Barriers to Eating Sustainably, Real and Imagined

During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.

It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food rather than the pre-made stuff" was to their strategy of getting by on a small income. In both the households I lived in as a kid - my father's single parent household and my mother and step-mother's joint one, not enough money was constantly be stretched by care and thrift. I didn't realize then how lucky I was to have this model.

My father owned no vehicle and was a single parent half the time to three girls. My youngest sister was a baby when my parents broke up, and we did not own a car. My father packed three girls under 10, one an infant or toddler in a stroller onto a series of buses each week, and took us into Boston (we lived in small cities well outside Boston) to Haymarket, an open air produce market that operates all year round. We would buy the food on the way home from some adventure in the city (my grandmothers always gave us the gift of museum memberships for Christmas) and then pack as much produce as we could afford and carry into backpacks - along sometimes with meat and fish from the Halal market or the fish vendors who came in from Boston Harbor. We would then take buses home and walk the mile or so back. Once a month my father would get a ride from a friend or pay for a taxi from the local supermarket - he'd take the bus there and take a cab back, loaded up with things that couldn't be carried back on the bus. And that was it for our shopping.

And then my father would cook. Despite working two jobs most of this time, he cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner, 7 days a week. My father's education in food had come from Julia Child, and his Polish grandmother so it was an elaborate cuisine. He rejected his mothers' bland, British WASP cooking, but he built on his mother's model. Gram had been a single parent in the 1950s. She left an abusive husband, and despite a full time job as a telephone operator and post-polio syndrome that left her mobility severel impaired during her whole life, she too produced meals every day for her sons.

My mother and step mother at least had a car, and there were two of them, but they had considerably more mouths to feed. For a long period my mother ran a daycare out of her home for low income families trying to get off welfare (this was back when there actually was such a thing as daycare to help women get off welfare). The state paid a tiny subsidy for food, but the project of providing breakfast (not mandated, but often the children hadn't had any), lunch and two snacks a day for kids made of healthy food meant that my family had to be extremely careful about money - the stipend didn't cover it even remotely and if my mother wanted to turn a profit at all, she had to be thrifty. Her innate concern for the children, however, meant that she would not do this by shorting them on nutritious food.

In addition, for some time during my teens, my mother and step-mother were foster parents to additional children - and again, the tiny stipend provided for foster kids by no means covered food, clothing, school supplies, presents etc... The kids often were inadequately nourished, so the food had to be nutritious, and they often had little experience of fresh or home cooked food so it had to be tasty. I don't think I realized as a teen how churlish my complaints about food were when I was fed so well, on so little.

The central means of making this happen was cooking from scratch, using simple and inexpensive but healthy ingredients - my mother and step mother both worked full time, and often were going back to school in the evenings as well. And yet my step-mother also produced breakfast, packed lunches and dinners every single night through my entire childhood.

So perhaps I didn't know any better when I went to college and graduate school and simply assumed that poverty and plentiful, good food weren't necessarily incompatible. My friends and housemates and I cooked - we threw parties with elaborate meals and ate inexpensive foods - produce in season from farmer's markets, often bought in bulk at the end of the day, meats from ethnic markets (goat curry was a big favorite), asian staples from the Chinese grocery store, backpacked from Chinatown, with 25 lb bags of rice in drag-behind grocery carts. I learned a hundred ways to make rice and beans.

I married a man who cooked and who had his own large repetoir of cheap, healthy dishes made from staples. We lived on baked sweet potatoes with greens and a cheese sauce with less cheese than roux (cheese was expensive) and learned to cook taro and plantain and duck eggs, which were cheaper than chicken eggs.

Eventually, I added more scruples - I started to care about how the produce was grown and how far my food travelled. I learned more about the pollution that contaminated the fish off the boats and about overfishing. I learned more than I wanted to know about how cheap meat was produced and stopped buying it. And we started keeping kosher. All of which should have sent our food budget skyrocketing, but didn't - because the same basic strategies for eating that we used before worked fine. Kosher food is much more expensive if you eat a lot of meat and processed foods - it is quite cheap if your meals are mostly vegetarian and fresh. Eating locally is the same - if you want to eat local, organic leg of lamb regularly, you must either be affluent or grow your own. If you are content to save up for the occasional festival lamb, and eat meat about as often as is healthy anyway (less often, used as a condiment), and are creative with what is readily available and in season, then eating locally and organically is not significantly more expensive than eating.

