This article is kind of badly written, but to it's credit it made me realize something that was obvious in hindsight. There are people here who are skeptical of the UPF health claims or have...
This article is kind of badly written, but to it's credit it made me realize something that was obvious in hindsight.
There are people here who are skeptical of the UPF health claims or have qualms about how nebulous the term are. Reading this has made me understand some of the nuances of their view that banning UPFs would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In particular, it was the description of the veggie straws that got me. Veggie straws are the perfect illustration of the practical problems with UPFs. They are healthwashed to all hell; you would be forgiven if you thought that they were healthy to eat. Even reading the nutrition breakdown legally required might not be enough to make you understand how bad they are for you. The name makes you believe that they are perfectly healthy things that you can eat as much as you want and stay thin and healthy, but in reality they are as bad as, if not worse than, fried potato chips.
This rant is about to get very USA-centric but I think similar things can be said about other countries.
For any given organization, culture tends to come from the top down, and what is a country if not a very large organization? And when it comes to food, who are the most powerful people? Generally, they are the large food producing manufacturers: Nestle, Mondelez, Kraft Heinz, Coca Cola, etc. Obviously if they were to go unchecked, they would do all kind of unethical things, like selling fake ingredients and poisioning people. Heck, this is actually a thing that happened in the past. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle ended up mobilizing people to create a "pure food movement" which eventually caused the creation of the FDA to enforce regulation on food producers.
The problem is that since then the FDA has only become less and less powerful, and the power has largely been claimed by food producing companies who have outsized influence in how the FDA recommends people eat. The current Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the document telling people how they should be eating, is confusing, lacks specific actionable advice, and much more importantly, nobody seems to actually know about it. I literally just learned about it earlier this year. To the government's credit, they are currently revising it - a process they do every five years - but from what I've heard the current draft does little to address the current food environment and UPFs.
In contrast, both of the other countries on this continent have been doing far more to help their citizens in regards to nutrition and health. For most Americans, the only US dietary recommendations they may know if they have a kid in public school is MyPlate a much needed update to the rightfully maligned Food Pyramid. Now compare that to the image that is on the cover of Canada's Food Guide and you can instantly see how much better it could be at conveying information to people. I'd also argue that the MyPlate diagram gives actively bad advice by telling you to drink milk with your meal. In a country where people are already getting too much fat, and too much saturated fat especially, why are we telling people to drink their saturated fat?
But guidelines are just a first step. Every government should be putting legislation into place to protect the public health. That was the entire reason why the FDA was established, after all, but they have really fallen behind. Mexico, for instance, has had a strict front of package warning labeling system on foods high in sugar, fat, and salt since 2020, and that was an extension of FOPNL requirements that had started all the way back in 2014. Canada has a simelar law in place that will begin strict enforcement at the start of next month. And the US? They are just now starting to consider it.
I think that much more concrete limitations should be put in place, but FOPNL is quite literally the least the government can do. with quality FOPNL laws, it would mean at the very least we would have less health-washing of products that are pretending to be healthy. Manufacturers would have to admit that their "made with whole grain oats" breakfast cereals are basically just desserts, and that their "better for you" snacks are still not good for you.
But there are many more important steps that governments can and should be taking to protecting public health, and I think the number one most important thing is quite simple and I don't think it's even particularly controversial: we should ban advertising food to children. Children should be brought up with good nutrition education, and advertising is going to undermine any attempt we make and lead to years of excessive- no, let's be honest: disordered eating. Potentially over the course of the child's entire life.
Without some degree of governmental intervention, all we will have are these news sources trying to do their best to tell you what you should be eating. That's what we have now, and anyone with half a brain can see that it's not working.
One of the things that got me was the link the article provided to pre-cut veggies which basically linked to something with a highlighted section that literally mentioned how washing the soil off...
One of the things that got me was the link the article provided to pre-cut veggies which basically linked to something with a highlighted section that literally mentioned how washing the soil off root veggies lost 10% of the iron on it. It also mentioned that trimming can lose mineral rich parts of a vegetable and talked about freezing and canning.
Pre-cut veggies are more expensive and add to packaging waste but allow for much greater accessibility of fresh foods to busy and disabled people. Frozen veggies are a way to get in-season vegetables year round and canned allows them to be shelf stable and be usable by people without kitchens/homes or who rely on pantries.
None of those are the reason diets are unhealthy and theres a sense of the letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
And that was one claim in half a sentence with a single link.
