Over the past couple of years, I have cut back substantially on prepackaged or prepared foods. I’ve almost eliminated buying them for a few different reasons, and have found homemade alternatives that are better in many ways.

There are a few reasons I have quit buying prepared or prepackaged foods.

Cost: it is amazing to see the price on some of the prepared foods out there. Take spaghetti sauce, for instance. (Please!) Unless you buy the sauce on sale, it is often $3 or more per jar. I would need to buy at least two jars, likely three, to feed everyone and have leftovers. For that same money, cans of crushed tomatoes, or tomato puree, is far cheaper. I can buy three or more large cans of good tomatoes for the price of two jars of spaghetti sauce. And the spices I already have on the shelf. My dollar goes a lot further with homemade meals.

Flavor: the prepared or prepackaged foods now have a funny flavor to them, or are too salty or sweet. Even something like salad dressing tastes horrid out of the bottle to me now.

Health: I looked at a few bottles of salad dressing the other day, and it was alarming to note that the first three ingredients in many of them were water, high-fructose corn syrup and soybean oil. A good homemade dressing will use olive oil, or even a good brand of canola oil that has no flavor, as opposed to soybean oil (which I don’t even think you can purchase in a store). If a recipe needs sweetening, good old fashioned sugar is the way to go–the corn syrup is an unhealthy substitute. Sodium? Don’t get me started. Some prepackaged or prepared foods are just too salty to me anymore. I used to buy Shake ‘N’ Bake years ago; the last time I tried it, it was too salty. Add in the preservatives with unpronounceable names, and you have to wonder why our bodies aren’t “pickled” by now.

Corn syrup really sets me off. Does anyone remember the big “New Coke” fiasco many years ago? The whole premise was that it was a new formula, created to stimulate decreasing sales of Coke. After letting the New Coke flounder for a bit, they brought back Classic Coke. Thing is, few people noticed the difference: Coke had switched from using sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, which is even worse on your body than excess sugar. Other products just shifted to the corn syrup over time, thinking we would not notice.

You have to ask, though…”Why?” Politics. This was the government’s way of supporting the corn growers of the U.S. Rather than use sugar as a sweetener, why not have our corn growers contribute to a product that could be used everywhere? We’re stuck with it now, unfortunately, unless we make our food at home and cut back on products that use the corn syrup over sugar.

So, what is the solution? Make your own food at home. Yes, it does take a little more time to make your own dishes from scratch, but often, it does not take much longer than heating up something in a jar or (hopefully, you don’t do this) take out of a box and heat in the microwave. For spaghetti sauce, it does not take me much longer to throw in cans of crushed tomatoes and my usual spices (I don’t even have to measure anymore) than it does to open up jars of ready-made sauce and dump them in the pot. Some food takes longer (such as, the homemade chicken nuggets that the family likes) requires dipping in an egg mixture, then a flour/spice mixture, for each individual piece before cooking. Even salad dressings are easy–the spice packets from Good Seasons and Hidden Valley Ranch beat buying that other crap in the bottles, and do not take that long to make.

For health benefits alone, I recommend making food at home; the cost savings and improved flavor are the icing on the cake. (Homemade icing…mmmm….)