"Instant food.
What is instant food? The simplest answer to that is food that you can eat without having to prepare it.
But I don't think that quite captures the spirit or the intended meaning of instant food.
For instance, I can buy an apple at the store and eat it.
I might want to wash it.
That's fine, but I don't have to do anything in particular to prepare it.
So that's pretty instant.
But that's not what we mean.
When we say instant food, instant food almost always means highly produced food or processed food.
It's been processed by humans in one way or another and usually many ways.
OK, once we get it, we can make it fairly quickly.
In fact, it's usually not instant.
You have to add hot water or put it in the stove or mix it or stir it or add other ingredients to it.
So it's not instant.
On the other hand, it's quite a bit quicker to prepare than the traditional food that hasn't been processed.
Now, by processing the food, we change the ingredients.
They're doing a lot of research on highly processed foods today and we don't know the full story.
We don't have all the answers, but it appears that highly processed food is not very healthy for you.
So instant food is not very healthy for you.
If you can prepare the food yourself, of course, you might argue you're still preparing it, but you're not putting in the high levels of preparation that the food factories can put into preparing it.
So it seems a little bit healthier for us.
A general rule of thumb that one person says is if you can look at the food and recognize what it is and what it came from, that's a reasonable level of low processing.
So when I eat spinach, I can look at it and see the spinach leaf, maybe not the whole leaf, but it's been cut.
And I can still tell that it's spinach.
A lot of the food factories will add additives to the food and those may or may not be very healthy for us, although they sound healthy sometimes.
So instant food.
Do you eat this a lot or do you not eat very much? I'm moving away from it myself.
Let me know what you think."