The Style Section of the Times should seriously be renamed as The Awful People Section.
This Sunday they featured an article on a family who hired a consultant for their nanny to help her cook better meals for their son.
But her mother, Stephanie Johnson, 46, who lives in TriBeCa and runs a cosmetics-case and travel-accessories line, wanted her daughter to adopt a more refined and global palate, whether it’s a gluten-free kale salad or falafel made from organic chickpeas.
As working parents, she and her husband, Dan Yashiv, 42, a music producer, do not have time to prepare such fare. And their nanny, from Wisconsin, does not always know the difference between quinoa and couscous.
I love the parenthetical “from Wisconsin” in the last sentence. Those RUBES from Wisconsin don’t know the difference between quinoa and couscous! Quel dommage!
Matt Yglesias says that in the future, there will be more and more of these types of consultants that provide services for the uber-wealthy.
But like it or not, a huge share of the jobs of the future are going to involve taking care of old people and taking care of kids. The best caretaking jobs are the ones that involve working for the richest, fanciest, fussiest people. Time to get depressed.
I’m in full-commie mode this morning.
Apt. 11d 
I’m totally for more wealth equity so that people have less resources with which to make decisions like this. But, I hate it when other people decide what’s a luxury for someone else (and this applies to iPods for welfare recipients as well as nanny-food consultants for really rich people).
I read with fascination the cooking experiments you do with your family. Cooking is part of your life and, you enjoy it. You’re teaching your kids much better food habits than I am (we eat out a lot, a serious lot, we order in, and my repertoire of food I cook is tiny). I can imagine hiring a consultant like marc&mark if one existed in my neck of the woods (an, it might). $2500 is within a budget of my frivolities (and, presumably, it could cost less, if instead of high paid personal chefs, a mother who cooks good food for her family ran the business). Our school lunch program is now being run by a mother/caterer, who designed the program for her kids’ school.
I think the Yglesias comment that a lot of jobs are going to be care-taking, and that personal, freelance consultancies are going to be one of the jobs of the future. But, I don’t think those trades of expertise are necessarily going to have to involve hugely asymmetric relationships. An interior designer could hire a cooking consultant in the same way that a cooking consultant might hire an interior designer.
I think there’s a tendency to see a purchase as a luxury if one, personally, doesn’t desire it, or need it.
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Actually, I think what it points to is the degree to which eating well is becoming a luxury in America. it takes time, education, expertise, money. It’s interesting to see the article about the Nanny Consultant in Salon.com and two articles down is yet another one about cuts to food stamps. On the one hand, it’s easy to bash poor people for eating junk food (as people do in the comments to that article) — but at the same time not to acknowledge the amount of time, care and effort which goes into eating well in America, where finding food without high fructose corn syrup could eat up a good part of your day.
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Yeah, if your family is routinely spending $40+ to go out to dinner (which is a very easy tab to wind up with even for very casual dining with a family–when the five of us go out to Sunday lunch at Panera’s, that’s what it costs), making arrangements (even expensive arrangements) to improve home dining could actually be fairly cost-effective.
If we renamed this just “cooking lessons for nanny” or “nutrition classes for nanny” (instead of “nanny consultant”) it wouldn’t sound crazy at all.
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This family may just be putting a good face on the fact that their kid has been subsisting on fluffernutter sandwiches ever since the nanny arrived.
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I don’t think that eating well is “becoming” a luxury. Middle-class families of the 1950s ate frozen foods. Middle-class families of the 1930s often didn’t eat meat, just beans and potatoes. In the 19th century, you would have to be uber-rich to have fresh meat at all, except for a week or two in the fall. The whole rest of the year was salt pork, and hope that you didn’t “scrape the bottom” of the “pork barrel” in midwinter.
It would be more accurate to say, as some writer did recently, that middle class Americans used to assign strong moral values to various sexual activities, but treated food as a morally neutral convenience. Those two positions are now reversed.
