Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store. Week by week, I'm showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what's safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn't come for.
As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:
- dairy-free
- low sugar
- avoid ultraprocessed junk
- avoid food coloring
- conditional vegetarianism
- avoid high histamine foods
- awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options
Last time we inspected the breakfast aisle and found it was full of sugar bombs, ultra-processed grains, and artificial colors. Most typical US breakfast foods are a terrible way to start your day, and the very best cereal option wasn't even sold in this store.
We'll now head into the frozen food section more thoroughly. This a grocery store, so you'd expect things like frozen vegetables, potatoes and bread, meats, maybe a few frozen appetizers for the overworked chef that still wants to spiff things up a bit.
Well, buckle up. This is going to be a trip.
Our first hint that this is going to be significantly different than imagined is this sign. "frozen entrees, frozen pot pies, frozen asian cuisine." Yes, "asian" lowercase. Ignoring the multiple levels of badness there, all of these things are ultra-processed convenience food.
...Yeah. This whole aisle is convenience meals. Save right at the end, anyway. You'll see.
So yeah. I think I was too demoralized at this point to actually count the brands of convenience meals. But there are a lot. The US has its health priorities all wrong, in that we tend to overload on meat and carbs, and ignore everything else. These meals will be very true to stereotype.
So, I was born privileged. Not "silver spoon at birth" privileged, but only my dad had to have a job for us to have a home and food. My mother therefore had time to cook, and while she really didn't like it, she did it religiously.
As a result, I am really not familiar with... basically this entire aisle. I've walked through it probably hundreds of times, but never really looked at everything there, because it wasn't something I was interested in. Never mind the conditional vegetarianism, which nixes everything that has a meat content.
The basic idea here is that it's a meal, in a box. You chuck it in the microwave, or the toaster oven, or the big oven, for whatever the directions say. After a relatively short amount of time, you have a hot meal. Maybe it doesn't taste quite as good as it would if you'd made it from scratch, but it's definitely way faster than making it from scratch.
I have a great deal of judgmental things to say about the whole industry, but it's worth recognizing that time is at a premium for many people, and the idea of shopping for ingredients, preparing those ingredients, and then cooking a meal for oneself or one's family can be exhausting or impossible after working 14+ hours at two different jobs.
As you can see, there's a great abundance of varieties. Not only brands, but meal types too. There's meat-and-potatoes meals, Italian pasta types, casseroles, pot pies, personal pizzas, Tex-Mex style burritos, and various pan-Asian options like lo mein and pad Thai. There's even frozen PB&J sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
The appetite for variety is alive and well in the US, even when we're barely lifting a finger for the meal.
I can't make this stuff up. In some cases the meals are geared towards a certain diet, like the protein-focused Atkins diet. Some are marketed towards a stereotypical masculinity, others toward health-conscientious individuals.
There's even "luxury" versions of these meals. Restaurant-branded and marked up, places like Boston Market, Benihana, and PF Chang's are very happy to offer you basically the same thing as other boxed ultra-processed meals, for twice the price.
Gluten-free versions are available as well, lest anyone be left out. And apparently someone finally decided Indian cuisine shouldn't be left out of the convenience food market, because there's tikka masala and lemongrass basil and coconut curry meals.
So, there's a lot of problems with these meals. We'll start with nutrition.
A good, healthy, nourishing meal is at least half vegetables and fruits. You will note the incredible lack of any vegetables, really, in these meals. There is no vegetable content in "Chicken Nuggets with Mac & Cheese." That just boils down to ultra-processed meat and grains, with a heaping serving of dairy. For those keeping track at home, that's yikes, bad times, and "now my brain is poisoned."
So let's have a look at a few of these. This one box meal has more half your daily recommended saturated fat, which is a poor start already. There's the 75 grams of cholesterol. It also has nearly a thousand mg of salt, which... let's just hope your heart is in excellent condition. It won't stay that way if you eat these regularly, though.
I'm going to categorically ignore the vitamins and minerals listed below that information. It's not that those things are 100% irrelevant, it's that I could literally get better nutrition from a pair of pills. And do, pretty much every day. Food from scratch would include tons of micronutrients, and what's included here isn't really worth mentioning.
