Returning from a ten-day break in Italy, it was back to opening a ton of e-mails and doing the weekly shop. Among the former was a survey stating that we as a nation are the largest consumers of ready meals in Europe, with our voracious appetite creating a £2 billion market. A trip to the supermarket to do the dreaded shop revealed that this is probably true: the choice of prepared meals in boxes seemed endless.

It struck me that I had not seen a single piece of packaged food in San Valentino, the village an hour and a half’s drive from Rome in which we had just being staying.

Maria, the 75-year-old mother of our hotel’s owner, was up at six every morning making fresh pasta for dinner and chopping locally grown tomatoes, onions and garlic for the sauces. The local pizza parlour was abuzz an hour later, making and rolling its own dough and chopping everything from aubergines to courgettes for that day’s toppings. When we were invited by friends to supper, meatballs were homemade, chilli peppers were stuffed an hour or so earlier and locally baked bread was offered to all. It was fresh, delicious and just naturally good for you.

Clearly this is not a lifestyle easily replicated in bustling British life, which partly explains our growing reliance on ready meals. According to Mintel’s latest Eating Habits report, we are trying to do one thing right at least by choosing “good for you” meals that are particularly responsible for boosting sales in the ready-meal market.

The challenge, however, is to find a ready meal that may actually do you some nutritional good. True, all supermarkets turn out their individual “healthy eating” ranges that are lower in fat than standard ready meals. Yet many still vary widely in the amount of salt and sugar they contain, are low in fibre and short on vegetables.

So it is good to know that there are some people out there who really do want to make ready meals good for you. It was a healthy eating author, Ian Marber, who first took the bull by the horns 18 months ago by launching his range of Food Doctor ready meals.

For a start, you can see the food through the clear window on the package, and they come with the promise of no artificial colours or flavourings. You can trust that all the nutrients – not just one or two – are well balanced without needing to pore over the labels like Hercule Poirot.

The flamed-grilled chicken is accompanied by reasonably generous servings of fresh-looking broccoli (three florettes, not just the odd green speck here and there) plus green beans, while quinoa pilau, a naturally protein-rich grain originally a staple in the Andes of Peru, has a light, sun-dried tomato dressing.

Other independent entrepreneurs are following suit. Stephen Purdew, the owner of the Champneys spa group, decided to bring us delicious, fresh Champneys meals created by top chefs from his resorts.

The Champneys 450g meal of Atlantic salmon with broccoli, rice and cannellini beans, herb crème fraîche and pumpkin seeds would keep even the hungriest of us feeling well fed. Like Marber’s range, there are no artificial additives; just good, honest ingredients that you’d expect in home cooking. And, not surprisingly, they stack up nutritionally.

Supermarkets have been quick to recognise this trend for a better class of fresh-style, healthy ready meal and have been busy rustling up their own versions. My advice is to be aware that some can be quite a nutritional rollercoaster.

Take Tesco’s “nutritionally balanced” chicken chow mein, for example. It may have only 370 calories and 6g of fat per 400g packet but it manages to pack in 21g of sugar (five teaspoons’ worth) and 2.6g of salt – almost half your daily quota. Within the same range, the Moroccan chicken with couscous has 540 calories, 25g of sugar (more than six teaspoons’ worth), yet just 0.2g of salt.

Marks & Spencer’s “nutritionally balanced” range of ready meals can be equally erratic nutritionally, from a chicken casserole with 460 calories and 15g of fat per 400g packet to a chicken, mushroom and bacon version with 100 fewer calories and half the fat.

While many of this new generation of “healthy” ready meals claim to be free of artificial colours and flavours (which makes you wonder why all ready meals cannot follow suit) and to provide a serving of vegetables towards our “five a day” this lack of consistency in their interpretation of the newly popular nutritionally balanced label can be confusing.

If their food development teams need a clear definition of what nutritionally balanced really means, they should chat to Maria, or many a mother of her age. Such women have been turning out home-cooked meals that implicitly meet such criteria for decades.

www.amandaursell.com

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