interestingly, an intervention study undertaken by health promotion researchers, showed that giving food skills training to parents improved parental culinary skills and nutrition knowledge. This training involved meal planning and preparation for weekly dinners, with the use of shopping lists.20 Therefore, this strategy provided by parents may indeed prove to be helpful in future research.
Now, there is a mobile app available that can provide these benefits free of charge. This mobile app, developed by the University of Southern California, is evidence-based (which means it’s been tested and shown to help parents) and is called VeggieBook. VeggieBook helps with the "what to cook" and how to shop smart and can be downloaded from the iPhone or Samsung App stores. The app has two parts. One part, called the SecretBook, helps the user to get a variety of healthy meal and snack purchasing and preparation tips. The other part of the app is the Veggiebook. The Veggiebook section basically lists a number of vegetables. The user can select a vegetable they want to cook with and then the app guides them through a variety of questions to narrow down to recipes that are most suited to their needs. So typical questions, the app asks the user, are preferred cooking method(s), flavour(s) and meat(s), who will eat it (child, adult, or diabetic), whether the recipe is for storing or freezing etc. Give it a go, you may be pleasantly surprised. What makes this app so great is that the recipes are easy to make and some of them can be made in a very short time.
I also found a couple of great media resources to improve parents' skills and confidence to cook. The first is a video series by Joshua Weissman called Cheap and healthy meals for the week, done in 1 hour. In these YouTube videos, he slam-dunks a few goals of healthy recipes, time-saving, budget-friendly meal planning, and cooking skills! Personally, I would ensure the veggie servings fill three-quarters of a dinner plate and the protein (that is, meat/fish) portions are in line with the dietary guidelines for eating protein.
The second social media resource is Jamie Oliver’s batch-cooking family recipes for more yummy and healthy meal ideas.
Solutions to tackle the 'picky eater' problem
A final barrier parents presented to cooking at home is the food preferences of their picky eater child(ren). Many parents fret over how to ensure their children eat enough and eat healthily. Realistically though, it takes time, effort, and a variety of strategies, tools and resources to overcome picky eating in children. I have devoted an entire book to this topic in My kids love veggies! This book puts the science into conversational language for any parent to learn why, when and how to effectively intervene to change children's dietary behaviours.
What are your thoughts on this issue? Do you have some great solutions for the barriers parents give? Join the conversation on Facebook at Parenting for healthy eating and share your thoughts.
Note: * I don’t drink so I substitute wine in recipes with healthier options given by healthline.
References
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2. World Health Organization. WHO Childhood obesity in European Region remains high- new WHO report presents latest country data [Internet]. 2022 Nov. (Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (COSI) report (5th in the series)). Available from: https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/08-11-2022-childhood-obesity-in-european-region-remains-high--new-who-report-presents-latest-country-data
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