Can I eat ready meals/microwave meals without heating them? (most of them seem to be already cooked)?

Question

I am curious about this. Often I buy microwave meals/ ready meals. It seems to me that the food has already been cooked, and I am just reheating them in the microwave. I wonder if push came to shove, would it be ok to eat these meals cold? i.e. without heating them in the microwave or oven. Also, the fact that they've been cooked and I am re-heating them, perhaps it is nutritionally better not to heat them again! I'd be interested if someone really knows the answer to this :)

Answer 1

By law, microwavable meals have to be ready to eat because heating in a microwave doesnt necessarily heat the food to a high enough temperature for long enought to kill all the nasties in raw food.
So... you can eat it cold as long as it is within the best before date.

Answer 2

Matthew, earlier you were asking for suggestions of things to do so might I suggest starting to cook your own meals. These would NOT work out more expensive if you do this in bulk. It doesn't have to be bulk whole meals but just the meat part (which does not have to be an expensive joint either). Cooking meat takes longer than other things so if this is prepared and packed in one meal portions and frozen you just have to prepare the vegetables regularly. I don't even do that every day but cook double the quantity of vegetable on alternate days and have the same two days in a row taking out a pack of frozen meat to go with those vegetables. If you planned your day so that you needed to be home at an approximate time to prepare and cook vegetables your day would have more purpose and you'd be eating more healthily and (I'm sure) more cheaply. The only negative things about preparing our own food versus having a frozen meal i.m.o. is that there is a little washing up to do after we've eaten whereas we just throw away those freezer cartons. Hope this isn't reported as chat because I used someone's name. I'm trying to be helpful and to 'kill two birds with one stone' here. If this vanishes soon you'll know that it was.

Answer 3

absolutely.. Every microwave meal has already been cooked, they are just frozen so that all you have to do is defrost them or heat them up! Otherwise you'd be cooking them for MUCH longer. There a little signs that you can tell as well, like if you have any food with meat or fish, notice how the beef is always brown and the fish is not translucent. Chicken should never be pink either.

Answer 4

The food is not always fully cooked before packaging, so I would recommend that you go ahead and zap the food. It will taste better, and will be a lot easier to eat than if it were frozen! I picked up a microwave at Wal-Mart not long ago for forty bucks, so it is not as if it were impractical to have one.

Answer 5

I think you should read the package - most of them are already cooked - but some are not and specifically say you must cook before eating.

I'm guessing you could eat the pre-cooked ones without heating,but I don't think it would be very enjoyable.

Answer 6

For the most part...though i would hesitate over the shell fish paella????

I would doubt that the dissipation of nutritional value would be increased by further heating...the pre cooking process would probably have done all the damage already.

Answer 7

Tell the truth now; you've obviously broken your microwave, can't afford a new one and cannot cook by conventional means either. I hope you enjoy your cold, uncooked ready meals. They sound deeeelicious, mm, mmm... ;-)

Answer 8

Wow and Oh brother. First of, not sure why you would want to and secondly I am assuming you would be at least thawing them out, right? So next we turn to science. OK, the frozen potatoes, for instance, need the heat to react properly and get creamy as they are intended to be, same with quite a bit of other items in many frozen dinners that need to react with heat to get the proper consistency. Does that make sense to you?

Answer 9

I really like both fruits and fresh vegetables better, however they look and taste. You desire a little of both.

Answer 10

In the event that it's a fruit they have seeds, otherwise it's a vegetable. And vegetables are usually grown in the ground while fruits are grown in trees.