If you know how to prepare a meal, however, and can be educated that there is no difference in a value brand of chopped tomatoes and a label one (as an example), you can (with a little time) make meals that can be enjoyed for a day or two by multiple people for less than ready meals. Part of the problem for me is that 1. Those skills are lacking and 2. If you're both working full time and looking after children it's difficult to find the time and energy to learn, shop for ingredients and prepare them.
Part of. Nowhere near the whole issue.
That is part of it, to be sure, but as you note, it is nowhere near sufficient.
The brain
functions differently very differently under stress.
"One of the best-understood examples of non-nutritive eating is the fact that stress tends to make us eat more. It makes sense psychologically, in that the people most prone to stress eating are those most actively restricting food intake the rest of the time: When the going gets tough and they need to be nice to themselves, this is how they ease up. They prefer to eat fats and carbs. If the boss is a creep, why not run wild on the chocolate-covered walrus blubber?
But we can't trace these habits merely to the complexities of the human psyche, because it's not just humans who exhibit them. Stress a lab rat by, let's say, putting an unknown rat in its cage, and it will eat more and show a stronger preference for high-fat/high-carb options than usual.
This phenomenon's occurrence in many species makes evolutionary sense. For 99% of animals, stress involves a major burst of energy use as they, say, run for their lives. Afterward, the body stimulates appetite, especially for high-density calories, to rebuild depleted energy stores. But we smart, neurotic humans keep turning the stress-response on for purely psychological reasons, putting our bodies repeatedly into the restocking mode.
Scientists are beginning to understand how this stress-related junk-food craving works. Stress increases the release of "endogenous opioids" in some brain regions. These neurotransmitters resemble opiates in their structure and addictive properties (and opiates work by stimulating the receptors that evolved for responding to the brain's opioids). This helps to account for the hugely reinforcing properties of junk food at such times.
Stress also activates the "endocannabinoid" system in the brain. Yes, there's a class of chemicals in the brain that resemble the ingredient in cannabis that famously links pot to getting the munchies. And stress activates another brain chemical called neuropeptide Y that can stimulate the craving for fat and sugar.
The most fundamental mechanism to explain this stress effect is that comfort food is, well, comforting. As first demonstrated by Mary Dallman and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, working with lab rats, fat and carbs stimulate reward systems in the brain, thereby turning off the body's hormonal stress-response."
Poverty - including relative poverty, which is
precisely why social scientists select this metric - is essentially to be subjected to constant cumulative stress. This, far more than the lazy Victorian moralism we've seen here this morning, explains why poor people often make behavioural decisions which the middle class finds baffling. In the case of junk food, giving people access to better nutrition and teaching them how to cook is an important step, but the results will always be limited unless we alleviate the chronic social stress endemic to unregulated capitalism, namely, by eliminating relative poverty.
As you noted earlier, it will take structural change - and there is only one party in Britain which understands this.
