A recent study by Flora Cuisine has revealed that over a third of mums in the UK are preparing up to three meals each evening in order to satisfy the individual preferences of children and partners.
Three meals!? I find cooking one meal tedious enough, but three? Crazy times.
I’m pretty sure my Gran didn’t used to cook three separate meals every mealtime. My mum just got fried eggs and chips and was grateful. So what’s going on here? Are we raising a generation of fussy eaters, or of parents too frazzled and disenchanted to argue?
Now I’ll admit that sometimes I will ‘tweak’ a dinner to make sure there is at least one type of vegetable that Belle will eat, but that’s just a case of a few extra peas here, and the removal from her plate of anything courgette based, it’s not that I’m cooking entirely different dishes. Who are these women with all this time on their hands?
Eat your peas or you don’t get pudding
The survey also showed that us mums are rather lacking in imagination, or possibly motivation, with 72% of us just cooking the same meals over and over again. Oh the joys of parenting! Around two-thirds of us apparently own recipe books we don’t use because the ingredients are too expensive and the recipes too long and complicated. Makes sense to me. I only buy them for the pictures.
So what can we do about this? Well, there’s the ‘shut up, eat it and be grateful’ school of thought of course – that saves on the cooking time but increases the risk of whingeing – or you could argue that it’s good to provide kids with choice, and to give them food they enjoy. Flora are taking a different approach. They’re putting together a recipe book full of cheap and quick meal ideas from real mums. Post your recipe on their facebook page and you could even win a prize! Fish fingers and baked beans anyone?
What do you think? Are we just spoiling our kids and creating extra work for ourselves or is it important to cater for everyone’s tastes?
Photo credit – mschmidt62