No beating around the bush - navigating this crazy world's food system, and eating healthfully, takes time.
All the reading and research take time. Granted, I love food, and the food system interests me, not in the least out of a sense of concern and self-preservation. Every time I find out something new and relevant about diet or food I try to incorporate it into my ways of shopping and cooking. That makes things more complex - discerning fact from fiction, understanding what particular research results and dietary recommendations actually apply to my family, sourcing new items, and finding ways to prepare additions to our food selections.
All the shopping takes time. I go to a lot of different places to shop as reasonably as possible, for as much variety as possible, to buy as locally as possible, to get the most organic and least sprayed foods possible, to buy pastured meat and eggs, find the most healthful seafood, and to research and buy those items I cannot find locally online or through my food coop. It takes time.
All the preparation takes time. Cooking from scratch takes time, no way around it. Most of my meal prep time goes into preparing produce since I often make several vegetable dishes, some raw, some cooked. But I, too, use short cuts - see an earlier blog post, hurry-nights, on that - my own fast food ways. And I love leftovers, frozen for a later point in time, or simply for lunch the next day.
Ultimately, you, the consumer, are responsible for discerning what information is relevant to you, what is healthy for your body, what diet makes sense, what food items to buy, and how to prepare them. Make no mistake, the current food system is not designed to provide you with the most healthful food, but to make money by selling you product - product earns more than produce. Hence big-ag and big-food's cat and mouse game with you, the consumer, to manipulate you by hiding facts that would prevent you from buying more of their stuff. Spend some valuable time to read between the lines and dig deeper. Whole unprocessed foods have no hidden agenda, only packaged and processed foods do.