This Sunday’s New York Times magazine was devoted to the topic of food. It featured an article on a 15-year old boy who is a gourmet chef, twin brothers who have competing microbrew companies, and the food in the restaurants run by celebrity chefs.
As always with style and lifestyle articles in the New York Times, these articles are aimed at the 1 percenters and the Brooklyn crowd. It missed the major stories about food in this country. Most Americans aren’t concerned with the half teaspoon of lemon juice over the bed of roasted beets and flower petals. They aren’t paying $200 for a meal in a restaurant run by Gordon Ramsey. I think we need a conversation about food the rest of us.
For most middle class Americans, the biggest food issue is that they don’t know how to cook and they don’t have time to cook.
In Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Kids aren’t learning from the parents, either, because parents aren’t cooking. Most people don’t know how to slice an onion or how to roast vegetables. I know people who have no idea what to do with a head of garlic or how to wash lettuce.
People aren’t cooking in part, because they don’t know how to do it. But is that a good excuse in the age of YouTube cooking shows and Epicurious? A five-second google search, “how to roast asparagus”, pulls up 10 million results.
The information is there. What’s not there? Time. People are extremely busy with work and parenting and food falls off the daily chore list.
The other food story that wasn’t included in the New York Times magazine is the horrific state of affairs of feeding the poor.
Apt. 11d 
I remain convinced that the “not knowing” part is more important than the time part, because if you have a decently stocked fridge and pantry (not very hard or very expensive- I could do it in grad school) you can cook tasty and good things pretty quickly. But, maybe even more importantly, people who are not used to eating good stuff don’t know they are eating bad stuff, so don’t mind, at least not lots of times. (I know this from personal experience.)
Cooking videos on youtube can be very good, or not so good, and it’s sometimes hard to know which ones will be good. But, you can never go wrong, I’ve found, with this series .
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Not knowing is definitely a major obstacle–let’s say you want to buy some Brussel sprouts because you know they are supposed to be incredibly good for you. How do you choose them? Are they seasonal? Is this a good price? Then you pull up recipes and try to sort through which one looks do-able to you and involves ingredients you recognize (not everyone knows what pancetta looks like or that you can sometimes use bacon instead). Then you spend time slicing and tossing and roasting and stirring, and your whole family rejects it. That’s wasted time, effort, money but also a big helping of frustration and shame. Doesn’t happen with steam-in-the-bag frozen corn.
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A few months ago when I was buying groceries and the cashier checking me out was a new to the job, late-teen/early 20’s, guy. I was buying some red potatoes and he picked one up and said, “Is this a potato?” and I said, “………..yes.” He responded that his new job was exposing him to all sorts of foods he had never seen before.
So there’s an anecdote in support of theory.
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“Is this a potato?”
That’s not a potato, this is a potato.
[Holds out a very large Russet]
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Let’s call the whole thing off.
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At our local grocery store, I’ve had the experience of explaining to two puzzled employee on separate occasions what a quiche is. I told the black kid that it was an egg pie and I told the middle aged Hispanic lady that it was a frittata with a crust. Not sure if that was helpful…
Some weeks ago, the store stopped stocking their ready-made quiche. So sad! They used to have ham and cheese and a spinach one.
In other quiche news, I was at a regional bee recently where an African-American 5th grader (I’m guessing on the grade by size) went out on the word “quiche.” I forget his entire take on it, but the first three letters he guessed were “kei-.”
Different worlds.
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Boy spellers have no idea how to spell froofy, female type things. I’d bet he’d also have no idea how to spell “mauve.”
“Gauntlets,” now, “gauntlets” a guy could spell.
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It’s been more than thirty years since “Read Men Don’t Eat Quiche.” Does it still have such a gendered existence?
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Real men know how to spell glaive-guisarme.
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“A five-second google search, “how to roast asparagus”, pulls up 10 million results.”
The inner toddler in a lot of us is thinking–why would you do that?
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This made me laugh because this was me a few (10) years ago. I didn’t have time to cook and I didn’t know how to cook. Then I found Rachel Ray. This was long before she had her own talk show. She showed me how to cook and how to do it quickly. Now I do have time and I have moved beyond Rachel Ray, but my husband still says she was the best thing to ever happen to our marriage.