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Whoops, Anonymous above is me.
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I do think it’s bizarro how food has become a class signal.
My kids eat well, because I spent a lot of time as a child at my grandfather’s house who came from the mountains of Italy and was also a professional maitre d’ at the Savoy Hotel in London, some fancy place in Argentina and later at the Waldorf Astoria in 1950’s. I was raised around people who took food very seriously. They were never rich. My grandmother was a saleslady at a department store in the Bronx. But I ate very well.
Most people don’t have nannies. They send their kids to daycare. Many daycare centers are not wonderful places. Ian went to borderline acceptable places, and Jonah went to an unlicensed Dominican woman who watched 12 kids in a one bedroom apartment. At the borderline acceptable places, lunch is microwaved fish sticks and chicken nuggets. A nanny is a luxury item. A nanny + a consultant is a super luxury item.
I made meatballs over the weekend and took pictures. I’ll post them later in the week.
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“Most people don’t have nannies. They send their kids to daycare.”
This may be largely a terminology issue. If one woman watches one or two or three kids, is she a nanny or a home daycare provider? It may depend a lot on geography and her employer’s class anxieties and other cultural factors, rather than the actual service provided.
Also, is it true that most people send their kids to daycare? Even for children of employed mothers, the numbers really are not that high for 0-4s.
http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/famsoc3.asp .
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I know this isn’t the point, but I’m just a few hours from Wisconsin and my lunch today is felafel I made from organic (though grocery-story brand) chick peas; organic kale, which I pick myself at my CSA, is a staple for me. In fact, I’ve found that people cook better in my rural town, because we have to. No Indian or Thai restaurant in a 70-mile radius, and you learn to make it yourself. It also helps that almost everyone has a maximum of a ten-minute commute.
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So people posting descriptions of their organic, real food, home-made felafel activate the same neurons in me that people hiring nanny-food-consultants raise in Laura. So do people who have spouses who can build bookshelves and rewire electrical switches for them (though, my spouse can legitimately state that he does make money that makes it possible for us to hire people to do those things, if we want to). Mostly I’m joking, but there’s a point in there somewhere.
Different families have different amounts of skill, time, inclination, and, yes, money and they should be free to allocate those resources as they please, until their choice bangs up against something we think is a necessity for everyone.
Nothing about that point of view means that I don’t think there should be higher taxes and that a more generous level of various supports should be provided as community resources. I’d certainly roll my eyes if someone argued that they should have lower taxes in NYC so that they can afford their nanny-food-consultant.
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The frying was kind of a pain – I hardly ever fry anything and am inept at it – so that part took maybe a half an hour. But with canned chickpeas, the rest of it was easy, and it was excellent. This is the recipe: http://theshiksa.com/2011/01/05/falafel/
I can build bookshelves and am trying to learn a bit about wiring. I wish I had a husband who I could resent for not being able to do these things! Though perhaps I would not have learned to do them myself if I did, and it’s fun. To each her own neurons and hackles…
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Oh it wouldn’t be fair to resent my spouse. He won’t let me watch norm abrams, though :-). I really should do that stuff myself. Will plan on putting up a mini bookshelf this week.
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“where finding food without high fructose corn syrup could eat up a good part of your day.”
Although I think eating real, good food is not easy in the lives of these times, I do not think that it is difficult to find food without high fructose corn syrup. The problem is finding the time and skill to cook it, and the time to eat it.
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Right. There’s lots of food without corn syrup in it, it’s just that assembly is required.
Some years ago, during one of our holiday cafeteria shutdowns, I remember looking in our fridge, which was packed full of raw chicken, raw ginger, lemongrass, and various other things and thinking–there’s no food here, just ingredients.
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Reactions to this story could have gone in so many ways. For one, I’ll advance the theory that the upper classes have traditionally hired nannies and such from (post-war) Europe or rural communities, so their family employees knew how to cook simple food. (Remember the relations between the cooks and mistresses of the households in Saki’s stories.) Now, processed food offerings are international. More families have two wage earning adults, so… the teenaged nanny or au pair doesn’t know how to cook.
