Twenty percent of British parents spend less than half an hour per day cooking meals for their family, a recent research has unveiled.
The findings come from a survey on cooking habits of British families carried out by kitchen company Lark and Larks, and portray the rapidly-changing environment in food and eating trends of what has been dubbed as ‘Generation Ready Meal’.
In a nutshell, one in five parents in Britain spends less than 30 minutes in preparing food for their household every day, while as much as 58% of parents spend less than one hour per day cooking.
A further 14% of parents said they feed their children with ready meals “more than once a week”, and 10% “regularly” opt for takeaway meals rather than home cooking. Only 15% of parents said they spend over 1.5 hours preparing food in the house per day.
Far from being a new trend in itself – cooking and eating habits have been changing for decades, together with societal development – these figures show how Generation Ready Meal can define not only young workers or single-member households, but can now extend to families (in the sense of parents with children) as well.
The average amount of time spent cooking has reduced by 50% over the past 20 years, particularly for women, who are taking an increasingly diminished role in the kitchen. Hectic lifestyles, a growing amount of time spent in the working environment as well as going to and coming back from work, gender equality on the workplace are all factors contributing to the emerging ‘Ready Meal’ trend among families.
The decline of home cooking is directly affecting the health of British children, as well as the population as a whole. The latest data from Public Health England and the World Health Organization shows 9.3% of children aged 4-5 is suffering from obesity, increasing to 18.9% for those aged 10-11