Last night made achar gosht, a really nice sour beef stew.
Ideally, I'd have chopped up fresh tomatoes, used homemade yoghurt, toasted and ground the spices myself, grated the fresh ginger and peeled the garlic. I do this when I have the time.
Instead I used the mustard oil that somebody else had pressed, used Dannon store-bought yoghurt, generic canned tomatoes, and pre-peeled garlic and grated garlic out of a jar. Didn't even squeeze the lemons to make my own lemon juice, and while I did grind the fenugreek and kalonji myself, I did not grind the cumin or make the red chili powder. (Nor did I make the chili pickle that I think accompanies achar gosht so well.)
When I make spaghetti sauce I'm content to start with crushed and diced tomatoes out of cans. I've made it with a pot full of fresh tomatoes, and it tastes better that way, but it takes a long time. Plus I really haven't had time to get my winter or spring garden going, and it's getting late for a summer garden. (Crap. That means either butter beans or black-eyed peas where I don't have chilis and eggplants already going.) Have to find time to harvest the nectarines. I have one of those recent suburban mini-yards north of Houston.
My mother--in her 80s, and presumably one of the "grandmothers" who really did embrace a lot of pre-prepared foods, was able to make homemade food without worrying about making sure every ingredient was fresh. It tasted better and was usually healthier--lower in fat and salt--than similar meals taken out of a box and heated up. Like her, when I find time and have the materials I can tomatoes and make pickles; I have a tray full of frozen par-boiled home-grown bok choi in the fridge.
Hyper-processed industrial food usually bad. But processed food by itself isn't necessarily bad. Whole food is often better, but the tradeoff with minimally processed food isn't all that bad. To this day I can't stand pre-made lasagna or stir-fry. The time trade-off isn't worth the loss in quality and increase in price.
One way I make the trade-off work and "rescue" some of the time is by using devices such as pressure cookers. So the achar gosht should have simmered for 45 minutes or longer. 15-20 minutes in the pressure cooker did the trick. The longest part was frying the onions--mostly because I ran out of the pre-fried onions and needed to make a run to the local Indo-Pak grocery.
The point is simple: There are healthy very processed foods, but they cost more. There are compromises, where a little time investment and use of processed but not "hyper-processed" foods can give a big increases in nutritional value (and reduction in the bad things processing puts in foods) and sharply reduce prices.
There's another important point to be made here: The price of a lot of hyper-processed food is more than the price of minimally processed foods.
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