Are pre-prepared meals really unhealthy? First, let’s understand what pre-prepared meals are

First, let’s do a multiple-choice question and guess which of your three meals a day are pre-prepared dishes?

In the morning, you take out the frozen steamed buns or dumplings and wontons bought from the supermarket, heat them up in a pot, cook them and eat them, starting a day full of energy. At noon, you open the takeaway app and order a dish of braised pork with preserved vegetables or a hamburger. In the evening, you plan to cook by yourself to reward yourself and your partner, but you are frustrated by your poor cooking skills, so you buy the pre-cut and prepared pickled fish from the supermarket, and eat it with great pleasure. Wow, it smells so good!

Which of the above mentioned dishes do you think are pre-prepared dishes?

According to the previous definition, pre-prepared dishes can be roughly divided into four categories according to the degree of processing. The first category is ready-to-eat, such as canned food such as eight-treasure porridge, and snack foods such as pickled pepper chicken feet. The second category is ready-to-heat, such as self-heating rice, self-heating hot pot, and meals for airports and high-speed trains. They can be eaten after being heated by microwave steaming. The third category is ready-to-cook, such as the convenient dishes on Taobao that can be served in 5 minutes. They are semi-finished dishes that need to be heated and cooked. The last category is ready-to-prepare food, which is more like the clean vegetables that do not need to be washed or cut in Meituan, similar to the pickled fish prepared in the supermarket. So if we follow the previous definition, the ones mentioned just now are all pre-prepared dishes.

However, on March 31 this year, six departments jointly issued the "Notice on Strengthening Food Safety Supervision of Pre-prepared Meals and Promoting High-quality Development of the Industry", which redefined the definition and scope of pre-prepared meals. These products are processed into dishes through industrial pre-preparation methods without adding preservatives. In fact, many of them have been eliminated. For example, our staple foods must be heated or cooked before they can be eaten. These are called pre-prepared meals.

The notice issued by the six departments clarified that pre-prepared dishes are pre-packaged dishes that are made from food and agricultural products, etc., and are edible after industrial pre-processing, heating or cooking, and no preservatives may be added.

Dishes prepared in central kitchens, fresh vegetables, quick-frozen rice and flour products, convenience foods and other staple foods are not considered pre-prepared dishes.

Simply put, only pre-packaged dishes without preservatives can be considered pre-prepared dishes. According to the new standards, pre-prepared dishes are definitely healthy foods.

The relatively standardized process of pre-prepared dishes can ensure the consistency of the quality and taste of dishes to a certain extent. Through the production and distribution of pre-prepared dishes, catering companies can more easily open branches in different regions without having to worry about the quality of the dishes. This standardized production and distribution model can provide catering companies with more expansion opportunities.

In fact, if pre-prepared meals are produced in accordance with national food laws and regulations, there is basically no risk.

The benefits to catering companies are obvious, and so are the benefits to ordinary people. The advantages of pre-prepared meals include cost savings, improved efficiency, convenience, and greatly saving our cooking time and the time it takes for businesses to serve meals.

So the question is, why do people get so scared of pre-prepared meals? In summary, there are two main reasons:

First, the merchants treat pre-prepared food as freshly cooked food. Many people go to restaurants to eat a homemade meal prepared by a chef, but in the end, they get pre-prepared food. Of course, you don't know that it is a pre-prepared food, and the merchants won't tell you that it is a pre-prepared food. More and more people are dissatisfied with the fact that they "spend the money for freshly cooked food, but eat pre-prepared food heated in a microwave."

The second biggest concern is that pre-prepared meals are not healthy enough.

The pre-prepared food industry is in its infancy, and its rapid development is bound to be accompanied by some undesirable phenomena. For example, the pre-prepared food production enterprises are mixed, the production conditions are uneven, and the quality of raw materials is worrying. These phenomena will cause food safety problems.

If you often eat high-fat pre-prepared meals, it is easy to exceed the fat limit and increase the risk of obesity. Pre-prepared meals usually add a lot of salt and sugar to improve the taste. This is a potential risk for patients with high blood pressure, diabetes, etc.

However, from the perspective of current social development, pre-prepared meals are in line with the needs of today's fast-paced life. Most of the office workers around me choose takeout, except for those who choose to cook for themselves because of financial pressure to get married, have children and buy a house.

However, it is also obvious to the naked eye that many takeout foods are unhealthy - the biggest problem with takeout is the lack of unified industry standards. There are too many loopholes in the implementation process. This is an unavoidable reality as the takeout industry itself is made up of countless self-employed individuals.

At this time, it is not unacceptable for pre-prepared meals to be on the table, but the premise is that consumers have choices - brands to choose and ingredients to choose.

Clean vegetables and group meals delivered from the central government are excluded from pre-prepared meals. This is beneficial to the regulation of the entire pre-prepared meal industry, including the formulation of a subsequent series of standards. It requires no preservatives to be added. How to maintain its flavor quality without adding preservatives requires freezing and refrigeration. The technology of cold chain will be more widely used in pre-prepared meals, which will cause some small enterprises to be eliminated, so that consumers can eat fresher, more nutritious and healthier pre-prepared meals.

Food safety is the bottom line, nutrition and health are the pursuit, and the key is to strengthen supervision from farm to table. It is not advisable to transfer risks to pre-prepared meals. There is nothing wrong with pre-prepared meals themselves. What is wrong is the lack of responsibility and profit-driven.

This article is a work supported by the Science Popularization China Creation Cultivation Program

Author: Curious Lab

Reviewer: Zhang Na, Associate Researcher, Doctoral Supervisor, Peking University School of Public Health

Produced by: China Association for Science and Technology Department of Science Popularization

Producer: China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.