But the assumption is that it must be. I run into this all the time - the idea that local sustainable food is best embodied in Whole Foods or something comparable, and that good food is only for the elitist affluent is wrong, but a widespread assumption. That doesn't mean that there are not real barriers to local, sustainable and healthy eating for many people - these are real and exist, and for some populations, are so burdensome that they may not be remediable. But I think it is important to talk about what these barriers are and what populations they affect, rather than to state, as one of my colleagues did recently in a discussion of his post on kosher coke, that a diet made up mostly of fresh foods is unachievable for most people. (I think his claim that kashruth is also unsuited to modern life is equally incorrect, but while I do think that more people should eat locally, sustainably and healthily, I don't really care whether more people keep kosher, so I'll leave that subject alone. ;-))

I'm not trying to pick on Revere at Effect Measure - what interests me about his observation is the fact that his assumption so much reflects a strain of popular opinion, that regards food awareness and particularly food that is local and sustainable as largely elitist and hard to achieve for most people. So let's take a look at what the primary barriers to eating sustainably are for most people.

The first one is poverty. For a chunk of the US population in extreme poverty, there are insurmountable barriers to cooking from scratch and eating whole foods. Families living in transitional housing or shelters have no access to cooking facilities. Immigrants sharing a very small space may have limited access or none at all to the facilities to cook and store food. The homeless often have no cooking facilities at all. For families who rely on older children to do meal preparation, pre-made and processed food may be the only thing realistically produceable. For families with limited transportation living in "food deserts" in urban or rural areas, it may be almost impossible to reach food, or there may be little time to do so. People working multiple jobs may be so tired that cooking is out of reach to them. The elderly and disabled may find cooking or shopping to physically onerous.

Some of these barriers might be overcome with various strategies. For example, for families with low incomes but stable housing and some discretionary funds, whose primary barrier is lack of time to shop, help in finding bulk sources and techniques for using bulk foods might over time both lower their grocery bill and reduce the amount of time they have to spend shopping.

An elderly couple who cannot travel out to buy local produce at farmer's markets due to the walking required or having given up a car might well be able to commission a local person to shop for them when they also go shopping - for example, in my neighborhood we served this function. We shopped for my husband's grandparents who lived with us, and became aware that other neighbors wanted to take advantage of wonderful produce but couldn't get out to do it, and so began to deliver produce to neighbors.

In some cases, policy shifts are needed in order to make significant changes - before homeless families can focus on quality food, they need a stable place to live - cities might enable families to take over foreclosed properties in exchange for maintenence, for example. A shift in policy that enabled food stamp dollars to pay out double at farmer's markets creates an incentive to use them there. Policies that encourage local soup kitchens and shelters to source local first, if comparably priced produce can be had would make more local food available to people who can't buy it at any price. Incentives for bringing farmer's markets and coops to low income urban food deserts can create food access.

But we should also remember that the poor are not a monolith, and while they often have reduced access to good food, not everyone experiences these barriers equally. I know among my own readers many, many low income people who do cook, buy in bulk, eat locally and sustainably despite being extremely poor. Some who are unemployed due to economic circumstances, retirement, youth or disability have time to cook. Many of them do the extraordinary and heroic work of producing a healthy, sustainable meal three times a day while living on tiny incomes.

It is one thing to articulate and try to alleviate the barriers to eating well that the poor face. It is another thing to claim that it isn't realistic to expect the poor to eat well. The latter erases those who do accomplish these things, and naturalize their situation, the former acknowledges that it is more difficult for some people, sometimes insurmountably more difficult, and gives us challenges to work on.

The same is true for those who are not poor - I just as often hear that it is not realistic for working people to eat well - that those who do so must be unusually wealthy or not have jobs. But this truly troubles me because it erases the experience of my parents, my grandmother, my own experience. By implying that good food is elitist, it is easy to marginalize those who care about it - but wanting to be healthy, wanting to vote with your dollars for a kind of system that is valuable to yourself and your community, wanting to enjoy your meals - that's not elitist, that's human and normal.