FDA regulations really are top-down, as were US government efforts to make school lunches more nutritious. But I believe much of the demand for unhealthy food is bottom-up? It seems like parents...
FDA regulations really are top-down, as were US government efforts to make school lunches more nutritious. But I believe much of the demand for unhealthy food is bottom-up? It seems like parents of fussy children have some experience with this.
Restaurants and food processors are responding to tastes that people have. Restaurants can succeed, and so can new products, for a lot of different reasons but one is that people really like the taste and don't mind if the food is unhealthy.
Although, there are also things they do that aren't driven by consumer tastes but rather by industrial concerns, like making shipping easier and shelf life better, as well as cutting costs to.improve profitability. It's a complicated optimization problem with a lot of competing constraints.
Cooking food at home is probably the best way to gain more control over what you eat, but people have reasons they don't cook. Convenience is important, too.
It sounds like you are thinking about this in terms of a market, so allow me to create a market parallel: the obesity crisis is the same as the climate change environmental crisis. Both of them...
It sounds like you are thinking about this in terms of a market, so allow me to create a market parallel: the obesity crisis is the same as the climate change environmental crisis. Both of them are effects that are directly caused by runaway markets that the government refuses to take dramatic enough intervention to stop. The lack of strong US guidelines on healthy eating allows for corporations to spin things the way that they want to - consider Veggie Straws pretending to be healthy equivalent to BP telling people to start thinking about their own carbon footprint so that they don't question how much damage they're causing to the environment.
Convenience is important but the problem goes far beyond convenience and into addiction. You know what's a really convenient meal that doesn't require any cooking? Pick any raw vegetables you want and have it with a can of beans. Alternatively, if you want something hot, you can often find frozen vegetables in stores sold in microwavable steaming bags that you can zap, optionally add the sauce of your choice (if you haven't bought a pre-seasoned option), and have an instant meal. You can also cook a potato in the microwave really easily.
The problem with these meals, though, is that most people don't consider them to be real options. None of these meals are as rich as the least calorific option in any fast food restaurant. Heck, there's going to be a lot of people who reject these ideas simply because none of them have any meat in them. The point is that people have been sucked into a status quo of rich, highly palatable, calorie dense convenience foods which have direct ties to creating metabolic disorders. If we want to reduce or eliminate said metabolic disorders, we need to intervene to make it harder to get stuck in the cycle where people become dependent on these kinds of food.
I've thought about this a lot since I started actually cooking for myself. The entire aisle for frozen dinners always struck me. The cereal and lunch snacks one too. Also the lunch meats one. The...
I've thought about this a lot since I started actually cooking for myself. The entire aisle for frozen dinners always struck me. The cereal and lunch snacks one too. Also the lunch meats one. The dairy one is great though that can stay.
Those aisles were great when I was like 12-18 and just starting out selecting food for myself, since I didn't know how to cook, but I finally learned how to cook in my 20s and so these days I use all of the opposite aisles. Fresh produce, meat, frozen food section for frozen veggies, dairy section for yogurt and then and the baking section. My entire grocery trip spans like 4 sections and that's only 1/4th of the store but you bet they have each of those 4 spread out so I have to walk through the whole store anyway cause marketing
I kind of get it. In my house we try to eat healthy, but man it's so much time and energy, at least if you want a decent variety of flavorful foods and to not get stuck with endless remixes of the...
I kind of get it. In my house we try to eat healthy, but man it's so much time and energy, at least if you want a decent variety of flavorful foods and to not get stuck with endless remixes of the same raw ingredients (which gets old fast). Meal prep + freezing helps, but you're still stuck in the kitchen for hours and are left with a pile of dishes (which a dishwasher helps tremendously with, but still).
If I suddenly had a big pile of cash fall in my lap, one of the first things it'd get spent on is a personal chef. I don't dislike cooking but when it's something you're always needing to think about it gets to be a drag.
We’re in a pattern of cooking 3-4 times a week and eating leftovers the other meals. I generally enjoy cooking and have managed to make it a bit of a hobby - first with just me and my wife (her...
