Sandra Dick: Food for thought on our unhealthy eating

Remember when a sandwich was ham, maybe a dab of mustard, if you were feeling lavish, a bit of lettuce? Cheese sandwiches were cheddar and smeared with pickle. For the more adventurous, they were on - gasp - brown bread.

You made them at home and took them to work in a lunchbox. They weren't runny French cheese with grapes and cranberries on warm crusty baguettes, toasted brioches with hummous and dates or, for that matter, a Subway 12-inch meatball Marinara with the equivalent salt content of 18 bags of ready salted crisps.

They weren't stuffed with lasagne either and they didn't emerge, ready made, weeks old, from a tin.

Strange as those last two sound, they are the latest entries on the nation's over-stuffed list of convenience foods that, some argue, owe more to convenience than to nutrition or good taste.

Take the lasagne sandwich, unveiled by Tesco - slogan Every Little Helps - which looks set to help the nation's obesity crisis by coming in at a whopping 565 calories and 26.9g of fat.

It manages to make nutritionists gasp in horror for combining two helpings of carbohydrates in one portion - pasta inside a slab of white bread, oozing meat and cheese sauce.

Perhaps sir would prefer a Candwich. It's threatening to wing its way from the land of the free where fast food is almost part of the nation's recommended five a day, a revolting sounding hot dog shaped roll filled with peanut butter and strawberry or grape jam, or something that looks not unlike dog food but which claims to be barbecue chicken.

Wash it down with a cup of coffee sipped straight from a self-heating can, or nip to Marks and Spencer for Le Froglet, a single-serve plastic glass of French wine with a tear-off lid that's a hit among people so desperate for a drink they can't spare the time to grab a corkscrew or, for that matter, a glass.

From breakfast cereals that come in plastic pots with plastic spoons and a side portion of UHT milk to yoghurt we slurp from a tube and cheese that comes in individually wrapped stringy strips, if it's not instant and convenient, we're too busy to eat it.

It's all about saving precious time. But when it comes down to sandwiches in a tin and self-heating coffee, the question is 'just how low can convenience food go?'

One answer to that comes from America, where a food giant is marketing large wheat cookies directly at schoolchildren who are simply too busy to eat a proper breakfast.

Called UBR (pronounced "uber", it stands for "Ultimate Breakfast Round"), and it's directly marketed as "a winning breakfast or snack to be served in elementary and secondary schools".

"That's very depressing," says Emma Conroy of Edinburgh Nutrition. "It's not children who are too busy to eat a proper breakfast, it's their parents who are too busy to make them one.

"A biscuit really should not be regarded as a proper breakfast."

She believes the buck stops with individuals who opt to buy packaged convenience foods over fresh, natural varieties.

"Good food goes off," she says simply.

"If something that's normally fresh has some modern way of preserving it added in, then alarm bells should go off.

"But people are very trusting.There's so much money to be made in processed food, producers can afford to spend millions promoting it.

"Consumers have ultimate power though, they could choose not to buy them."

The temptation to buy, however, is great, agrees Mary Contini, of Elm Row Italian restaurant Valvona and Crolla.

"It worries me when I walk around most supermarkets and there's something like 20 per cent decent, fresh food and around 80 per cent absolute junk," she says.

Convenience foods are obviously attractive to parents who juggle work with childcare and haven't time to rustle up homecooked meals.

"And people don't know how to cook," she adds.

"Then they get used to the taste of preservatives and sugar and fat - those tastes are almost addictive."

All that said, there's nothing that new about 'instant' food - a generation of Britons was raised on instant mash and Vesta curries, boil in the bag meals and tinned soup.

There is, however, one saving grace.

For the Candwich is now embroiled in a US legal action after a chap hooked by the idea invested 92m into it and other projects.

Unfortunately, it's alleged, it wasn't his money.

So UK sandwich lovers may have to wait a little longer to get enjoy the satisfaction of pulling a ring pull and releasing a Candwich..