That does not mean that the middle class doesn't face real barriers to eating sustainably too (or that some of these barriers may not also affect the poor). But again, it is important to distinguish between imaginary generalities like "modern people work too hard to cook meals from scratch" and specific, real barriers. These include lack of time, lack of knowledge about how to cook (lack of cooking skills is a American problem that crosses class barriers, but, of course, the lower your household income, the more you suffer physically from it because of the quality of pre-prepared food available), false perceptions about how hard the process of preparing food is, unfamiliarity with fresh foods and preferences for processed foods or even aversions to healthy foods.

I recently ran a workshop in which a young woman, a recent college graduate who came to the US from a less affluent country talked about being a Nanny for a family with young kids. The family ostensibly cared about what they ate - but she observed that the parents almost never cooked, because they were too tired. It was always easier to get take out. She contrasted this to her mother, a single parent with several children who worked long hours in a menial job while also maintaining a garden and cooking three meals a day, and observed that the people she worked for didn't work harder - but they saw cooking as more difficult and they were constantly made aware of the availability of take-out and processed foods.

This is one of the reasons I think we have to be so very careful about not naturalizing barriers to cooking and buying sustainable food - because while some of them are very real, it is also true that magnifying those barriers is enormously profitable and is part of nearly every advertising campaign. Unless you are extremely conscious of the impact of those strategies it is easy to take for granted that Campbell's Soup is better than homemade, that it is easier to put the kids in their carseats and drive to Taco Bell than make a salad, that tired Moms rely on Stouffers and Pop Tarts. It behooves us to be very suspicious whenever we go along with the message of corporate culture, and more so with food, because there is so much money to be made in processed and premade foods. There is virtually no marketing budget for fresh vegetables, none for water from the tap or homemade iced tea not from a powder, for whole grains and legumes - while there is an enormous marketing budget for all of those other foods. Telling us that local and unprocessed is more expensive, more work, harder, pricier is very, very profitable.

And again, some of the barriers people face are very real. It may be that your wife or husband really won't eat anything green - but maybe you can get started with the local berries and fruits. Maybe you really are working too long to be able to do elaborate cooking - but a crock pot could make it possible for you to save money and eat better food. Maybe you don't know how to cook - but perhaps you could learn.

Some of these things require policy and social changes - the revitalization of home economics in schools, for example, may be necessary to ensure that the next generation has better cooking skills than their mothers. Investment of resources in materials that help people locate local sources of food can make it possible for busy families to buy more locally. Encouraging more meatless or low meat meals in schools and other places where people get their ideas about how meals are supposed to look could certainly help.

And some of these changes may never happen - someone who eats only coke, steak and doritos may never buy the "Let's get a bale of fresh collard greens and eat less meat" argument. But again, we can't erase the many people who come home at the end of a long day of work and put a freshly made meal in front of their kids. The truth is that the issue is not realism - it is a complex combination of commitment, education, policy support, community support, enthusiasm and knowledge. And the very fact that so many people do do this is proof that far more could than do.

At the center of my presumptions is this - that despite the high barriers to eating well that our society throws up, there is a remarkable commitment to making both personal and social change. Given the enormous weight of the money that pushes us to eat industrial and not regard the cost, I find it both heartening and astonishing that so many people from every walk of life find themselves united around the basic cause of feeding their families decent food. I was lucky enough to live in a family where that mattered, and it shaped my life. But more, I am lucky enough now to be an adult in a society where as a people we are learning to care about our food - that does not allow us to evade responsibility for not making food access equal - but it does give me hope for what emerges over time.

Sharon

Categories

More like this

When I was 12 or so, I asked my divorced, working outside the home mother why she didn't make apple pie very often. She handed me her battered Betty Crocker cookbook with various scraps of paper inserted with additional recipes and variations. Not long afterwards, my brother and I started cooking dinner once (each) a week. Guide mostly by our mother's book collection, and advice (when sought) from our mother.
Our 10 year old daughter cooks dinner on Monday nights. She has her own recipe book, and all the advice she asks for, _when_ she asks for it, from her mother and I.
There is no _good_ reason for any person to grow up ignorant of cooking real food, from garden to table.
Long live the hobbits.

Glenn

There is definitely a personal preference factor (some people just don't like to cook) but my response to that is, "I don't like to do dishes, but I don't eat off paper plates every night!"