It should not be normal that a young adult only knows how to make pizza and popcorn in the microwave.
There’s a problem with assuming young people of the future will opt for service jobs. Many won’t. They’ll move wherever there’s more opportunity. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jan/30/great-escape-european-migrants-fleeing-recession
It would be interesting to follow the nanny. I’m betting she doesn’t remain a nanny for long. Or, she may not stay with the original couple for long–after all, she can now distinguish quinoa from couscous. She’s already made it out of Wisconsin, which is no mean feat in a depression.
I don’t see anything awful here. Four adults are conspiring of their own free will to make a five year old eat her vegetables. Two are getting paid for their efforts. Looking at the Marc&Mark website, a fair number of the consulting chefs have small children. It’s probably easier for the chefs to combine chef consulting and short-term contract work with the demands of raising small children, than to work restaurant hours.
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“(Remember the relations between the cooks and mistresses of the households in Saki’s stories.)”
Yes! I think there’s a line from a Saki story that goes like this: She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as good cooks go, she went. Also, the poaching of a talented cook is a Wodehouse plot, if I’m remembering correctly. A talented cook could afford to be a bit of a prima donna, as she knew she could find a job anywhere.
It seems like that in the late 19th century/early 20th century, rich English people expected their cooks to be terrible, and it was a major achievement to acquire and keep a good cook.
From a Saki story:
“The cook was a great believer in the influence of environment, and nourished an obstinate conviction that if you brought rabbit and curry-powder together in one dish a rabbit curry would be the result.”
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My husband is from Wisconsin and he made Spam casserole for himself and our daughter the other week. He’s not a rube, knows the difference between quinoa and couscous, and has a penchant casseroles with what he calls “Lutheran binder” (that would be Cream of Mushroom soup). While some might look down on such preferences as emblematic of flyover state lack of culture, I prefer to celebrate the diversity it bring to our lives.
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Repressing a very bad Protestant BDMS joke here.
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As long as it doesn’t involve Lutheran binders full of women, I think you’re covered.
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Sort of related: Let’s see what’s happening in Canada.
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First the poon tang, then the poutine.
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I saw your husband’s spam casserole on Facebook. I particularly liked the rectangle spam slices artfully arranged on top. It was modern art.
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I’m from Wisconsin and I’ve never eaten Spam. I don’t remember it ever being food that was regularly consumed by Sconnies.
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Spam was invented in Minnesota, which is more or less the same kind of place. I do know, from direct report, the people in Wisconsin will serve a sausage in a drink if you ask them to.
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Go Brewers!
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There’s quinoa in the paper bag.
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You’re wrong, it’s couscous.
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Again, I’m not sure that food has “become” a class signal. Part of the issue might be that children are usually not very class-conscious. History shows that food has always been a class signal. For example, recall that Vance Packard’s “The Status Seekers” (1959) notes that in that era, only the upper crust ate dark bread: the middle class ate Pepperidge Farm and the lower class ate Wonder bread. In an earlier era, the choices would have rotated somewhat (cake, white bread and dark bread, respectively).
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“Again, I’m not sure that food has “become” a class signal.”
Yes. As I recall, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is horrified to see a child from a poorer family pour syrup over everything on his plate.
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As long as it doesn’t involve Lutheran binders full of women, I think you’re covered.
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Gah! That was supposed to be a reply to MH above. I’ll go try to add it to the mix in its proper place.
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Rich people are free to spend money on whatever they like. There is nothing morally wrong with a nanny consultant, if the nanny isn’t being micro-managed and is paid properly for the higher expectations of her job. However, rich people have to expect that others will laugh at at them for spending money on things that seem worthless or on services that seem to be commonplace knowledge. They also have to understand that the vast majority of people are living with less and less things and services, and that their luxuries highlight the disparities in this country.