Let's look at something slightly less blatantly unhealthy.
This is a taco bowl meal. You can see hints of green in the picture. Now, the picture always looks nicer and more healthy than the real thing inside the box, but it's something.
This still has a decent amount of saturated fat. It also has a sugar content, and a third of your day's salt in one convenient tiny bowl. It's better, but even if I wasn't vegetarian, I still wouldn't put this in my mouth. At least not without a heaping helping of greens to put under it.
Sweet and sour chicken bowl. The picture shows green, carrots, and peppers. Healthy, right? Look carefully. Did you spot the 15 grams of added sugar on top of the 5 grams of natural sugar? Yikes. That's most of your sugar for the day, right there in one tiny bowl. This is one of the ways companies make their products craveable- by loading it with extra sugar to feed your addiction.
I would say "maybe we shouldn't be surprised, it's sweet and sour chicken, after all..." But the meal right next to it, the sticky ginger chicken, has exactly the same issue.
One last pitfall to point out. See that tiny, unassuming gram of trans fats? That's a big no-no. Even one gram will muck up your cholesterol. This box would be worth avoiding for that one gram of trans fat alone. The pile of salt and saturated fat is just insult atop injury at that point.
I'm happy to say it's no longer common to have a trans fat content in these meals, but it's clearly still happening.
So that's the nutrition. Now let's look at the ingredients.
The first thing you might notice is that the list is extremely lengthy. That's for a lot of reasons, but not the least of them is that the contents aren't as simple as "steak, potatoes, gravy, spices."
Freezing food can do a metaphorical a number on its texture and flavor. In order to have the final product look, feel, and taste palatable, a great deal of chemical tinkering has to ensue. The "beefsteak" alone has been propped up with yeast, corn starch, corn sugar, and a salty food stabilizer called sodium phosphate. Never mind the vitamins and minerals sprayed on there so the whole thing doesn't look completely nutritionless.
The potatoes are made from potato flakes, which you'll note is an ultra-processed form of potato. There's not much fiber or nutrition left in them by that point. Speaking of ultra-processed... I hope you didn't get the wrong impression from the phrase "beef steak." This is not steak, and it's been soaked in enough preservatives that the shelf life is probably years.
Did you guess it was about to get worse? Because it suuuure is! The meals marketed towards male consumers tend to be the most hideous, I guess because stereotypically women care about health and nutrition and men don't.
This chicken dinner does not come with a hunk of breast meat. It comes with ultra-processed rib meat and some breast meat thrown in, bleached, sprayed with vitamins, and then propped up with soy protein and that sodium phosphate stuff I mentioned earlier to give it a non-vomit-inducing texture. The dark meat portion doesn't even have to pretend to be chicken breast, but it still receives the chemical facelift so as to taste appealing.
The potatoes are, again, potato flakes. I did not grow up on potato flakes, and I'm quite sure it shows. Real mashed potatoes might take longer to prepare, but they are leaps and bounds better. These potato flakes had to be artificially colored to be sure you wouldn't find them revolting, apparently.
The most honest ingredient in here is the corn, which it seems they didn't have to tinker with to make it shelf-stable. Finally, this horrifying monstrosity comes with dessert (a brownie), which makes the whole box nearly 1,000 calories, most of your day's fat intake, and most of your day's sugar intake in one convenient box.
Also, lest this be lost: this meal is two chunks of breaded ground chicken processed into slabs that look almost like breast and thigh pieces (protein and starch), a serving of corn (starch), a pile of potato flakes (more starch), gravy and seasonings, and then a brownie on top of all that (sugar and even more starch). This meal spits on the concept of good digestion.
This wasn't even the worst dinner box I ran across, by the way. The biggest offense to sanity was excessively awkward to get a picture of in the crowded and busy aisle at the time I was doing my research, so I didn't bother.
So, is it all this awful? Is this whole aisle an unredeemable dumpster fire? Surprisingly to my privileged self, no. But perhaps unsurprisingly, it really depends on what kind of food you choose.