We’re in a pattern of cooking 3-4 times a week and eating leftovers the other meals. I generally enjoy cooking and have managed to make it a bit of a hobby - first with just me and my wife (her more discerning palette), and now with a young child who is (usually) excited to help out. But it is endless. Every single week forever - think of meals to make that are nutritious/varied/workable with the week, do the shopping, make the food, clean the goddamn dishes…
Last summer we had a big family get together and my mother in law hired a private chef. It was amaaaaaazing. She planed the meals, came in the afternoon to cook dinner (enough for lunch leftovers the next day), prep breakfast (oven bakes), and clean all the dishes.
I would 100% hire a chef if I had enough money. Not for every meal, but like at least half the week or half the weeks.
In an ideal world, it should be possible to by ready to eat healthy foods for when you don't have the time or the energy to cook. I don't think there's anything fundamentally impossible about that.
In an ideal world, it should be possible to by ready to eat healthy foods for when you don't have the time or the energy to cook. I don't think there's anything fundamentally impossible about that.
IMO it's honestly insane that we expect everyone to cook. We have a perfectly functional professionalized model - restaurants. A restaurant chef cooking a huge-ass dish to feed 10+ people at a...
IMO it's honestly insane that we expect everyone to cook. We have a perfectly functional professionalized model - restaurants. A restaurant chef cooking a huge-ass dish to feed 10+ people at a time will basically inevitably be more efficient than every single, couple, or family of 4 cooking their own tiny little meal. Instead, we have restaurants charging high prices for one of several dozen different meals, which has no real economy of scale.
Half the problem is the standard saving-money advice of "cook your own meals!", which is basically grassroots austerity, and just as bad as regular government-policy austerity - decreasing market participation destroys jobs, drives the remaining sellers upmarket and destroys economy of scale. Fuck austerity.
One thing that's missing from restaurants is a way to know how healthy the food you're getting is. Some sort of regulated label would be very helpful, and would improve food quality overall. Right...
One thing that's missing from restaurants is a way to know how healthy the food you're getting is. Some sort of regulated label would be very helpful, and would improve food quality overall.
Right now, restaurant food, especially for cheap ones, is probably very unhealthy.
Agreed, but it means more waste on the part of the retailer. I agree completely, but until you make it affordable and break the stranglehold that the snack industry has on people, there isn't a...
Agreed, but it means more waste on the part of the retailer. I agree completely, but until you make it affordable and break the stranglehold that the snack industry has on people, there isn't a non subsidized way to do it.
Yeah I had to learn to be totally okay with mixed up version of the same base 3 ingredients. Turns out there really is a dish I could spend most of the rest of my life eating and 8 year old me was...
Yeah I had to learn to be totally okay with mixed up version of the same base 3 ingredients. Turns out there really is a dish I could spend most of the rest of my life eating and 8 year old me was wrong its not mac and cheese
There are frozen meals that seem relatively healthy to me. I like a variety of grain+bean bowls. Corn kernels, beans, rice, minced veggies etc. all flash freeze really well and you're left with...
There are frozen meals that seem relatively healthy to me. I like a variety of grain+bean bowls. Corn kernels, beans, rice, minced veggies etc. all flash freeze really well and you're left with something that's almost entirely whole foods.
What ones have you found? Those kinds are fairly rare in my experience, and the ones that I find tend to had a lot of added salt and fats. The few ones I found that met my standards were...
What ones have you found? Those kinds are fairly rare in my experience, and the ones that I find tend to had a lot of added salt and fats. The few ones I found that met my standards were ludicrously overpriced, as much as $8 per (relatively small) bowl.
It's definitely not a cost-efficient way to get calories. https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.960222634.html - $4.49 / 270 Calories / 19% Sodium DV...
It's definitely not a cost-efficient way to get calories.
In the mid teens (so, ten years ago), I would frequently read about "shop the perimeter of the grocery store". It's a rough quote that comes from Michael Pollan. It's also well embodied by this...
My partner and I have a small freezer, most of which is taken up by curly fries, nuggets of some description, and knoedel. But we don't live off of that- that would be insane. You could summarise...
My partner and I have a small freezer, most of which is taken up by curly fries, nuggets of some description, and knoedel. But we don't live off of that- that would be insane. You could summarise the solution to grocery stores selling overly processed foods in a single sentence.
Buy more raw foods and cook. Just cook! Buy veggies (carrots, broccoli, onions, garlic, bell peppers), buy bulk rice from an Asian goods store, buy pastas and beans and cuts of meat (chicken is well priced, and relatively healthy), and just cook it. It's not rocket science, and it doesn't have to be a full-time job.
