Why are ready meals so shit?

[pancreas]

Just choked down a 'No.1 Waitrose Lasagne'. I bought it because it was reduced to a pound or something, from about £8. It was an amorphous morass of slimy snot membranes articulating across pneumonic cat sick. I needed a handful of Maldon just to make it taste of something.

Surely there's no excuse for it in the modern age? We know what these things—like lasagne—should be. We're no longer having to make an educated guess about it, informed only by a dog-eared copy of Elizabeth David and someone's memory of something they ate in a square in Rome when they were doing the Grand Tour.

Ready meals are—without any exception I know of—awful. Yet M&S basically seems to subsist on the festival of plastic generated by its ready meals, and the boomers wallow in the creamy muck therein like pigs in shit. (Why is it always so pappy?)

It seems to me that very few people have any real connection to their taste-buds. They *may* just about register salt and sweet, etc., but for the most part their analysis of food is: does this look like Food (the edible substances I am used to ingesting)? Is whatever flavour it has wildly in excess of Food in any direction? Is it boiling hot and therefore free of Germs?

This seems to me the only explanation for how this barf gets through the taste tests. But I'm open to other thoughts.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

I mean... they've either already been cooked or they've been designed to still be edible for up to a year or whatever once they're in the deep freeze. Plus whatever else has been done to them so that you can zap em in the microwave and not die shitting your guts out from e.coli. I think we're just at the limit of ready-meal technology.

[Twit 2]

Aspirational sludge for deluded peasants. No amount of convenience justifies the squalor. Cesspit remnants banged off a ladle. The muck of a thousand anuses farted onto foil.

[poo]

John Torode's cum-filled navel.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I generally only buy these items if they are reduced to 38p and have a yellow sticker on them also, so may only be partially able to formulate a meaningful or informed reply, but I feel, as I often do, the whirring engines of compulsion stirring in my loins, and simply cannot resist posting a reply.

The lasagne mistake above is a typical example of what I would categorise as a 'rookie error' and 'the behaviour of a rank amateur', the sort often made by members of the haute-bourgeoisie such as pancreas, when they dabble in slum-level consumerism rather than on safer territory, walking peer-down bespectacled through the mung-bean cement sack rat runs of an Abu Bakr supermarket clutching a Yotam Ottolenghi (he's 51) hardback, bashing its sharp corners through the unwitting faces of the fully niqabed in your search for camel cheese and 100% virgin arse-softened Lebanese belm curds.

The more initiated in these follies of capitalist expediency know all too well the treachery inherent in the supposed 'premium ready meal' market and are aware this strata of ignominy is all-too-often the most disappointing one, especially so when it comes to pasta.

No. 1 Waitrose Lasagne, on the face of it, offers a 100% irrecyclable carton of earthly delights. The ingredients pass muster, comprised as they are of real things that exist, rather than ones conjured by dirty man-magic in a slop homologation plant which sandblasts the residual gristle off dismembered horse knees. Yet, however correct the list may seem, the processing of the correct ingredients has still been done by a machine called Geralt-01Z and its quality control lovingly watched over by a Pontefract rapist called Bolg.

Nevertheless, with ingredients such as actual cheese and red wine, you would think the end product, regardless of texture, would at least supply the sweet umami goodness. But what they gone done, the slags, is over egg the pudding, or, in this savoury context, 'fuck it all up a lot by being shit'. There is simply too much goodness and richness for it ever to be a success in the film-coated microwave carton format.

The debt-laden precariat have known for a while that if you must have a lasagne at once, like some sort of atavistic Emilio-Romagna Timecop, you may as well just opt for a bog standard one. The paucity of the bechamel inversely becomes the dish's saviour, leaving one to paw meekly at the savoury but notionally passable (digestively) dromedary matter, rather than the No. 1 Waitrose experience which is likely gargling a betting addict's hangover snot through a Piccini Chianti-fuelled diarrhoea attack.

Anyway these are just some roughly sketched thoughts on the subject.

[Dewt]

I said it yesterday but it's a curse when everything you can cook is better than most things you can buy

[idunnosomename]

waitrose own brand stuff is rubbish. the standard of ready meals from aldi is really very good. maybe you should try them. ponce

[Danger Man]

As somebody once said "If you want sex then a wank is rubbish but if you want a wank then a wank is the best thing in the world"

Same with ready meals (and fast food in general).

