Rant warning! Are we becoming a nation of bone idle wastrels.

I think ready mashed potato is about the worst example of bone idleness.

DGD only eats crustless bread - well, she leaves the crusts and of course her hair is still straight!. The birds have the crusts.
(curly feathers?)

We always buy things like that when they are reduced. They then cost very little and no hassle or waste - perfect!

Oh I'm all in favour of 'bone idle wastrels.' I'll buy bags of prepared stuff if I need them. And I think crustless bread is great, saves having loads of half eaten crusts around.

I often buy ready chopped or peeled onion etc for my elderly mother, she is registered blind but wants to be independent as possible, preparing soups, stews etc, after all how many gransneters buy stewing steak or lamb already diced and ready minced beef instead of buying it from your local butcher and preparing it yourself!

The Co-op is good for Fair Trade food.

my last two meals, supper last night and luncht today, were fully prepared by a pub chef and very nice they were too..no guilt either. Buy as much fair trade as you can to be sure food procured ethically.

Street food! Freshly prepared

We could always read the label, pattieb.

rq, when I worked in Thailand, everyone seemed to eat food prepared by the Thai equivalents of chippies and take aways on the street at wayside cafes. I'm not talking about tourists. I wasn't in a tourist area.

I wonder if there are any additions to the bags of chopped food such as preservatives, sugar etc that we might not be aware of ?

Nothing wrong with chippies and takeaways - I agree!

I meant if we were truly bone idle wastrels we would all be there every day
Even microwaving a bag of veg would be too much effort

Like lauderettes before most people had their own machine or the hand washing laundries where my grandmother worked from the age of twelve.

Lazy sods, the lot of us. Not.

Who's feeling guilty about tea? Irony bypass.
Anyway, moved on to coffee now

And there's nothing wrong with chippies and take aways either. All these things have a perfectly respectable place in modern society.

Tea. Another thing for people's guilt trips. Add all tinned foods as well.

e.g. Tinned peaches/freshly sliced and plastic packaged peaches. One is fresh for immediate consumption. One is preserved in a tin for later consumption.

Shrug.

We need to get over feeling guilty about every bloody thing.

I think if we were a nation of bone idle wastrels then the queues at the chippies and the takeaways would be miles long!

I am sitting up in bed with a cup of tea (9.42) and GN so no prizes for guessing why I felt this thread is applicable to me

Why is using prepared fruit any different, essentially, from using prepared wool, say, or cotton or leather, or using tools someone else has made instead of making the tools oneself?

We are all people of our time. A hundred years ago we would have had to boil up bones to make stock; now we can buy stock cubes. A hundred years ago we would have had to make all our own clothes; now we can buy everything ready made. Further back in time we would have had to grind wheat to make flour, make candles and soap, spin wool and linen.
Are we all 'bone idle wastrels' for not doing these things now? Yes, some people still make their own patchwork quilts, candles, spin and dye their own wool and so on, but they don't have to. It's a choice, they enjoy making things. 17th century housewives had no option.
So today we can buy ready prepared fruit and veg. As bags says, why is this any different?

Nothing wrong with buy pre-cut fruit and vegetables. We have an allotment and lug home lots of muddy, homegrown fruit & veg which has to be washed, bad bits or tops cut off and chopped or sliced.

But there again if I've nothing in and I see a big bag of diced carrots and swedes for £1 I'll quite happily take that home and use it. A £1 FHS is hardly being extravagent. If I've no salad greens ready to pick I'll certainly grab a bag of mixed leaves.

So best of both world as far as I'm concerned.

Once again, I recommend Max Roser's ourworldindata.org for actual and positive facts.

The thing is, though, they are working, and though their wages may seem like a pittance to us, it is better than what they had before. Things are improving in developing countries, not getting worse, and I think this is largely because of trading such as has been talked about on this thread. Of course it's political. Everything human beings do is political. Political means "how we organise ourselves".

<politics alert>
Up to a point, perhaps Bags.
I'm sure no-one objects to a division of labour when it involves paying to have one's car serviced, or a builder to add an extension to one's home, when our own particular skills are deficient in that department, but there has to remain a question, as I think someone else mentioned upthread, when it might involve people in third world countries (or even this one) working in poor conditions for a pittance.
Difficult though, isn't it? I can't see many of us wanting to go back to the days when we wore almost exclusively home-knitted sweaters and spent our afternoons pored over our sewing machines, but I did wonder slightly, earlier this week, about the ethics of buying two new sweaters in the Gap outlet.

Exactly.

A sign of civilisation and the division of labour.

It's no different from buying lean/boneless meat.

So long as one pays for it.