Aside from being an opportunity for the whole family to get together, one of the best things about Thanksgiving is that familiar aroma of grilled turkey coming from the kitchen, the beautiful sight of macaroni and cheese together with fresh fruit salad, mashed potatoes, and other freshly prepared home-cooked meals set on the table.
Uhmm home-cooked meals! When last did you have those?
This is a term that is slowly disappearing from the lexicon of the average American.
With each passing day, and as the need for speed becomes a more desirable way of living, more and more Americans now steadily rely on fast and pre-cooked foods for their nutritional needs. This new way of living is having a toll on the general health and well-being of Americans, and this is a culture we have to change, thus the need to re-localize food.
What is Food Re-Localization?
Food re-localization is the process of bringing back home-cooked meals to the dinner table. It’s about rethinking our food supply chain and making it shorter, more sustainable, and healthier. Re-localizing food starts with the simple question: How much of my food consumption is home cooked and locally grown?
In answering this question, it is important to highlight that in recent times there has been tremendous progress in re-localizing food. The need to achieve this vision has led to the evolution of food tech solutions like Local Chow amongst others that enables individuals to access home-cooked meals and local foods available in their neighborhood.
This is a huge development in the food industry for the country, and the benefits are indeed enormous.
Benefits of Home-Cooked Meals
There are several benefits to eating home-cooked meals. But for the sake of this article, we are going to focus on three core pillars; Health, Environment, and Food security.
1. Health
Eating home-cooked meals is one of the easiest ways to improve your health. The primary benefit here is that it reduces the number of processed foods you are consuming. Processed foods are typically high in sugar, fats, and sodium. They also tend to have fewer nutrients than their whole food counterparts.
People who eat home-cooked meals are more likely to be healthier. This is because it easier to control what ingredients go into your meals, thereby allowing you to avoid these unhealthy products.
Home-cooked meals can help lower the risk of developing certain cancers and heart disease. And for individuals already sick with cancer or heart disease, eating more home-cooked meals may help manage the condition better than eating fast and pre-cooked foods.
2. Environment
While it’s true that eating out can be more convenient and less time-consuming, the benefits of home-cooked meals are far more profound than just saving yourself a few minutes each day.
A return to home cooking would have positive effects on your personal health, as well as environmental sustainability. Let’s take a look at some of these benefits:
- Less packaging: You don’t need to buy single-serving wrappers for food, which means you won’t end up with lots of plastic or aluminum waste sitting in landfills or floating in oceans around the world forever!
- Less waste: There are many types of food packaging that aren’t recyclable, so even if your city does recycle them there’s still no guarantee they’ll get recycled effectively (and even if they do it might not be possible due to contamination). This can lead to harmful chemicals entering our water supply through leaching from containers and other materials used during production processes such as dyes and adhesives which may contain toxic ingredients like lead chloride or bisphenol A (BPA).
No doubt eating locally helps reduce the carbon footprint of food. It’s also good for the local economy. When people spend money on local farmers and artisans, those farmers and artisans spend money at other businesses in your community—and so on. The effects ripple outward through your neighborhood and even into other communities where members of your community travel to the shop or eat out. This is how an economy works!
3. Food Security
Food security is a growing concern for many families. The cost of groceries is on the rise, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to afford healthy meals that are also good for the environment. But this is a challenge we can tackle by localizing our food consumption.
Local foods are a huge part of any community, and home-cooked meals are an important part of the family.
Consuming local foods and more home-cooked meals can help improve food security by reducing the amount of money a family spends on groceries and other food-related expenses. In addition, cooking at home can help you save money on dining out since it’s usually cheaper to prepare your own meals than order takeout or eat out at a restaurant.
Other benefits of home-cooked meals and local foods are;
- They are better tasting
- They are relatively cheaper
- They are more nutritious
- They support local industry and farmers, etc.
Accessing Home-Cooked Meals Near You
While the best way to get home-cooked meals is by making them yourself, we know that not all of us are professional chefs, plus with our fast-paced way of life, there has to be a solution that readily makes home-cooked meals available to individuals on demand. This is where Local Chow comes in.
With Local Chow, we have provided a platform (mobile food app) where you can find healthy, and better-tasting home-cooked foods in your neighborhood. You can order any meal from the menu and have it delivered to you at your doorstep.
Conclusion
The world is a fast-paced place. We are constantly on the go, trying to juggle our lives and responsibilities, and most of us have little time left for cooking healthy home-cooked meals. We have the opportunity to create a food system that is healthy and sustainable, but only if we take action and re-localize food.
