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THE JOY OF HOME-MEAL ASSEMBLY

Do you think "scratch" is what you do to an itch? That recipe measurements include "cans" and "boxes"? Do you have a Pavlovian response to the microwave timer ring? Then you are part of the biggest food trend of the last decade.

Text: PHILIP PREVILLE

1 | 2 | 3 | Cookbooks | Oct '04

My local supermarket sells more than 3,000 products. I am acquainted with maybe three dozen of them and their locations, so I tend to walk the exact same path through the store twice a week. Some aisles I never visit; certain freezer doors I never open. Like most people, I wend my way from entrance to checkout in a serene but determined trance.

I was recently jolted out of my grocery-store daze by row upon row of Maple Leaf Fully Cooked Roasts: whole beef pot roasts and meat loaves, turkey breasts and pork loins, precooked in gravy, refrigerated and sold for $9.99. I was stunned: Until now, my convenience meat world had been limited to frozen burgers, tins of seafood and Flakes of Ham. Here was a package promising a juicy, delicious, idiot-proof roast after only 10 minutes in the microwave.

It turns out I was the last to know. Fully Cooked Roasts were first introduced back in the fall of 2003 and have become a hit with consumers because they epitomize the biggest food trend of the last decade, one that’s heating up every test kitchen in North America. The trend is called home-meal assembly, or in industry shorthand HMA. Its typical products combine convenience with choice, allowing people to prepare quick, easy, no-fuss meals while – and this is key – letting them retain control over the components. In other words, without forcing them to resort to the all-in-one TV dinner solution.

Yet the fully cooked roast is kind of like taking the meat out of the TV dinner and selling it separately. And according to Colin Farnum, Maple Leaf’s director of research and development, that’s the genius driving the roasts’ success. "The idea is to provide consumers with a nutritious centre-of-the-plate entree around which they can create their own homemade meal," he says. Indeed, when I wandered the aisles with newfound alertness, I quickly realized how many home-meal assembly products have been around for years, just sitting on the shelf waiting for Farnum to invent those roasts: Lipton SideKicks, Uncle Ben’s Bistro Express, Dempster’s Garlic Bread with Cheese, Tanimura & Antle salad in a bag with dressing, ready-to-steam fresh-cut broccoli and cauliflower in the produce section. All prepackaged items, all made to go together. For a generation raised wearing mix-and-match clothes, it’s Garanimals food.

A typical meal from these products – roast beef in gravy with steamed vegetables and savoury rice, plus garlic bread and mixed greens with vinaigrette – is a quintessential, just-like-mom-used-to-make supper, only without soiling a single cutting board or reaching for the spices. I made such a meal, and while it didn’t taste like my mother had nursed it to perfection all afternoon, it didn’t taste like it took 25 minutes either. It tasted like a home-cooked meal prepared by someone who doesn’t know his or her way around the kitchen all that well. Which is exactly what most of my friends under 35 are like.

So Colin Farnum has saved us time and effort, and the end result is something most of us couldn’t have managed on our own. Most importantly, we have the satisfaction of feeling like we prepared it ourselves rather than settling for takeout. As Farnum says, "The phrase ‘I made dinner’ used to mean ‘I transformed raw ingredients from scratch.’ Now it simply means, ‘I assembled it.’"

1 | 2 | 3 | Cookbooks | Oct '04