[Cloud]

They're generally squirted out of a nozzle in an automated production line.  That and they've had the arse cooked out of them and a load of preservatives etc to make them last.

There's decent ones like Booths do, but they also happen to cost the same as a nice meal out...

[Abnormal Palm]

Two words:

CARLOS GRAN-JAMON

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

As somebody once said "If you want sex then a wank is rubbish but if you want a wank then a wank is the best thing in the world"

Same with ready meals (and fast food in general).

What if you want... a lasagne?

[BlodwynPig]

[idunnosomename]

What if you want... a lasagne?

wank on some mince

[Buelligan]

They're made from stolen pets, that's why.

That, and 5G.

[Ambient Sheep]

It's true that the best-tasting ones aren't necessarily the top-of-the-range ones.

[pancreas]

wank on some mince

And to think everyone was surprised when it turned out their food was full of horse-meat. This is the next scandal.

As with the horse-meat it will turn out that the only ready meals without cum in them were sold in Waitrose, and ironically, I don't actually mind eating horse-meat.

[shiftwork2]

Charlie Bigham's though.  It's £8 and it's got a gurning tit on the box.

[Danger Man]

And to think everyone was surprised when it turned out their food was full of horse-meat.

They should have been delighted. Horse meat is far better than other meat.

Not that anyone should eat horses obviously.

My wife once ate horse meat.

[idunnosomename]

Charlie Bigham's though.  It's £8 and it's got a gurning tit on the box.

oh wow when you get one of them for like £1.50

fucking SUPER JACKPOT

the ones with aldi equivalents (like the lasagne, meatballs ones) are just as nice. but only lidl still do them in the cool wooden tubs.

anyway, i find the standard of ready meals to be extremely high these days although i still prefer to cook from scratch. cheers

[Buelligan]

They should have been delighted. Horse meat is far better than other meat.

Not that anyone should eat horses obviously.

My wife once ate horse meat.

He's married to Catherine the Great.

[pancreas]

anyway, i find the standard of ready meals to be extremely high these days although i still prefer to cook from scratch. cheers

I think you'll find there was a sign on the door saying No Iconoclasts.

[Misspent Boners]

I've been eating really well; way better than before the lockdown but had a bout of wreckless takeaways over the weekend so forbade myself from getting one upon finishing work tonight...hadnt eaten all day though so got two different chinese ready meals, duck and a meal for 1 thing, 2 quid each. I'm now writing this to you from on the bog a mere 20 minutes later feels like I've been poisoned. A sobering reminder of the shitness of ready meals 

[beanheadmcginty]

Every time my eyes alight upon one of those overpriced punnets of Charlie Bigham's and I see the 8 quid price sticker, my brain immediately goes "Charlie fucking big potatoes more like".

[idunnosomename]

I think you'll find there was a sign on the door saying No Iconoclasts.

im sorry, i cummed all over it

[Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle]

Waitrose own brand stuff is crap, and also ready meal lasagne is always shit. Some meals are OK, ready meal curry is alright.

[pigamus]

Microwave lasagnes are all rubbish, even the M&S ones. I know too much salt is bad for you but you need a bit of it in there to make it taste of something.

[idunnosomename]

ive had the charlie bighams lasagne (for like a pound fiddy, york sainsburys local outside micklegate bar oh yes) and it is a bit rich. still better than the aldi one which isnt bad. but it's not worth making a lasagne for two yourself imo. so whatever. yellow sticker baby

for the avoidance of doubt they go in the oven for 40 min

[Pijlstaart]

Get a career to support your family, spend all your time at work away from your family, get divorced for spending all your time at work away from your family. Lot of money, no time, no joy and only then have you earned an £8 ready meal. They're not for us, we haven't proven ourselves. If you've sacrificed everything to climb that greasy pole then you're going to take whatever you find up there, not because you want it anymore, of course you don't want it, you take it just to prove you can. Imagine if £8 ready meals were good, that'd be the real travesty, because they're not for people who value good things.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I like them. You don't have to cook anything, and you can put them in a microwave for a few minutes then eat them.

[Danger Man]

Ready meals are meant to be microwaved.

The OP probably stuck his in his Aga and totally fucked it.