About a week back I tried a proper long-roast (~5 hours) pulled pork for the first time, and while it wasn't perfect, it made some absolutely delicious tacos / fajitas (soft-shell, not sure what to classify them as?). A freezer meal is convenient when you're having an off day, but it doesn't beat something home-cooked.
Tacos are traditionally tortillas, typically corn. Hard "shells" are a 20th century United States thing. Pork is a fairly common filling as well. What restaurants keep referring to as "street...
Tacos are traditionally tortillas, typically corn. Hard "shells" are a 20th century United States thing. Pork is a fairly common filling as well.
What restaurants keep referring to as "street tacos" everywhere now are just tacos.
Fajitas are peppers, onions and meat cooked hot and fast, like cooking with a wok, until it's sizzling and you're concerned about not accidentally burning everything.
Traditionally, tacos actually are just a tortilla (mostly corn, northeast mexico to Colorado 'tex mex' often uses flour depending on subregion), with stuff (meat seasoning, herbs, onion, etc). Not...
Traditionally, tacos actually are just a tortilla (mostly corn, northeast mexico to Colorado 'tex mex' often uses flour depending on subregion), with stuff (meat seasoning, herbs, onion, etc). Not to get off topic.
This article is kind of badly written, but to it's credit it made me realize something that was obvious in hindsight.
There are people here who are skeptical of the UPF health claims or have qualms about how nebulous the term are. Reading this has made me understand some of the nuances of their view that banning UPFs would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In particular, it was the description of the veggie straws that got me. Veggie straws are the perfect illustration of the practical problems with UPFs. They are healthwashed to all hell; you would be forgiven if you thought that they were healthy to eat. Even reading the nutrition breakdown legally required might not be enough to make you understand how bad they are for you. The name makes you believe that they are perfectly healthy things that you can eat as much as you want and stay thin and healthy, but in reality they are as bad as, if not worse than, fried potato chips.
This rant is about to get very USA-centric but I think similar things can be said about other countries.
For any given organization, culture tends to come from the top down, and what is a country if not a very large organization? And when it comes to food, who are the most powerful people? Generally, they are the large food producing manufacturers: Nestle, Mondelez, Kraft Heinz, Coca Cola, etc. Obviously if they were to go unchecked, they would do all kind of unethical things, like selling fake ingredients and poisioning people. Heck, this is actually a thing that happened in the past. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle ended up mobilizing people to create a "pure food movement" which eventually caused the creation of the FDA to enforce regulation on food producers.
The problem is that since then the FDA has only become less and less powerful, and the power has largely been claimed by food producing companies who have outsized influence in how the FDA recommends people eat. The current Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the document telling people how they should be eating, is confusing, lacks specific actionable advice, and much more importantly, nobody seems to actually know about it. I literally just learned about it earlier this year. To the government's credit, they are currently revising it - a process they do every five years - but from what I've heard the current draft does little to address the current food environment and UPFs.
In contrast, both of the other countries on this continent have been doing far more to help their citizens in regards to nutrition and health. For most Americans, the only US dietary recommendations they may know if they have a kid in public school is MyPlate a much needed update to the rightfully maligned Food Pyramid. Now compare that to the image that is on the cover of Canada's Food Guide and you can instantly see how much better it could be at conveying information to people. I'd also argue that the MyPlate diagram gives actively bad advice by telling you to drink milk with your meal. In a country where people are already getting too much fat, and too much saturated fat especially, why are we telling people to drink their saturated fat?
But guidelines are just a first step. Every government should be putting legislation into place to protect the public health. That was the entire reason why the FDA was established, after all, but they have really fallen behind. Mexico, for instance, has had a strict front of package warning labeling system on foods high in sugar, fat, and salt since 2020, and that was an extension of FOPNL requirements that had started all the way back in 2014. Canada has a simelar law in place that will begin strict enforcement at the start of next month. And the US? They are just now starting to consider it.
I think that much more concrete limitations should be put in place, but FOPNL is quite literally the least the government can do. with quality FOPNL laws, it would mean at the very least we would have less health-washing of products that are pretending to be healthy. Manufacturers would have to admit that their "made with whole grain oats" breakfast cereals are basically just desserts, and that their "better for you" snacks are still not good for you.
But there are many more important steps that governments can and should be taking to protecting public health, and I think the number one most important thing is quite simple and I don't think it's even particularly controversial: we should ban advertising food to children. Children should be brought up with good nutrition education, and advertising is going to undermine any attempt we make and lead to years of excessive- no, let's be honest: disordered eating. Potentially over the course of the child's entire life.