You're typically better staying away from breaded and fried options, but if you desperately desire that, and don't mind paying a dollar more, this is one (sadly vegetable-free) option. The chicken part of this meal is literally just "chicken breast." No more, no less. No chemical tomfoolery to make it feel and taste fancier than it truly is.
The ingredients list still ends up long because there's multiple avenues of cheese in this meal, but it's significantly less processed by comparison. But we can do better.
This was the best I found in my random sampling of the frozen meals. It's gluten-free, which is a nice bonus, but I mainly point it out because of the ingredients. The most complicated thing in there is the sauce, which has only a couple "preserve this longer" ingredients in it. The rest is pretty much "we froze this and put it in a convenient bowl for you." Onions, cauliflower, beef strips, and peppers.
It's worth noting that the more real the food gets in this aisle, the higher the price is going to be... and I could probably throw together this steak bowl for half the price at home, if I bought steak from the grocery store like a normal person.
This looks pretty health-conscientous, right? It's organic, vegetarian, even, and the box is green. The ingredients are fairly basic. So what's the matter?
Well, check the fats. Yeah. Half a gram of heart-stopper trans fats. Always, always, always read your labels.
Moving on! We survived the mile-long, both-sides-of-the-aisle convenience food section, so we now get to look at... well. It's still convenience food, but it's a little less one-box-and-plastic-microwave-done.
There's the stuff that gets the "you tried" award from me. Meatless patties of various types. I'm fond of Quorn and Beyond Meat, of all the options there, but they're definitely meal ingredients, not full meals.
Frozen pasta, bagged and boxed. It's mostly the stuffed varieties: tortellini, ravioli, and pierogis. This is kind of why I'm personally less than impressed with the single-box heat and eat things. For the price of a single convenience "meal" you can get a bag of tortellini, dump a can of pasta sauce on it, and have a meal for 2-3. For bonus points, fry up some ground meat, onions, and wilted greens and mix those in. You get a healthier meal for just a bit more effort.
There is also frozen bread if you don't care to slice, butter, and shake garlic powder (and perhaps shredded cheese) over your bread before you toss it in the oven.
The sandwiches deserved their own section for some reason. Hot Pockets also live here, and corn dogs just because.
And here, at last, is the only reason I frequent this aisle: the frozen vegetables. When I was growing up, frozen vegetables were pretty much chopped vegetables in a bag. At some point when I wasn't looking, someone realized that people tend to cook the whole bag at once, and people would probably pay money to be able to do that without removing them from the bag...
So now there's "steam in the bag" options. And not only that, they've started coming out with seasoned and sauced varieties for an even bigger markup.
Personally, I really hate chopping onions, so my spouse and I typically keep frozen onions on hand. (Except recently those haven't been available...) We also tend to keep steam-in-the-bag green beans around, because my spouse favors green beans above all other vegetables. On the bright side, this basically ensures we eat a ton of vegetables, because the leftovers aren't really appealing. So we tend to eat the entire bag between the two of us.
The last thing to point out here is that they sell bags of frozen, chopped spinach and kale. This is by far the easiest way to add nutrition to a meal, in my opinion. Doesn't matter if it's pasta, casserole, or stir-fry, you can just dump a handful of frozen chopped greens into it and know you're helping yourself without even affecting the flavor.
Ideally, you'd do this with fresh greens. But as we all know, fresh greens don't last nearly as long as frozen, and after tossing my hundredth or so bag of half-rotted salad greens, I started to really appreciate the shelf-stability of frozen greens and vegetables.
And that finishes that aisle. Next time there will be more frozen food, because aisle 2 was already quite long enough by itself. Don't forget ultra-processed convenience food is absolutely out to kill you, so always, always, always read your labels. And probably eat them with a steamed bag of vegetables on the side.
(By the way, if you really don't have the time to do shopping but do want to eat fresh whole foods instead of ultra-processed junk, please consider Blue Apron as an option. They'll ship the portioned and responsibly-sourced ingredients and recipes right to your door. This can double as a "learn to cook more stuff" course as well.)
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