My guess is that she wasn’t profiled in the New York Times Magazine.
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I live in a region where home- and locally grown food and wine is valued. Many people make their living growing fruit, vegetables or grapes. People can or freeze food in preparation for the winter. There’s a summer cooking camp for kids at the local middle school. Our community fall fair is overflowing with best carrot, best apple and best,”fruit/veggie” contests.
We are not one percent kind of people — but because the bounty of the land is key to the success of our community, the ability to create good dishes out of local produce is also valued. My 12-year can cook a meal (and knows the difference between a potato and a yam).
As an aside, our community is in the midst of a discussion about changing some reserved agricultural land to land available for development. The most vocal group against the change? Young 20-somethings who want the available arable land to stay available to farmers.
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I think the “not knowing” is huge. And, you tube videos help (the Rachel Ray example is a good one, you can learn, from the video, or the tv, or a book). But, you have to actually learn. I had home ec class, so I learned the basics of American food prep (i.e. boiling an egg, baking, . . . which are not a part of my cultural cuisine) and chopping vegetables is something I grew up knowing. One can look those things up, but if you’re looking them up every time, the looking up becomes a barrier.
Take the example of making biscuits, which is pretty easy. But, if you’re looking up the recipe every time, it becomes a big barrier (even though the recipe is 5-6 ingredients).
I wish there was a way to bring cooking classes back to school (and shop classes, which I regret not having had access too — I was the last transitional generation where people had to pick one, and the girls almost always picked home ec and the boys shop. I had actually signed up for shop and then decided I wasn’t willing to be the only girl in the class (interestingly, my parents had been advocating for the shop class).
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There’s a collection of essays by American food writers in which one essay starts “I grew up in a house without an onion.” It’s interesting how food knowledge has both broadened and shrunk. I think many people know about a much broader range of foods.
We eat a lot of Chinese food (though we are not Chinese), and our kiddos like to impress people with their fluency with chopsticks. The other day, at their school meal, chopsticks were an option. Many of the kids didn’t take up the option, but ours did, creating the cross cultural confusion that thrills me about America. My kiddo commented that it made chopsticks cooler than if only the Chinese children knew how to use them — chopsticks became cosmopolitan sophistication and hipster/urban cool, rather than ethnic.
On the other hand, the broadening has also meant that more people don’t have a few basics that are so familiar to them that they don’t need to think to cook them (i.e. implicit, instinctual knowledge).
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For the middle class I think there’s also a time & energy gap. Once you’ve done it for a year or two, you know you can make scrambled eggs with mushrooms and spinach on toast with a chickpea, olive and cherry tomato salad in 20 min, or how to plan slow-cooker or reheat-friendly meals around your family’s rhythm. I think my husband and I are lucky in that we kind of sorted that out pre-kids, thank you infertility. I certainly didn’t learn that growing up on Hamburger Helper, although at least that was cooking of a sort.
But before it becomes automatic, you are potentially both coming home at the end of the day after a day of juggling priorities job, a night of catching up on email ahead, with cranky kids, an activities schedule, homework and having to sort out what to do next with what you have around. Meantime people grab those stir-fry ready bags from the freezer or a fresh-to-go meal on the way home. And of course that means it’s not automatic for our kids.
That said, I don’t blame the NYT Magazine for aspirational stories. I agree more balance would be nice but it bothers me more on the news end than the magazine end.
Rachel Ray’s ghostwriter was in the NYT blog at least: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/dining/i-was-a-cookbook-ghostwriter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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We’ve seen amazing things happen when you pair local chefs with high-povery schools: http://www.utne.com/environment/kitchen-abcs-in-a-madison-middle-school.aspx#axzz2xeLerEiW
That article is from 2009, but the program is still going strong. Our school has a nearly 80% free/reduced lunch population, and all the kids are learning how to cook.
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Time is the biggest factor for me. I love to cook and am good at it. But I’m stretched in too many different directions most days, and food is the one area where I have an alternative option that isn’t “give up something you need and/or love to do, or make your daughter give up something she needs or loves to do.” Food has a takeout option that’s a good quick-fix.
