I didn't make it to the 2010 IACP Conference this year, although I really did want to go. For one thing, the International Association of Culinary Professionals was holding their annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, a city I've never visited. On the other hand, I wanted to attend because the shallow end of my personality loves a good culinary smackdown, and the annual IACP meeting is notoriously filthy with them.
As my colleagues and friends started to drift back to their homes and computers, I began hearing the tales: This food star seemed a little bit tipsy. That food star seemed a little bit angry. The editors in attendance -- who are invariably set upon like flypaper in a room full of moths (I know; I've been in that position) -- were cranky. Maybe there was just too much coffee involved. After all, we are talking about Portland.
But one of my friends said "you really should have seen the Michael Ruhlman/Karen Page fight" which, apparently, was good enough to be immediately dumped onto YouTube, mostly because Ruhlman, who has the best hair in the food business, told his co-panelist that being too busy to cook was simply b**s**t. And that caught my attention, as did Ruhlman's earlier comments on the panel:
"Food editors, food tv programmers...have gone way overboard [in that everything] has to be fast, that it's got to be quick, that it's got to use only three ingredients...and that's the wrong message to send...We've got to let people know that it's okay to spend an hour in the kitchen...It may be fundamental to our humanity that we take an hour and spend it with our family, cooking a meal..."
Extreme? Perhaps. But the fact of the matter is that that fateful day more than half a century ago, when rice became instant, macaroni showed up in a box along with an envelope containing a weird, powdery, unidentifiable orange industrial dreck, and fried chicken came frozen in a little foil tray and served with something that for years has been known as "that apple thing," our culture started to go downhill with a bullet. This is not rocket science.
By the time I come home every night, it's nearly 8:00 pm. This is not ideal, I am in no way proud of it, it exhausts me to the bone, but it is what it is. My weeknight meals have included tarragon-stuffed roast chicken (preheat oven to 425, salt and pepper the bird, slip garlic under the skin, fill cavity with tarragon; that takes maybe five minutes. Pop bird in oven, twenty minutes breast side up, twenty minutes breast side down, twenty minutes breast side up, remove from oven, let stand for five minutes, and then eat. What do I do while it's roasting? Laundry. Go through mail. Walk the dog. Call my mother. Pour myself a glass of wine.); mussels cooked in white wine, garlic, a little tomato, and a handful of herbs (10 minutes, start to finish); roasted tofu with soba noodles and vegetables (again, 10 minutes; the tofu roasts while the soba water boils and the vegetables cook). Am I and the way I live an anomaly? Possibly.
What is it, then, that keeps the average Us from getting into the kitchen and cooking with some degree of care and thoughtfulness whenever we choose to eat at home? What is it that causes us to want it faster, quicker, easier, and in three steps or less? Is it our ingrained cultural tendency towards competition, speed, and shortcut? Or is it just misplaced energy? After all, how many of us spend hours every evening watching television when at least one of them can be used for preparing a simple meal from scratch?
Michael Ruhlman's comment at IACP that cooking is fundamental to our humanity was neither hyperbole nor extremist. Because the minute that a culture stops cooking for itself and ceases the basic act of nurturing, it starves. And every time we choose the quick-n-simple, pre-fabricated, synthetic, just-add-water route, we're one step closer to hunger, regardless of how much food comes out of the oven.
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The nurturing I received from the kitchen has been so powerful in my life that years ago I left a successful career as a sales executive to open a restaurant and later teach cooking classes which I've done since 1995. After teaching thousands of people from grade school kids to corporate execs I can tell you from experience that even when teaching how to make a restaurant quality 5 course meal, they are all amazed at how easy it really is once someone shows you how...and how nourishing to the spirit being in the kitchen has been.
But once upon a time, handling a knife and chopping veggies wasn't all that special. People did it as a matter of course. Some people still do, but it's practically become a fad to be able to these days, which is a scary commentary.
I feel it when all these chefs and cooks say, 'People need to take more time!" but at the same time, someone needs to take an interest in making sure people understand how to use the knife efficiently and well if they're going to even start trying to cook for themselves again.
Hey -- I'll be that someone! Watch a Jacques Pepin video on his website. Then practice later when you prepare a meal.
Thank you! Why don't people cook? I think it's one part habit and one part connecting to and focusing on all the good reasons to cook and being motivated by them. Marcella Hazan said something along the lines of 'what could be better than eating food that was prepared with love by someone you can hug.' Not much more you can add to that. Food is nourishment on many levels, and when we forget that, we do, as you said, starve ourselves.
One really loved to cook and the other didn't like it at all. When my parents married, my mother was distressed trying to cook for my father because he hated pretty much everything. She finally realized what the problem was - his mother didn't like to cook, so most everything was boiled or had the bare minimum attention. Once she convinced my father to try her asparagus, her roast chicken, brussels sprouts, he ate it all and discovered, in his mid twenties, that he actually wasn't a picky eater, his mother was just a terrible cook.
My point is, if you are brought up in a family where the people cooking for you don't like to cook, there is a good chance you aren't going to like what they cook. You won't understand what all the fuss is about home cooking, because your point of reference is that home cooking is gross. I think there are probably millions of people out there whose food experiences growing up were like my dad's, hence the quicker, faster mantra.
I think it would be very intimidating for someone with no cooking experience to go to the store and figure out which knives, pots, pans, spices, pantry basics and so on, to buy (not to mention very expensive to get started).
You don't sit there in front of the oven watching the bird roast. You do laundry. You read your mail. You play with your dog.
I'm single but I don't cook for one. I cook. Then I make my own fast food. I take the left overs and I make TV dinners with them. Some go into the fridge for later in the week. Some into the freezer for longer term.
For meals requiring longer prep or cooking, those I do on the weekends. I can enjoy the fruits of my cooking all week. I also have a repertoire of faster home cooked meals.
I don't buy pre-processed foods any more. (I stopped when I cut out high fructose corn syrup. By necessity I pretty much have to make everything from scratch now.)
I've always made my own pies and cookies. I'm back to making cake from scratch. I've made Cornish pasties. I make bread.
I don't plan on chicken kiev on a weeknight because I have to finish dinner by 7 so I can be in bed by 10. But I can make salmon or a steak or pan fry a chicken breast.
Cooking isn't wasted time. Cooking should be planned and scheduled like any other important task. If you can schedule a meeting for work, you can schedule time to cook dinner. And while it's cooking, dust, vacuum or just spend some time watching TV.
My aunt sez 'If you can read you can cook'.
I'm learning.
It is impossible to believe that despite the plethora of timesavers we have created in last hundred years, we somehow do not have the time to cook. My dinner this evening, pasta with bacon and sorrel, will take me 20 minutes to make (and would take half that if I had the induction range I want, which boils my pasta water in about 30 seconds).
Today the average American watches 5 hours of TV a day. Even I watch my share, write full time, own a restaurant and have 2 kids and a house to care for. Sure I'm a pro cook, but I've met hundreds of home cooks who are better at home cooking than I am. Seriously. Hundreds. Those who don't cook simply don't know how. And some subset of them, I have to say, are just lazy and spoiled by drive-thru indifference.