Like you say, there are some barriers, but anyone could make some small change - and then build on it. I actually dislike many vegetables, and yet I'm making a commitment to living off my garden, and there are no meat trees, dang it! So I'm learning recipes (like gingered carrots, and Arabian squash casserole)that help me enjoy my veggies. And as I see the prices of food go up and up, I am thrilled to have the option of eating frugally. And I have so many 15 min to 30 min fast-from-scratch recipes that I just won't let friends and family use that as an excuse! Sure, start small... but make a start!

I noticed a pattern above, that plays out across the land;
are we too tired to cook, or too tired because we don't? A good meal, minus the preservatives and chemically produced flavors and ingredients hard to classify as food (indeed, some classifled as pesticides), lends nutrition. Fast food does not, only calories.
The middle of our supermarkets is thick with poisons.
But, as you do, Sharon, we need to cook, food we grew if possible, with friends and loved ones. Grow visible gardens. Share our bounty. Support Farmer's Markets.
In the old days extended families and neighbors met, cooked and ate together, kept the ties alive. Events seem to be trending that way again.

My parents raised three children on a little five-acre farm. They had a garden (although, in fact, there were many vegetables my father wouldn't eat at the time), and we raised our own meat, and froze and canned vegetables and berries from u-pick farms. My memories of those years are of my father telling us all the time how wonderful all this good food was, how lucky we were, etc. I believed every word; it was a lovely childhood. Not until last year did he tell me we lived that way because the alternative was food stamps, and his parents had raised him to believe that he should be able to provide for his family without assistance. Came as quite a surprise. As did his regret for "all things we couldn't give you kids." Told him I can't recall ever doing without a thing that mattered. I still feel lucky, and that life is still the standard for what I want for myself as an adult. I wish everyone faced with poverty could have the same opportunity for meaningful wealth.
Your observations are wonderful, Sharon. So true, you simply do what needs to be done -- unless, perhaps, there's someone constantly pointing out that it's Such hard work, and perhaps you are too tired for such drudgery, and really, deserve a break, etc. I find I have to refrain, sometimes, from saying rude things to the television set.
The truth is, though, if you get used to your own food, it's not as easy, anymore, to enjoy all those prepared conveniences. When you can make anything you want, exactly the way you want it, and it tastes delicious, you start noticing how inferior convenience foods are. I recently toured a local business that makes "healthy" snack foods, and listened to the other tour-goers raving about how delicious the snacks were. Personally, I find them barely edible. They probably were good, once, a long ago, when the business founder was a single mother selling the sugar-free cookies she'd invented to the farm stand to make a living. But now that she's got a big, shiny laboratory with lots of automated equipment and shiny new nutritionists to calculate the amount of dehydrated vegetable powder to put in them, well, it's just not the same as the cookies you can make at home with a handful of flour and some peanut butter or oatmeal. Which is sad in a way, since I admire her for succeeding in the face of pretty steep odds.

A girl I work with at a part-time job commented she couldn't afford to eat - was taking nursing school and skipping meals. I picked up a 2 or 3 qt. crock pot and recipe book for her, and talked about beans and rice.

Two weeks later she reported she had used the crock pot. To make cheese fondue for snacks. *sigh*

All of your points were good, but I was particularly struck by your childhood examples because they sounded a lot like my childhood. I feel extremely lucky to have been raised in a relatively poor family, mostly because I learned that it doesn't really take much money to survive. If you're willing to grow a lot of your own food and not buy much, you can spend a lot of your time on so many more important things than working!

Sharon,

Thanks for challenging mainstream "wisdom" on this matter. Too many people we personally know even in the breadbasket Willamette Valley of Oregon, are shopping at the corporate discount stores rather than partaking of the rich abundance available here from local farms.

Yes, it's a lifestyle thing; so easy to buy the corporate line rather than slow down and take the time to cook.

I'm lucky to be married to a British woman with a lot of cookbooks who has always been "way behind the times," and therefore never fully bought into the processed food "revolution."

Her influence, and my situation of being a "poor professional carpet cleaner," have ensured we've always had healthy home-cooked meals.

I found the comment about working people not being able to cook and eat well an interesting one. For the past 12 years, much of it living on my own, I have been working full time and studying or researching part time. I admit that I'm reluctant to use the time between work and study to cook from scratch and there's little brain power left to think about what I might want to eat. My solution was to cook only on weekends, but to make enough to freeze portions so that I can microwave dinner when I get home. I'll cook several different meals on a weekend, maximising my use of the oven and stove top, so that I have a variety of things to choose from. Yes, I'm probably losing some nutrients in the freezing and microwaving process, but at least I know what's in what I eat, and I also get the advantage of buying in bulk.