Question: I’m curious how the other half lives. What’s your routine for getting food on the table in time to head out to whatever adult or kid activity is on deck in the evening? How far do you have to drive to get anywhere—-to the store or anywhere else?
I ask because tonight is a union meeting night for me (I’ve got 3-4 labor-oriented meetings a month, and since everybody else’s children are all grown, these are scheduled for early in the evening.) So I tell the kid (she’s 14) she can eat leftovers. I grab a sandwich since there isn’t time to drive home first. When she had music lessons during the week, I scheduled it for early enough we cooked and ate when we got home (now she has ’em Saturday morning). If either of us has an evening activity that starts at 6:30 or after, I can cook something and still get us there. If it starts before then, no–it’s a default takeout night. The drive home from work and the drive back out is the deciding factor. Right now, I’m working a 4:30 quitting time job. I’d be able to cook more often if I had a 3:30 quitting time job (but I’d have to get up earlier to work out in the mornings).
I live in the inner city, where there’s package liquors and fast food joints instead of grocery stores. Going to the store is a hassle during the week—a huge time suck that I save for the weekend because of the drive-time. I buy for the week, but fresh veggies don’t always last the week—veggies in Illinois get trucked in from far away, so they’re already a week or more old before they get to the store shelf. Even though I make a point to go to the rich-people store (fewer bad veggies), food storage is still a problem. The farmer’s market veggies last a long time, but are breathtakingly expensive (and only available May-October).
What are your problems/solutions?
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I have an eerily specific answer: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0ApBViJQT7tdMcHVCQXo2Z1EzS0U5Wm1oS09lOWwtVVE&usp=drive_web
The work plan line was the key when I was still doing that. We have more nights out now with martial arts so I make things like curry buns to eat on the go, or if we can stop home first we use the crock pot.
That old plan was grownups taking lunch too. I have to invest more in packing my older son’s lunch.
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I love that Shandra. Do you plan every week like that? Hmh, I wonder if Google Docs would help us plan. We tried a whiteboard, but it didn’t really work. Will try. .
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I used to bj but haven’t in a while. It did help cause my husband could see what to prep for the next day 🙂
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We eat a lot of take out and pizza. That’s our problem. Yesterday one kid came home, and put together a newspaper, did math homework; the other had a sports practice and a b-ball game. Kid 1 made sausage and pasta for herself, kid 2 was delivered a tuna sandwich at baseball, i had a sandwich, spouse had a stir fry. (Kid 1 would have eaten stir fry, but it was made after the baseball game ended, at 8:30 PM).
(We are also really picky, another problem).
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To answer La Lubu above: My kids are in their early teens and we have no free evenings. We cook in the weekends, at least 4 lunches, 3 dinners. Most weeks, we cook once more during the week (usually Wed,as that evening is freer). Weekday cooking is restricted to making rice (we like fresh rice with our Indian meals), or assembling the meal (pasta/noodles/sandwiches). We also make a large salad with veggies and beans (no leafy veggies, so it doesn’t go limp) and use that through the week. If making tortillas, we make a batch in the weekend, and keep the kneaded dough ready for mid-week – it takes only 5 minutes to make tortillas, if the dough is ready.
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Cooking on the weekends is a big time-saver for us as well: muffins the kids can eat for breakfast, a box of pasta, lunchbox stuff, batches of barbecue or roasting a chicken, cookies and/or granola, etc. Then we can add/shuffle around during the week to make meals. We have go-to pumpkin waffle and banana pancake recipes to do breakfast-for-dinner also, which is a time-saver of a busy weeknight.
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I’m not keen on the cook-and-eat within a half hour;I’m already rushing through a half-hour lunch break at work. I guess I’m just confused on why so many family-type activities aren’t scheduled to start at a time that allows for a decent meal at home. If I have to cram a meal in just a half-hour, I’m going to take the stress-free and cleanup-free option of takeout (no dishwasher).
What I try to do is make a big batch of stuff that will provide leftovers for the pressed-time days of the week (minimum three days, sometimes all five). Gumbo, etoufee, stir fry, curries, chili, soup, (pasta) sauce—stuff that just needs some fresh rice or pasta or is good to go on its own. But I inevitably run out before the end of the week. Or, I don’t have the time on the weekends to do a big meal with planned leftovers.