Without some degree of governmental intervention, all we will have are these news sources trying to do their best to tell you what you should be eating. That's what we have now, and anyone with half a brain can see that it's not working.
One of the things that got me was the link the article provided to pre-cut veggies which basically linked to something with a highlighted section that literally mentioned how washing the soil off root veggies lost 10% of the iron on it. It also mentioned that trimming can lose mineral rich parts of a vegetable and talked about freezing and canning.
Pre-cut veggies are more expensive and add to packaging waste but allow for much greater accessibility of fresh foods to busy and disabled people. Frozen veggies are a way to get in-season vegetables year round and canned allows them to be shelf stable and be usable by people without kitchens/homes or who rely on pantries.
None of those are the reason diets are unhealthy and theres a sense of the letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
And that was one claim in half a sentence with a single link.
FDA regulations really are top-down, as were US government efforts to make school lunches more nutritious. But I believe much of the demand for unhealthy food is bottom-up? It seems like parents of fussy children have some experience with this.
Restaurants and food processors are responding to tastes that people have. Restaurants can succeed, and so can new products, for a lot of different reasons but one is that people really like the taste and don't mind if the food is unhealthy.
Although, there are also things they do that aren't driven by consumer tastes but rather by industrial concerns, like making shipping easier and shelf life better, as well as cutting costs to.improve profitability. It's a complicated optimization problem with a lot of competing constraints.
Cooking food at home is probably the best way to gain more control over what you eat, but people have reasons they don't cook. Convenience is important, too.
It sounds like you are thinking about this in terms of a market, so allow me to create a market parallel: the obesity crisis is the same as the climate change environmental crisis. Both of them are effects that are directly caused by runaway markets that the government refuses to take dramatic enough intervention to stop. The lack of strong US guidelines on healthy eating allows for corporations to spin things the way that they want to - consider Veggie Straws pretending to be healthy equivalent to BP telling people to start thinking about their own carbon footprint so that they don't question how much damage they're causing to the environment.
Convenience is important but the problem goes far beyond convenience and into addiction. You know what's a really convenient meal that doesn't require any cooking? Pick any raw vegetables you want and have it with a can of beans. Alternatively, if you want something hot, you can often find frozen vegetables in stores sold in microwavable steaming bags that you can zap, optionally add the sauce of your choice (if you haven't bought a pre-seasoned option), and have an instant meal. You can also cook a potato in the microwave really easily.
The problem with these meals, though, is that most people don't consider them to be real options. None of these meals are as rich as the least calorific option in any fast food restaurant. Heck, there's going to be a lot of people who reject these ideas simply because none of them have any meat in them. The point is that people have been sucked into a status quo of rich, highly palatable, calorie dense convenience foods which have direct ties to creating metabolic disorders. If we want to reduce or eliminate said metabolic disorders, we need to intervene to make it harder to get stuck in the cycle where people become dependent on these kinds of food.
I've thought about this a lot since I started actually cooking for myself. The entire aisle for frozen dinners always struck me. The cereal and lunch snacks one too. Also the lunch meats one. The dairy one is great though that can stay.
Those aisles were great when I was like 12-18 and just starting out selecting food for myself, since I didn't know how to cook, but I finally learned how to cook in my 20s and so these days I use all of the opposite aisles. Fresh produce, meat, frozen food section for frozen veggies, dairy section for yogurt and then and the baking section. My entire grocery trip spans like 4 sections and that's only 1/4th of the store but you bet they have each of those 4 spread out so I have to walk through the whole store anyway cause marketing
I kind of get it. In my house we try to eat healthy, but man it's so much time and energy, at least if you want a decent variety of flavorful foods and to not get stuck with endless remixes of the same raw ingredients (which gets old fast). Meal prep + freezing helps, but you're still stuck in the kitchen for hours and are left with a pile of dishes (which a dishwasher helps tremendously with, but still).
If I suddenly had a big pile of cash fall in my lap, one of the first things it'd get spent on is a personal chef. I don't dislike cooking but when it's something you're always needing to think about it gets to be a drag.