I'm living proof that even if you grew up on Hamburger Helper and McDonalds, you can learn how to cook and eat real food. It took a long time but I went from adding frozen veggies to a box of mac'n'cheese to cooking almost everything from scratch, shopping at the farmer's market and growing what I can while living in an apartment. Sadly I see sheer laziness as a lot of the reason why people don't cook for themselves more- they *know* they could, they just don't want to.

Here in the St. Louis area there's a major new community garden and low-cost farmer's market project being run in a working-class neighborhood by older African-American ladies who definitely aren't rich, but who care enough about good food to put in the time to get it. Good for them! The deal capitalism has offered us is that we work such long hours making processed crud that we have to live on processed crud, while in exchange we're supposed to get paid enough to buy it - but the corporations aren't holding up their end of the bargain any more. As the processed crud becomes harder to afford, more and more people are going to take off the blindfolds and start looking at alternatives.

I'm one of those people who grew up preferring junk food to healthy food and has not, to date, been able to reverse that preference. It's especially difficult to motivate yourself to try to make your own meals from fresh ingredients when you know that you will like the end product less than something you can heat in the microwave with less time and effort.

The odd thing is that I kind of like growing vegetables, I just don't like eating them. Each year I have to look for people to give stuff away to.

I agree with Sarah above. I often cook on the weekends for the week - usually two pots of soup, stew or casserole. My husband will cook one or two other meals. Between that and leftovers, it is usually enough for us.

While I shop the farmer's markets frequently, I do use canned foods when needed - mostly beans and tomatoes. Most everything else is fresh or home processed.

For quite a few years, I also used Mimi Wilson's "Once A Month" cooking. It was a lot of work the weekend I did it, but oh so nice for the rest of the month especially when my daugher was still living at home (she helped out too).

As someone who spends 8-9 hours a day staring at a computer screen, I can honestly say there is a different type of tiredness that comes from that type of "labor" than the physical tiredness from a day spent moving, lifting, and working in the classic sense. I've worked different manual labor type jobs and had much more energy and sense at the end of the day than I do now. At the end of my office-day, I feel almost completely devoid of any ability to be creative, responsive, or coherent when I get home at night.

Luckily, I have a job that affords me the means to buy local, organic food (we probably spend $700-800/mon on food...and eat 95% vegetarian) and to eat out twice a week at ethnic or organic restaurants. But it's just my wife and I in a small apartment. I really don't know how the people who have kids, a huge house, etc. do it.

just wanted to point out that there's one more barrier to good food and cooking: never having enough money together to buy bulk.

basically, if you have no stored food already, and you scrounge together a few dollars every day, there is no option of "saving up" to be able to afford the bigger and more affordable bulk-packs. instead, you use the few dollars you have to feed yourself NOW, and to pack the most calories and filling into those meals as possible.

In situations like that, I think there should be ways to encourage people to pool their daily allowances and buy bulk as a group, and ways to ensure that they can do this safely, i.e. without the risk of losing their money to a scammer.

Also: stop giving crappy junkfood to food-pantries. dried fruits, healthy ready-to-eat snacks, etc. are much better than pizza sauce, cake mix, and similar.

(we probably spend $700-800/mon on food...and eat 95% vegetarian)

unh... there are months where I don't even earn that much :-/

I was astounded recently to learn that my weekly grocery bill is half what "average Australian families" spend, especially when I buy mostly organic and local. The reason becomes much more obvious when I look at other people's shopping trolleys, which are filled with chemicals and processed "food".

By Anonymous (not verified) on 06 Apr 2010 #permalink

Is it possible that I'm not the only one who feels that feeding oneself, in a healthy manner at that, three friggin' times a day is a pain in the human tush?

In my life, I know I need to elevate the cooking deed to higher attentive grounds, sure. It's just that sometimes I get tired of this need to feed myself every few hours. Seems like there is a connection there somewhere that goes beyond supermarket shopping and trying a new recipe.

Off to forage......

By Crumb Cake (not verified) on 06 Apr 2010 #permalink

Dan, I agree with you that in many ways screen work is more exhausting than some kinds of manual labor - that's one of the reasons I'm so anxious to spend more time farming - the last few years have been clear proof that screen time is really, really tiring and brain-dissolving ;-). But that doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of people just as exhausted as me out there ;-).

