What I’d Uninvent: Addictive Convenience Foods Working Moms Hate

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

Those addictive convenience food ads haunt every tired mom—here’s what I’d uninvent instead.

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If I could wave a magic wand and make something disappear, I’d choose the “convenience foods” that pretend to take care of us while quietly making us sick. Not every shortcut in a box is evil. There’s a place for frozen vegetables and canned beans, but the engineered, addictive, ultra-processed stuff that hijacks our taste buds and then leaves our bodies and minds exhausted? Those are the ones I’d gladly uninvent .

Just this morning, I scrolled past an advertisement for a “new, one-of-a-kind food,” all bright colors and bold promises. It didn’t have to say what was in it; the script writes itself. Salt to keep you reaching back in for more. Sugar to spike your blood and then drop it. A cocktail of industrial oils, artificial flavors, and lab-designed textures to make sure you can’t eat just one. These products are created in test kitchens with the same precision as tech gadgets—except the goal isn’t nourishment, it’s consumption. And most of us, especially as tired parents, are the target market.

What bothers me most is how these foods dress themselves up as help. They show up with labels like “fun,” “easy,” “family-sized,” or even “better for you,” and they slide right into the cracks in our overfull lives. No time to cook? No energy to plan? Here, have something that tastes like comfort and costs less than a bag of good groceries. The problem is, the bill comes due somewhere else: in our health, our energy, our kids’ behavior, our medical systems. As ultra-processed foods have taken over more and more of the typical diet, rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic diseases have risen right alongside them.

As a homesteading-leaning, working mom, this hits close to home. I know what it feels like to be tired at 5:30 p.m. with hungry kids orbiting the kitchen and a brain that feels like an empty pantry. On those nights, the ads for magic, ready-to-eat solutions feel like mercy. But I also know what it feels like when my body is running on too many of those quick fixes: foggy, irritable, strangely hungrier despite eating more. It takes time and energy to push back against that current—to cook from scratch when possible, to keep real food in the house—but the difference in how we all feel is undeniable. When I chop vegetables with this knife (affiliate link) after using this honing steel (affiliate link) to sharpen the blade and store ingredients in these glass Pyrex containers (affiliate link), I have energy to play with my kids and have a meaningful conversation with my husband.

If I could uninvent anything, I wouldn’t erase every packaged shortcut. I’d erase the category of food-like products that are deliberately designed to be irresistible first and nourishing last, if at all. I’d trade “new, one-of-a-kind” snacks for old, familiar foods that our bodies recognize. I’d love to see fewer marketing dollars poured into teaching kids to crave cartoon-shaped sugar and more into making real, simple food accessible and appealing. Until that magic wand shows up, all I can do is quietly opt out where I can. I choose ingredients over inventions and meals over products. And I teach my kids that food is meant to help us live well—not just keep us reaching back into the bag.

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Feature Photo by Behnam Norouzi on Unsplash

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