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Food

Brits Spend More Time Looking at Food on Instagram Than Cooking

New market research from OnePoll shows that most of us would rather look at food on social media or watch cooking shows than get into the kitchen.

When you finally make it home after a long day of playing email whack-a-mole with your inbox and working through mountains of photocopying, you're pretty beat.

But at least you can settle down in front of the latest episode of Masterchef and pretend that the furry hummus and limp carrots you're eating is actually confit duck breast with reduced angel hair jus.

Sound familiar?

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The results of a new survey released show you're not the only one with am embarrassing gulf between the food on your various screens and the stuff you actually eat. The report, commissioned by Danish butter brand Lurpack and carried out by market researchers OnePoll, found that 52 percent of the 2,000 people surveyed in August would rather watch cookery shows or look at food on social media than cook.

Why? Because they're too busy.

Not too busy to watch back-to-back episodes of Come Dine With Me or fall into an Instagram #foodporn hole, though. OnePoll found that in a week, people spend more than five hours consuming food virtually and just four hours cooking it. And if other studies are anything to go by, most of those minutes will involve the microwave purring over Gregg Wallace's voice.

According to the survey's results, over the course of a week, the average adult spends one hour and 37 minutes watching cooking programmes on TV, with the Great British Bake Off proving the most popular, followed by Masterchef and Come Dine With Me.

READ MORE: Millennials Can't Cook and Don't Care Who Knows It

Those surveyed also reported spending three and a half hours a week browsing food websites and social media. People used Facebook the most for looking at food-related content (44 minutes a week, on average), compared to other social media channels like Twitter and Pinterest. Cookery books were looked at on average for just 9 minutes a week.

So, yeah, MUNCHIES may be partly to blame for your lazy cooking habits. Just one more video before lunch, though?