How do you bring your family along with you as you try to cut back on packaged food goods
I have mixed success around here and making slow progress. Here’s a few thoughts on how we’re doing on the food front.
Cooking from scratch rather than packaged food
– Progress good so far. We’ve been practicing this for awhile and we all “get it”. I’m fairly happy that any jars or pasta sauce etc have been kicked to the curb, and not a TV dinner in sight (not that there ever really was), and we hardly ever get takeaways, we much prefer to cook yummy food at home.
Baking instead of buying packaged foods
Progress: mixed. Sometimes I have the time to bake goods, and other times I just can’t keep up, and back creep the packaged bakery goods. At least the dreaded “muesli bars” haven’t made it back. A combination of sugar, processed and individually wrapped items is the reasons we don’t want them.
School lunches
Progress – we’re heading in the right direction but a few things sneaked in when hubby did the weekly shop last week. Room for improvement :
Please, no more plastic cheese. Individually wrapped portions of fake cheese is not good. Please let’s just use a block of cheese which we can slice or grate or whatever is needed on the day.
Please, no more low fat, sugar yoghurts in individual plastic containers. For example this packaged yogurt here in the picture contains 12.7g sugar per 125g serving.
In comparison, this natural plain yoghurt, contains only 3.9g per 125g serving.
Now that’s a whopping 8.8g of extra sugar in the individually packaged fruit flavoured low fat yoghurt, equivalent to 2 teaspoons. Now that really adds up when WHO only recommends 6 teaspoons of added sugar in a day (if if we acknowledge that some of this sugar is not added but from the fruit)
And a word of warning, even yoghurts with natural flavour can catch you out if you don’t read the packaging. I’ve bought a couple only to get home and realise it’s actually “natural with added sugar”. Grrr.
Small Steps to Change Now 
It’s always challenging to get the family on board with various efforts. Mine is healthy eating, but I’m up for the challenge! You might like my new food blog at insidekelskitchen.wordpress.com. I touch on these issues periodically.