"A ready meal is basically cooking"

You put it in the oven. You use a plate, sometimes. You might add a bit of salad. It's not a takeaway, and it's food at home, so it feels like the honest end of the habit. I don't want to be snobbish about ready meals, and some of them are fine, and on the nights when a plain plate really isn't going to happen, a tray in the oven is a better fallback than the app. But the belief is that the tray is a version of cooking, and it isn't, and the difference isn't about the food. It's about what you learn.

Matthew Lam and Jean Adams, using the same UK survey as chapter 4, found that people who cooked a main meal at least five days a week, and people who were confident cooking a range of foods, got a smaller share of their energy from what the researchers call ultra-processed foods, which is the category most ready meals fall into. That's a cross-sectional finding and I won't lean on it for more than it carries. What it describes is a pattern where the more you cook, the less of your food arrives pre-made, and the less you cook, the more of it does.

Here's the difference in plain terms. When you make a plain plate, you do something, and it goes slightly better than last time, and the next one is easier. When you heat a tray, nothing happens to you. You're exactly as able to cook afterwards as before. The tray gives you dinner and takes nothing from you, and that sounds like a good deal until you notice that nothing being taken is also nothing being built, and that after a year of trays the event is exactly as big as it was.

So I'd put the ready meal where it belongs, which is as a stopgap. It's what's in the freezer for the night when the shelf has run out or the fifteen minutes really aren't there. It isn't cooking, and calling it cooking is how a person who could cook ends up not cooking for a decade. Keep one or two in the freezer and use them the way you'd use a spare tyre.