Japanese Curry Chicken and Settling for "Good Enough"

Over there to the right is a picture of the box this curry sauce came out of. It doesn’t have any particularly nasty chemicals in it; some people have problems with MSG, but it is naturally occurring. That doesn’t mean it’s good for you, but personally I would be less concerned about what is basically a kind of salt and much more

concerned about, for example, the effect of seaweed-extract polysaccharides like carrageenan which are added to foods as a cheap way to bulk and thicken them. (You can make a gelatin-like food from the same seaweed that contains carrageenan, but that’s different from hiding it in your ice cream to save on dairy cost. People who screw over dairy farmers and mess up ice cream just to make a few more cents a carton deserve their own circle of Hell.) Still, the point is not what is in the box, nor is this a recommendation of the S&B Golden Curry product. (Though it was fine.)

The point is that this curry chicken meal took an hour to make and contained:

A Free Range Red Ranger Chicken, chopped in 1-to-2 inch pieces with a cleaver

A large home-grown onion chopped in chunks

4 extra large CSA carrots chopped in 1-to-2 inch pieces

5 CSA potatoes chopped in 1-to-2 inch pieces

The above box of curry sauce mix, a couple tablespoons of homemade cooking lard, and water.

Follow the directions on the box and serve over rice.

Would it be better, and healthier, to make a Japanese curry sauce from scratch? I think so. (Japanese curry is kind of a mix of a curry and a browned roux). That would also have taken several hours to make, possibly after a special trip to the store to get ingredients we don’t typically have on hand. With two young children and a farm to run, we don’t often have that kind of time.

That’s the curry on the right. It was good.

If your options are (1) cheap and unhealthy takeout food, (2) not eating the food you enjoy, or (3) cooking what you like by using as many good quality local ingredients as you can and settling for a sauce or other components from package, then cook the food you want with the off-the-shelf time-saver. It’s good enough.

Americans spend far less on home-cooked meals than we did 75 years ago, and we are also generally much less healthy. Part of the problem is that, coincidental to the popularization of radio and television, prior generations failed in their duty to pass on basic life skills to their progeny. However, it’s also true that most families today have dual income earners by necessity, which means we have less time to cook, and at the same time unhealthy processed food is widely available and artificially inexpensive because the workers who make it are egregiously underpaid. We need to recognize that a home-cooked meal is always going to be better than this garbage, even if that home-cooked meal isn’t “from scratch”. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Cooking a meal with some pre-packaged ingredients is just fine. In fact, even if everything in your home-cooked meal comes from a can or a box, at least you know what you put in it.