Crumb Cake - I know what you mean, honestly - Eric and I both feel that way about lunch. Somehow we're always surprised when mid-day comes around and oh, we have to do something about it ;-). Dinner seems less startling somehow. Fortunately, we have children to keep us on the straight and narrow - they get really unpleasant if not fed regularly ;-).

Sharon

As someone who spends 8-9 hours a day staring at a computer screen, I can honestly say there is a different type of tiredness that comes from that type of "labor" than the physical tiredness from a day spent moving, lifting, and working in the classic sense. I've worked different manual labor type jobs and had much more energy and sense at the end of the day than I do now. At the end of my office-day, I feel almost completely devoid of any ability to be creative, responsive, or coherent when I get home at night.

Yeah, I find exactly the same thing. I'm a pretty good cook when I can be bothered, but that's not very often at the moment. All of the motivation I do have goes into more rewarding hobbies.

I also agree with Crumb Cake that this absurd need to eat several times a day is a right old pain in the eema... Reptiles have a much better approach, if you ask me.

@ Jadehawk re: not having the money to buy in bulk. I know what you mean. That's less of a problem for me than it used to be, but since I live alone I can't always use enough of something before it goes off to get the cheaper unit price by buying in bulk. The solution for me was to find a friend or two in similar circumstances, go shopping together, buy the big bag of whatever and divide it up. It's particularly good for fresh fruit and veg where you can often buy a huge box of something in season for very little money.

I ran into another obstacle to sustainable (or at least the start of sustainable...) eating recently - having finally made the transition from renting an apartment (which had zero capacity to grow anything given its orientation and my general unwillingness to be innovative in the area) to owning a home (with a yard which is exposed to pretty much a full day's sun) I've run into the near insurmountable obstacle of my wife not being at all happy with my plans to expand our 8'x 8' vegetable patch (which I already have planted probably over capacity...) to include at least a quarter of the back yards space (or even the doubling in size I initially eluded to while keeping my overall plans secret).

I'm hoping that an early crop of fresh veg might change her mind. And that any corn that I happen to grow doesn't end up getting torn out by the roots.... It appears that the American love affair with lawns is a hard cycle to break.

Sharon, thank you for another terrific post.

It has been my pleasure to learn to cook, all over again, now that my forties are a memory...

There are opportunities to learn, grow, barter, cook, and still enjoy a wonderful life. I am sitting at my desk at work, staring at a large sourdough bun and patiently waiting for lunch time!

Ewan, my mother had much the same issue with a number of things my step-mother wanted to do, including mixing vegetables in with front-yard ornamentals (which actually looks really pretty) and cutting up the yard. My Mom was partly converted, however, by being exposed to other people who thought this was good and attractive - that is, once she realized it wasn't just my crazy step-mother, but a somewhat normal thing to do - once she met the garden club and the community gardeners and such - she found that it was easier for her to see it in that context. I've found the same is true with my husband - no one's spouse ever really sees one as an authority, so it always helps to put one's craziness into perspective ;-).

Sharon

Your original blog, among other things, has inspired me. Today I bought my first pressure canner. I hope I don't kill anyone! (Can you tell I'm nervous?)

If you can manage the time between meals well enough, an option that works pretty well for me is a large enough breakfast late enough that I only need to eat one more large meal. Cuts down the cooking time from 3 times a day to twice. For me this means breakfast about 9 a.m. and dinner about 3 p.m., with possibly a light snack (crackers and cheese) in the early evening. My DH and I do this whenever we eat a large-enough breakfast that we aren't hungry again till mid-afternoon.

When I was in grad school and working about a 50 hour week, I cooked breakfast and dinner for me and my then-husband (we almost always ate lunch on campus to minimize time needed to go back and forth between home and lab). I developed a repertoire of meals needing only 20 to 30 minutes of hands-on time. They often included frozen veggies and stuffing-in-a-box, but I did make an attempt to cook at least the meat dish from scratch, if not always all of it. And we found time to do the dishes, too. These days, I could do better, but actually my DH is the main cook, and he always cooks from scratch - as I do when I bake. Scratch cooking along with home-grown produce is key to our remaining gainfully unemployed.