In the healthy eating world, most of the conversation revolves around what’s healthy and what’s not. Great starting point, for sure, but once you figure out what’s healthy, where do you go? The kitchen of course, because we’ve already established that most ready-made foods are definitely not healthy and are often health-damaging. Real, whole foods are the answer, and they need to be prepared, in a kitchen.
So what’s it like when you head to the kitchen?
- Do you want to turn around and run out after 5 minutes? Or are you comfortable spending a little time there?
- Are pots and pans, gadgets and foodstuffs arranged to match your meal making flow?
- Is there adequate room on the counters to safely and comfortably chop vegetables, mix, season and serve?
- Can you find and pull things from cupboards and drawers easily–and without several other things falling out at the same time?
The Math
If you’re spending precious seconds and even minutes finding what you need, running repeatedly back and forth across the kitchen, shuffling the counters to make room for the cutting board, or just feeling frazzled by chaos, know that those seconds and minutes add up more than you think.
This is where hidden health risks lie.
Once combined, the accumulation of those wasted seconds and minutes gobble up what precious little time we have for meal making. Eventually, we end up seeing meal making as so tedious and hard that it’s impossible in our busy lives. So we give up on it, leaving us with a diet of health-damaging, ready-made processed foods.
Solutions for Kitchen Chaos: Mary in the News
Marni Jameson writes the nationally syndicated At Home column. We’ve worked on a couple articles around creating functional kitchens that support easeful, everyday healthy meal making.
For Marni’s latest article, I headed to Denver to help organize her daughter’s newly remodeled kitchen. Marni took notes and wrote one of her always-entertaining articles that catalogued the improvements we made to streamline the kitchen for meal making.
In the article, she included six valuable kitchen organizing pointers (and I added one more!) Even just one or two might be just the ticket to make your kitchen a friendly, supportive ally for getting health-supporting meals on the table.
- Tip 1 Start by Decluttering
- Tip 2 Put food where you cook
- Tip 3 Eliminate pantry treks
- Tip 4 Thin the caddy
- Tip 5 Keep dishes, glasses and flatware by the dishwasher
- Tip 6 Weave in prettiness
- Tip 7 Use bins strategically
Learn more about these tips here.
IMPORTANT POINT: Don’t despair if your kitchen isn’t a Perfect 10. I think we get deluded by the Home Beautiful kitchens in ads and articles. Of course you want a beautiful space like the one above from Marni’s daughter’s kitchen.
But meal making is messy!
My kitchen is often cluttered by produce from the garden that needs to be processed, groceries that need to be shelved, beans soaking in the slow cooker, dirty dishes headed for the dishwasher, etc.
But over the years my eyeglass prescription has changed so I don’t “see” or sweat temporary dishevelment. I know that a few minutes of tidying will put the kitchen in good shape for smooth and efficient meal making–even if I don’t have time to get every last thing put away. And most importantly, the underlying organization in my kitchen is sound.