Dear LPG, 

When we take a walk through the supermarket each week, those of us who are lucky enough to be able to make the repeated trip up and down the shopping aisles can feel it to be a pretty time-consuming and repetitive chore, and the cooking involved can often leave us uninspired too, especially if we are nearly always cooking for one.  I know that I can be tempted to get a bit of frozen fish, meat or a few frozen vegetables to save a bit of time when putting something together for supper.  And it is no wonder that every now and then, a complete frozen meal will be added to the shopping trolley, and we think nothing of it really.  It is something that never entered my mind until I was recently forced to see the whole issue from another perspective. 

As we get older, not being able to get out of the house becomes something that can suddenly catch up with us.   

I have a friend who was perfectly fine until one day, about 3 years ago, when she suffered a stroke, which left her approaching retirement while unable to leave home alone.  I have another friend who, in his late 80s, fell while visiting a neighbour, broke a hip and has never managed to recover well enough to be confidently able to leave his home unaided since.   

I am sure that I am not the only older person who knows someone who is housebound for one reason or another and who has very few family members geographically or with sufficient time to take on the role of being their designated carer.   

Professional carers do the best they can with the truly limited time that they have, but it does not include time for the preparation of a fresh meal.  

One of my friends has pre-prepared meals delivered by one of those companies that specialise in delivering them for elders and, they all appear to arrive with a ‘cook from frozen’ sticker somewhere on each box.  I have never tried one but there is something about the way that a frozen meal looks that is just not the same as a fresh one.  I have the odd TV dinner myself now and then, but the thought of not having any other choice every day is something that never occurred to me until it was dinner time when I visited.  

I have to say that the ones we buy in the supermarkets look better somehow.  I have the theory that the supermarket ones are put together, with appearance being slightly more important than their nutritional value.  

My other friend immigrated to England years ago.  He brought his love of the food from ‘back home’ with him.  He is lucky enough to have a sister who batch-cooks many of his meals to make sure that there is always something that has that ‘back home’ flavour, but they still have to be frozen.   

I, like most of the people old enough to be reading my message, will remember the 1950s and 1960s, when having a freezer in the kitchen, which was not just the top bit of your fridge, became the norm and the controversy surrounding what needed to be thawed before being reheated and eaten safely became a fair-sized recurring question.  

We all prefer fresh food to frozen but I cannot help but feel that there is also a difference in appearance between most of the frozen meals that need defrosting and those that don’t.  The sad thing is that carers don’t have the time to choose the better option for their clients, and I see my friend opt for a sandwich rather than a balanced meal because of those differences. 

Food poisoning comes in many different guises too, and when I got talking to another person who lives housebound and alone, that lady told me that the vast majority (and often the entirety) of her frozen meals end up in the bin and get swapped for a sandwich because of her fear of getting ill.   

Those meals that family prepare in their homes before they are delivered and stored have to be a cause for concern too.  They are also more than likely to get shoved in the freezer, and we need to be sure that the carers remember to transfer tomorrow’s frozen dinner to the fridge the night before it needs to be eaten.  Defrosting properly is key and reheated food does not have to be cold to be bad for you. 

Perhaps the one thing that came from all my thinking about this subject is that anyone who plans to cook anything that comes from the freezer should be sure to check how it needs to be defrosted and how long for… 

MJ, Ladywell