We’re in a pattern of cooking 3-4 times a week and eating leftovers the other meals. I generally enjoy cooking and have managed to make it a bit of a hobby - first with just me and my wife (her more discerning palette), and now with a young child who is (usually) excited to help out. But it is endless. Every single week forever - think of meals to make that are nutritious/varied/workable with the week, do the shopping, make the food, clean the goddamn dishes…
Last summer we had a big family get together and my mother in law hired a private chef. It was amaaaaaazing. She planed the meals, came in the afternoon to cook dinner (enough for lunch leftovers the next day), prep breakfast (oven bakes), and clean all the dishes.
I would 100% hire a chef if I had enough money. Not for every meal, but like at least half the week or half the weeks.
In an ideal world, it should be possible to by ready to eat healthy foods for when you don't have the time or the energy to cook. I don't think there's anything fundamentally impossible about that.
IMO it's honestly insane that we expect everyone to cook. We have a perfectly functional professionalized model - restaurants. A restaurant chef cooking a huge-ass dish to feed 10+ people at a time will basically inevitably be more efficient than every single, couple, or family of 4 cooking their own tiny little meal. Instead, we have restaurants charging high prices for one of several dozen different meals, which has no real economy of scale.
Half the problem is the standard saving-money advice of "cook your own meals!", which is basically grassroots austerity, and just as bad as regular government-policy austerity - decreasing market participation destroys jobs, drives the remaining sellers upmarket and destroys economy of scale. Fuck austerity.
One of my go-to daydreams is to open up an automat focusing on healthy inexpensive food.
One thing that's missing from restaurants is a way to know how healthy the food you're getting is. Some sort of regulated label would be very helpful, and would improve food quality overall.
Right now, restaurant food, especially for cheap ones, is probably very unhealthy.
Agreed, but it means more waste on the part of the retailer. I agree completely, but until you make it affordable and break the stranglehold that the snack industry has on people, there isn't a non subsidized way to do it.
Yeah I had to learn to be totally okay with mixed up version of the same base 3 ingredients. Turns out there really is a dish I could spend most of the rest of my life eating and 8 year old me was wrong its not mac and cheese
If ever we needed the chewy decimal system...
There are frozen meals that seem relatively healthy to me. I like a variety of grain+bean bowls. Corn kernels, beans, rice, minced veggies etc. all flash freeze really well and you're left with something that's almost entirely whole foods.
What ones have you found? Those kinds are fairly rare in my experience, and the ones that I find tend to had a lot of added salt and fats. The few ones I found that met my standards were ludicrously overpriced, as much as $8 per (relatively small) bowl.
It's definitely not a cost-efficient way to get calories.
https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.960222634.html - $4.49 / 270 Calories / 19% Sodium DV
https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.970480200.html - $6.49 / 450 Calories / 33% Sodium DV
https://archive.ph/PsMVM
In the mid teens (so, ten years ago), I would frequently read about "shop the perimeter of the grocery store". It's a rough quote that comes from Michael Pollan. It's also well embodied by this somewhat joke of a picture: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F8e%2F54%2Fa9%2F8e54a9f3c445c36906fca589a97b3ab3.png&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=2c0ea17c2ccfc16740490a531d7b52028cfb62278895cce7234743173ed9d39a
My partner and I have a small freezer, most of which is taken up by curly fries, nuggets of some description, and knoedel. But we don't live off of that- that would be insane. You could summarise the solution to grocery stores selling overly processed foods in a single sentence.
Buy more raw foods and cook. Just cook! Buy veggies (carrots, broccoli, onions, garlic, bell peppers), buy bulk rice from an Asian goods store, buy pastas and beans and cuts of meat (chicken is well priced, and relatively healthy), and just cook it. It's not rocket science, and it doesn't have to be a full-time job.
About a week back I tried a proper long-roast (~5 hours) pulled pork for the first time, and while it wasn't perfect, it made some absolutely delicious tacos / fajitas (soft-shell, not sure what to classify them as?). A freezer meal is convenient when you're having an off day, but it doesn't beat something home-cooked.
Tacos are traditionally tortillas, typically corn. Hard "shells" are a 20th century United States thing. Pork is a fairly common filling as well.
What restaurants keep referring to as "street tacos" everywhere now are just tacos.
Fajitas are peppers, onions and meat cooked hot and fast, like cooking with a wok, until it's sizzling and you're concerned about not accidentally burning everything.
Traditionally, tacos actually are just a tortilla (mostly corn, northeast mexico to Colorado 'tex mex' often uses flour depending on subregion), with stuff (meat seasoning, herbs, onion, etc). Not to get off topic.