I visit family in other states and I get comments like “I can’t believe you are so thin.” For context I am a healthy weight and I eat what I consider a reasonable diet. I sit and smile while I watch them drink soda and eat pure sugar and salt. I don’t care about your life choices but don’t act surprised by someone that’s a normal weight.
It sounds like you were like most people in the western world - uneducated on nutrition, cooking and basic life skills. This isn’t a jab at you this is just the world that we live in. Most people don’t have a good understanding of these things so the go with what is easy, fast and feels inexpensive. This drives obesity.
It’s great that you took the initiative to learn home economics and it sounds like it has helped you and your family. Many others have not gotten to the “so we learned” stage yet for whatever reason.
Well, I knew how to cook and enjoyed cooking well before the pandemic. We did rely on more packaged food back then, not junk food, but just “packaged” stuff (i.e. bread, dry pasta, etc.).
As prices went up, we had to find ways to bring them back down.
Another example would be canned beans. As a vegan household, we were going through canned beans… at least 40 cans per week. Not bad when they are $0.69 each, but impossible to sustain as they climbed to $1.69. So, we started cooking dry beans with our instantpot (which we already had).
Almost no prep work, other than dividing the portions into separate containers to make it easier to use in other dishes. But we’re saving hundreds of dollars a year, and we’re getting 100% beans (no anti-foaming agents, preservatives, or other extras).
We picked up so many cost-saving strategies over the pandemic, and while food costs are still high, it’s not crippling our budget.
Education in (basic) nutrition, basic meal prep, kitchen shortcuts, using small appliances to your advantage, all go a long way!
The biggest challenge that I think most families would face to get out of the “so we learned” stage is deprogramming certain habits and taste preferences.
If you’re used to overly sweet, overly salty, overly fatty, and artificially flavoured food, then it takes some adjustment before your taste buds can appreciate what real food tastes like (spoiler: it tastes better than the fake crap).