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I suppose I come from a different place. I learned nearly everything I know of cooking from cookbooks. My mother “cooks” about six dishes. She is not interested in cooking at all. So I don’t place the knowledge of how to cook in the “commonplace” category, as I know from personal experience that it is possible to become an adult who doesn’t know how to cook.
Now that I’ve taught myself how to cook, I am amazed at all the precooked meals and “convenience” foods people will buy. To me, that’s a luxury, because they’re paying much more per item to save a little bit of time. On the other hand, it’s their choice, and I don’t laugh at them, because they place a higher value on “convenience”.
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I agree – it’s all about choices. We (as a family and me on my own) travel to NYC a few times a year to go to museums, galleries and theater. Some people probably think we are crazy but it’s a priority for us.
For some spending time in a big city taking part in cultural activities would be like pulling teeth. They’d probably laugh at us spending our time and money this way.
We choose not to spend much on vehicles (had one car for 10 years that we still have – a 2001 RAV4). And don’t spend a lot on clothes. And again, some who prefer to have a newer vehicle and/or a large wardrobe would find that strange.
Paid cleaning help or prepared foods for some are worth the expense because in exchange they get more time to do other things.
I can appreciate the envy – but own the envy rather than making fun of the choices.
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I don’t think it’s fair to call it envy — I’m pretty sure that Laura wouldn’t want to hire a consultant to teach her nanny how to cook (or her children, skipping the nanny intermediary).
I think what people are envious of is the power the wealthy have to make choices, and that, in turn, is also the privilege of wealth. And, as wealth becomes more unevenly distributed, that freedom to make choices exacerbates any other differences that exist. Though there are certainly as many poor boors as rich ones (and, since there are more poor, one might, statistically, expect more poor boors), there is a certain form of boorishness that arises from wealth, and the bubble in which it allows individuals to live and work. That is, “Rich people have less compassion, psychology research suggests.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/rich-people-compassion-mean-money_n_1416091.html
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It’s all relative in terms of finances, eh? Some of those with less will judge us about our spending and some of us will judge those with more than us. I’d like to imagine that I’m above the judgements but to be honest, I do it too.
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“I know from personal experience that it is possible to become an adult who doesn’t know how to cook. ”
Me too. I am an adult who doesn’t know how to cook (by which I do not mean that I can’t cook, because I am quite good at following recipes, and do know how to do all the steps). For me, commonplace knowledge is statistics, cooking I have to look up.
Maybe part of this discussion is the growing expectation among the class that can afford it, that our children will have had access and instruction in a much broader skill set than our own. A big part of that in our family has been access to sports instruction (skiing, skating, basketball, baseball, tennis) none of which neither my spouse nor I did. In a parallel example, I’m guessing that many parents with humanities backgrounds are expecting that their children will have a higher level of skill in math, science, and tech than they expected of themselves (or have) (and that the reverse is true for those of us from math/science backgrounds).
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I think that I mentioned this in another comment to an earlier post – I believe that no matter the level of wealth, some people are into status. If they can’t compete with dollars, then they can compete on who is the most eco or living the most sustainably.
It’s just different versions of pretention.
I know I’m speaking personally and not backing it up with some sort of stats but I’ve lived at the bottom end (growing up) and at the other end (not ridiculously wealthy but doing well) and I’ve encountered on occasion those who are scorekeeping at every income level.
If you’ve got the funds to hire out this task or that task, go crazy. I don’t believe that it says anything about that person’s character. If you like to cook, cook. If you don’t and have the luxury of prepared foods, fine.
But like you note, it is difficult to see that freedom of choice that a few enjoy.
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“pretension” – gah to the spelling mistakes….
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Not on topic (unless I really twist to try to make it), but there’s a great article on Sebastian Thrun and Udacity (i.e. MOOCs) http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb that you might find interesting.
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Yes, I know. Been a crazy day here. Will post on it later tonight.
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