If you go into a big supermarket, hundreds of ready meals stretch from floor to ceiling.
You can find all sorts of meals there, from teriyaki chicken to paella and Lancashire hotspot.
They’re a massive part of our national diet. But just a few decades ago, such meals barely existed. There was no such thing as pre-prepared chilled food which could just be warmed up in its plastic tray – yet.
Rosalind Rathouse, now 81, was one of the first people to develop this new type of food which would revolutionise our diet and health, not for the better.
She set up a pre-made pies business, Piemaker, in the early 1980s, and its success led her to making pies and cakes for supermarkets including Waitrose and Harrods.
She told Metro she was then approached to create a new style of product which could potentially be sold in stores.
Rosalind created the samples, which were back then just pre-prepared versions of home-cooked dishes, put them into plastic containers provided, and took them to buyers who tasted them and quizzed her on how they were made.
While frozen ‘TV dinners’ were invented in 1953, it was not until the 1980s that chilled meals designed to be microwaved became popular in supermarkets.
In the years since, Rosalind said there has been a ‘galloping’ acceleration in how factory food is produced, moving further and further from the basics.
‘In the 70s and 80s, we didn’t know about ingredients like guar gum, Xanthan gum, and sodium metabisulfite,’ she said. ‘No one was doing that sort of thing. If things were preserved, they were preserved with natural vinegars. But now, even vinegar has preservatives in. Mustard is a preservative, but mustard has a preservative in it. Everything is to give it a longer shelf life, but that never used to happen.
‘It probably was in the later 80s and 90s that the big change took place, and you could never have predicted it, never in a million years.
‘That people are dying 40 years later, you can’t even think about it.’
In April, a study was published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine which linked consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) to nearly 18,000 early deaths in the UK, where it makes up 53% of people’s energy intake.
Looking at how ready meals have evolved in the years since she made them in small bakeries and kitchens, Rosalind is appalled, and thinks the health dangers of UPFs should be taken as seriously as cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, or even the Covid pandemic.
‘When the Covid deaths started, we were all so upset,’ she said. ‘And now it’s 18,000 deaths linked to UPFs, and no-one’s batting an eyelid.’
Now, almost every ready meal sold comes with a familiar cardboard sleeve and peel-back plastic film. But back then, even the packaging was in the early stages of development, so Rosalind had to fix the plastic lids on with a clothes iron.
‘I had to cover it with a cloth so it wouldn’t melt, and then the heat would go through and let the plastic form onto the top of the dish,’ she said. ‘To get it off again, you’d have to cut it open.’
She presented the meals to supermarket buyers, often things like stews and curries, which at that time were packaged separately from the rice, ‘the sort of thing you could just put into your microwave and heat up’.
‘I don’t know how they developed them or if they did anything with them. But all I I know is, I did a lot of dishes for them,’ she said.
Grandmother Rosalind went into the food business after the sudden death of her brother in a road accident. Formerly a school teacher, she began to question how she wanted to spend her life, and eventually quit teaching to pursue ‘a romantic idea of pies’.
This led to forming Piemaker, which supplied pies to supermarkets, and even to the restaurant of the Orient Express train for three months, whose catering at the time was supplied by celebrity chef Prue Leith. For a time in the early 1980s, she was contracted to bake a thousand cakes for Waitrose per week at 79p each, which was later increased to 3,000 per week at 49p.
This is a lot of cakes to churn out for a small business, and she struggled at first to make them in uniform sizes, until eventually buying a machine to dollop a specific size of cake batter into each box.
It’s hard to imagine a major supermarket commissioning such homemade products now, with so much now automated from the production of ingredients to the packaging.
Rosalind said she has always been ‘obsessed with pure ingredients’, even when friends teased her for wanting to avoid MSG in her children’s food: ‘I always had the argument that if I wouldn’t eat it, it can’t be sold.’
She was an early advocate for high quality ingredients in food manufacturing, opting for fresh and avoiding additives.
But the dried egg and dried milk she sniffed at back then are now the least of our worries, with artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers and stabilisers increasingly linked to poor health.
Looking at the food industry now, Rosalind said: ‘It’s a shock. You could do a good ready meal with flour, no additives, no modified starches, or modified protein. The reason they put those in is because they’re cheap.
‘If you did a really good, bulk-produced one, the price comes down and then there’s no reason why they couldn’t do proper food. I’m very upset with that.’
If you speak to Rosalind, you wouldn’t expect she was an early pioneer of convenience foods. Since 2002, she has devoted her life to teaching people to cook simple, healthy meals from scratch after founding the Cookery School at Little Portland Street in central London.
Last week, the government outlined proposals to encourage supermarkets to promote healthier eating. While this is going in the right direction, she thinks it’s ‘too slow’, and that the traffic light system for food should be reformed to indicate their level of processing, rather than the current system for salt, sugar and saturated fat.
She is now spearheading a march later today to ‘fight fake food’, hoping to raise public awareness about UPFs and their health dangers.
Starting at 12pm on Portland Place, marchers in chefs’ hats (although they have been ‘advised against’ carrying rolling pins) will carry a big pie to the Houses of Parliament, urging the government to ‘fix our broken food system’.
‘As a cookery school we want to see real cooking back on the curriculum,’ the march advert says. ‘We also feel strongly that the government must agree on a legal definition of UPFs and reference UPFs in dietary recommendations. Only then can they consider UPF labelling and a UPF tax.’
Cookery School is also offering free online classes on YouTube called Cook For Victory, intended to teach beginners to cook in 20 days.
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