One thing I have been working on recently is cooking, especially from scratch and attempting to keep it healthy. One big thing I have noticed is that a lot of food (once cooked) has a very short shelf life (usually days), and if you have something with few ingredients, it requires quality ingredients.
For prepackaged/premade foods, one would want food to stay good for longer than days once cooked/made, so it can be transported to a store, kept at a store for a while, purchased, stored at a home until eaten. Or even at a restaurant/fast food place, the same thing applies. A lot of those places have a significant amount of premade food.
Applying that same concept for profit, if the food is to be cost effective, lesser quality ingredients are needed.
It seems that to have the food be cheap and stay good for a while, this is what happens.
Kudos for focusing on cooking. It really changed my life when i started focusing on things like making bread, growing my own vegetables (at least to supplement store-bought), and learning the science and history behind foods/meals. I lost about 10 pounds just by learning how to cook and gaining an understanding of portion control and managing salt/nutrition levels. Also, I'm pretty confident my daycare-enrolled kids are less sick than their classmates who eat out one or more meals daily or are reliant on the bag of chicken nuggets and yellow-weird mac and cheese.
I will have to look at them, thank you! I have been going through the Good Eats, and I like them. Something else I found that has been amazing is that there are a few cooking lecture series from the Great Courses. They are expensive at full retail, but it is possible to get sales on them. I cannot recommend those enough.
I have also been going to my local library, and they have been indispensable for finding gems of cookbooks and find books on how to cook. I can basically try out a few recipes and see if I like them or not.
Cooking techniques from tropical areas where food spoil quickly are useful here. It's one of the big reasons that spice is used in Indian cooking for example - historically not for flavour in particular but because food spoils extremely quickly (as in within a day or two) if not spiced.
If the palette suits you, it's something I'd suggest looking into. We prepare foods on the weekend (working parents) and they stay for about a week and a half in the fridge, and you can mix and match the different dishes over the week to break monotony.
I learned a few basic templates from my wife. I don't have specific books or sites to recommend, but a general "approach" that you can use when looking at various resources (online or in books).
There are two or three templates that you can use with different base components to achieve a wide variety of dishes without a lot of memorization.
For example, a basic north-indian vegetable dish template I use is simple. First, chop an appropriate veggie (green beans, potatoes, beets, cauliflower, etc.). Heat cooking oil in pan until it's hot enough that mustard seeds start popping when you add them. Add a handful of mustard seeds and while they're still popping (within 5 seconds or so), add the veggies. Dry-cook that until veggies are cooked to taste, add red chilli powder, optionally some mustard powder, and salt to taste.
That template basically gives you half a dozen dishes that taste very different depending on the vegetable.
Likewise, there are simple templates for dals - typically you prepare an onion-and-spice paste by heating a small bit of cloves/cardamom in oil, reducing the onions down to a post-caramel paste, spice that with cumin and coriander and red chilli powder during the reduction, and add some tomato chunks towards the end. Then take the spice-onion paste + semi-cooked tomato chunks and add that to water and dal and cook in a pressure cooker (or regular pot if you're willing to soak the dal overnight prior to soften them).
There's a similar approach with an onion-base curry paste for meats and hardboild egg curries.
I didn't learn from books myself - mostly experimentation and getting the hang of a couple of basic templates which I started experimenting with. Personally it's more enjoyable that way.
But whatever resource you use, keep in mind that you can have a _very_ free hand in experimentation, substitution, and alteration. There is no orthodoxy and Indian cooking varies from area to area, village to village in specific choices of ingredients and spice mixtures.
There is a reason a large part of "cooking" in the past involved preserving/canning. Pickled food seems to have largely been relegated to cucumbers nowadays. And jellies/jams are used in quantities that wouldn't have made sense in the past. Probably the same for many alcohols. Yes, it was the boiling of the water that made it safe, but I suspect the rest of the process helped it stay safer longer. (Would have to dive in on that claim, as I suspect it is less true for beers than it is other drinks.)
So, yes, it shouldn't be a big surprise that fresh ingredients don't have a longer shelf life. Most of what we do to make things no longer fresh came about precisely because of that. :)
You bring a good point! So I wonder if there is a way to come back to that more with buying foods from a store. Buy things that are preserved without sugar or similar preservatives? That may help?
I suspect the old ways of preserving are still fine to buy. Even if they use sugar, they likely aren't using as much as is in a single can of soda. Dried/corned/pickled/cured/etc are all ways people used to make things last longer.
I think the trick is that it is more than just eating food prepared that way. It is having a lot less of it. Seasonal foods may help your gut in some ways, I can't say. The fact that food was seasonal also meant you just ate a whole lot less of it.
(Above is pure speculation on my part, for what its worth. If someone has studied this, please correct me.)
When I've done meal prep, I usually have 1-2 meals that I leave in the fridge, and the rest in the freezer... The ones in the freezer are generally good for a month without freezer burn. I'd presume vacuum sealing would make them better for longer in the freezer. I'll usually pull out meals for the day after tomorrow each day.
After a few meal prep sessions there's usually a bit of variety this way... you have to do a lot the first week, but it gets easier.
These days I've been keeping keto macros and nearly carnivore... mostly meat, eggs, greens. I've cut dairy and nuts as both are easy to over do and I seem to have a very strong response to dairy in particular.
It's also a culture thing. In Japan every supermarket and convenience store sells a lot of high quality fresh food (sushi, onigiri, a lot of different bento) that is meant for same day consumption. This only works because a large part of the population actually buys that kind of food for the same day. The shelfs are mostly empty in the evening. I went home empty handed quite a few times when waiting for the reduced prices one hour before shops close.
As far as profit goes, you have to also keep in mind that wholesale prices are cheaper than low volume, so a restaurant won't pay as much for the exact same cut of beef as you would.
That's fair. I was thinking back to my days when I worked in a coffee place and a restaurant, I was actually pretty surprised how much of the food was prepackaged and only needed heating to serve.
For prepackaged/premade foods, one would want food to stay good for longer than days once cooked/made, so it can be transported to a store, kept at a store for a while, purchased, stored at a home until eaten. Or even at a restaurant/fast food place, the same thing applies. A lot of those places have a significant amount of premade food.
Applying that same concept for profit, if the food is to be cost effective, lesser quality ingredients are needed.
It seems that to have the food be cheap and stay good for a while, this is what happens.