But still—-even heat-and-eat takes up time, and my biggest problem is having to beat the clock to be out the door by 5:30 to get somewhere by 6:00. There’s no getting around that. I can’t afford to live closer to my most frequent destinations, and there’s no getting around that either (unless I win the lottery, in which case “moving” is already a forsworn conclusion, and it’s going to be a helluva lot father than “across town”).
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Yeah sometimes your schedule just doesn’t allow for certain things. In that case it’s kind of a choice between whatever can be immediately ready at home (served from the crockpot, or cold choices like a pasta or bean salad + muffins) or just buy takeout. Takeout is not a moral failing.
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Takeout is not a moral failing.
Even Arby’s?
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Arby’s is a venial rather than mortal sin, but you don’t want to take your chances by doing it too much in the same month.
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Oh, I don’t think takeout is a moral failing! It’s just that there are relatively few healthy and tasty options for “food, fast” where I live. If I forget (or am too busy) to call a half-hour ahead (before quitting time), I’m screwed.
What would be best IMO is having some space between the end of the workday and the after-work fun stuff (or educational stuff, or social stuff, or whatever). Who does this jamming everything up immediately after work work for , exactly? Old folks who go to bed before 9:00PM? I don’t get it. Why can’t kung fu start at 7:00 instead of 6:00? Non capisco.
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By the way, there’s a version of what Shandra does in every issue of Woman’s Day (or perhaps Family Circle). Given the circulation figures for such magazines, I’m wondering about Laura’s assertion that “most people don’t know how to slice an onion.” Is there some kind of research on this? Even if folks don’t follow the “Month of Meals” found in women’s magazines, there must be some kind of demand for them or else the magazines would devote those pages to other things.
There’s also “once a month meals”: http://onceamonthmeals.com/
Which has a variety of regimes (paleo, whole foods, vegetarian), which I’m tempted to try but I don’t have a big freezer or a microwave.
To answer La Lubu’s question, my personal, if flawed, solution, is that my kids aren’t allowed activities during the week, only on weekends during the day and during- and after-school clubs. So there is always a family dinner with a parent.
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Christiana said:
“To answer La Lubu’s question, my personal, if flawed, solution, is that my kids aren’t allowed activities during the week, only on weekends during the day and during- and after-school clubs. So there is always a family dinner with a parent.”
Yeah. In our house, there needs to be a darned good reason for violating the dinner hour. I can accept temporary incursions, but not bolting down drive thru as a way of life year round. I think it’s particularly ridiculous to do that for sports. We put kids in sports in order to teach them to be healthy, and then we have drive thru every night in order to make practice and games? What????
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This is our solution, too. I have 3 kids and they’re only allowed to do activities that meet before school (at school), immediately after school (at school) or on weekends (though I try to keep weekend activities to a minimum, too). I don’t think I’d ever get a cooked meal on the table otherwise.
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Autistic Youngest geeks out over cookbooks, the Food Network and her culinary class (with her ASD peers). We pick out new recipes to try on a regular basis and keep old ones in the loop. I still don’t get to show off the cooking skills that I honed in my youth (preparing feasts for hundreds of medieval recreators at a go or whipping up a Sacher torte for a friend’s birthday), but it’s fun to share the practice. As you say, it’s not a given that families will know how to cook or have the time/energy to pass on home-cooking skills.
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My 11-year-old did a week-long cooking class (90 min X 5 days?) last summer and it was a huge inspiration. She’s been baking cornbread from the recipe she learned there ever since. On the last day, each group did a different food and they made a complete lunch. Oh–and most wonderfully, the teacher had everybody washing up and tidying up after cooking every day.
A couple days ago, she was in charge of baking a Mexican chocolate cheesecake from a kit at home. I ran the mixer (not wishing to have massive chocolate spatters all over the kitchen) and took it out of the oven, but she was running the show otherwise.
http://www.elmejornido.com/en/la-lechera/products/mexican-style-chocolate-cheesecake-kit
Both she and her 9-year-old brother want to do a cooking class this summer.
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