Culinate serves up a roundup of reactions on the web to Michael Pollan’s latest New York Times Magazine piece, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, which meditates on the paradoxically simultaneous rise of the Food Network and decline of home cookery.
Although I can sympathize with some of the criticism (I agree that using food marketing specialist Harry Balzer as the sole prognosticator on the future of cooking in the US is pretty limited!), I found the article fascinating. I long ago recognized that neither I nor my family fit the profile of the “average” American, so I often feel alienated from descriptions of the norm. We home cook nearly every meal with fresh ingredients as the centerpiece, buy very little highly processed food with the exception of cereal and the occasional box of crackers or chips and salsa, and most of our bread is home baked by myself. We try to incorporate as many local foods as we can, and eat with the seasons in mind. This hardly fits the picture of the average home depicted in the article.
I wondered why and how we came to live this way, particularly since both my husband and I came from middle class families with two working parents, and whose mothers viewed the task of putting a nightly meal on the table with similar harried distaste. Their repertoires included many of the housewifely staples of the ’70s: meatloaf, sloppy Joes, and bologna sandwiches. This despite the fact that my mother’s parents ran a small town restaurant, and my husband’s mother came from an Italian family with at least one excellent cook. I know my mom must have perceived cooking as labor from an early age, since her mother was gone at the restaurant most hours of the day, and her grandmother made pies at home as well. As far as I could tell as a child, my grandmother seemed to love cooking; she certainly did a lot of it and was good at it, too. She reveled in making my favorite dishes every time we visited: chicken and dumplings and chocolate meringue pie, and yearly she churned out batches of strawberry preserves. My mom, however, perhaps reacting to her childhood experience, did not share the love (except for baking; she still makes the best brownies, a family recipe).
When I met my husband I had been really cooking – that is, to feed myself – about a year, from the time when I had moved into my first apartment. My husband, who had a year off before graduate school, probably had more experience in the kitchen at that point than me. Some of my memories of our first year as a couple include meals made at our respective apartments, like the Cuban style chicken with black beans and corn that I made for us to share one night. Over time – and we’ve now been together 17 years – we both developed our skills, expanded our repertoire, and have become complimentary partners in the kitchen. He cooks most of the meat and I cook most of the meatless dishes. He stir fries, while I make Asian noodle soups. Grilling is primarily his job. If there’s dough and baking involved, I’m usually in charge. He takes care of the main dishes and I’ll handle the sides. Some tasks, like soup making (with the aforementioned exception) fall to whomever feels like doing it at the time.
I like to think our home cooking stems partially from frugality, since we certainly can’t afford to eat out on any kind of regular basis. However, we spend more on food for our family of three than most people do, and as Michael Pollan and others have documented elsewhere, the fresh ingredients we use often cost more than the processed foods the “average” family bases meals around. And even if we are saving money by cooking dried beans, rice, and cheap vegetables like carrots, that’s offset by splurging on expensive ingredients like Kalamata olives, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and organic butter.
I’ve come to see our mutual appreciation of cooking and food as a pillar of our relationship; we share a similar goal (healthy and delicious meals), we can appreciate each other’s skills, we have a frequent opportunity to enjoy ourselves together, and there is always something new to try. And because of this, the act of cooking has become more than merely putting food on the table; it’s a way of sharing some of the most essential elements of life with my loved ones. Growing up feminist, I never thought I’d be spouting platitudes that sounded so close to the mid-century vision of the housewife that our moms were both emulating and trying to escape. But I would argue now that, rather than being the essence of woman-as-homemaker, cooking is, as Pollan writes, the essence of being human. What better reason to get off the couch?
Reactions to Pollan’s Latest Magazine Piece
Culinate serves up a roundup of reactions on the web to Michael Pollan’s latest New York Times Magazine piece, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, which meditates on the paradoxically simultaneous rise of the Food Network and decline of home cookery.
Although I can sympathize with some of the criticism (I agree that using food marketing specialist Harry Balzer as the sole prognosticator on the future of cooking in the US is pretty limited!), I found the article fascinating. I long ago recognized that neither I nor my family fit the profile of the “average” American, so I often feel alienated from descriptions of the norm. We home cook nearly every meal with fresh ingredients as the centerpiece, buy very little highly processed food with the exception of cereal and the occasional box of crackers or chips and salsa, and most of our bread is home baked by myself. We try to incorporate as many local foods as we can, and eat with the seasons in mind. This hardly fits the picture of the average home depicted in the article.
I wondered why and how we came to live this way, particularly since both my husband and I came from middle class families with two working parents, and whose mothers viewed the task of putting a nightly meal on the table with similar harried distaste. Their repertoires included many of the housewifely staples of the ’70s: meatloaf, sloppy Joes, and bologna sandwiches. This despite the fact that my mother’s parents ran a small town restaurant, and my husband’s mother came from an Italian family with at least one excellent cook. I know my mom must have perceived cooking as labor from an early age, since her mother was gone at the restaurant most hours of the day, and her grandmother made pies at home as well. As far as I could tell as a child, my grandmother seemed to love cooking; she certainly did a lot of it and was good at it, too. She reveled in making my favorite dishes every time we visited: chicken and dumplings and chocolate meringue pie, and yearly she churned out batches of strawberry preserves. My mom, however, perhaps reacting to her childhood experience, did not share the love (except for baking; she still makes the best brownies, a family recipe).
When I met my husband I had been really cooking – that is, to feed myself – about a year, from the time when I had moved into my first apartment. My husband, who had a year off before graduate school, probably had more experience in the kitchen at that point than me. Some of my memories of our first year as a couple include meals made at our respective apartments, like the Cuban style chicken with black beans and corn that I made for us to share one night. Over time – and we’ve now been together 17 years – we both developed our skills, expanded our repertoire, and have become complimentary partners in the kitchen. He cooks most of the meat and I cook most of the meatless dishes. He stir fries, while I make Asian noodle soups. Grilling is primarily his job. If there’s dough and baking involved, I’m usually in charge. He takes care of the main dishes and I’ll handle the sides. Some tasks, like soup making (with the aforementioned exception) fall to whomever feels like doing it at the time.
I like to think our home cooking stems partially from frugality, since we certainly can’t afford to eat out on any kind of regular basis. However, we spend more on food for our family of three than most people do, and as Michael Pollan and others have documented elsewhere, the fresh ingredients we use often cost more than the processed foods the “average” family bases meals around. And even if we are saving money by cooking dried beans, rice, and cheap vegetables like carrots, that’s offset by splurging on expensive ingredients like Kalamata olives, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and organic butter.
I’ve come to see our mutual appreciation of cooking and food as a pillar of our relationship; we share a similar goal (healthy and delicious meals), we can appreciate each other’s skills, we have a frequent opportunity to enjoy ourselves together, and there is always something new to try. And because of this, the act of cooking has become more than merely putting food on the table; it’s a way of sharing some of the most essential elements of life with my loved ones. Growing up feminist, I never thought I’d be spouting platitudes that sounded so close to the mid-century vision of the housewife that our moms were both emulating and trying to escape. But I would argue now that, rather than being the essence of woman-as-homemaker, cooking is, as Pollan writes, the essence of being human. What better reason to get off the couch?