So, about half a month ago, when I started writing this post, Yglesias argued that the way celebrity chefs should be helping people eat healthier food is by aiding the production of pre-packaged meals that are better for you. Why?
If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch.
The good news is that there’s no real reason to think that food you prepare yourself is for some reason intrinsically healthier than food someone else prepares for you.
Eh. I’m not convinced. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good story about what he learned when he first baked blueberry muffins. Baking treats yourself ensures you know what goes into them.
To that I’d add a couple of points. Portion size is much easier to control when you cook your own food, as is the addition of salt, spices, and fats. It also strikes me as unlikely that the best organic hippie-dippie free-range pre-packaged food imaginable will be free of stabilizers and preservatives. While I don’t want to return to 1959 (though I think the argument that we have less time is somewhat undercut by the idea that blogging and Netflix are these new things we do), I think there’s no way around the idea that home cooking is better for you, especially if you’re in an area where your take-out options are limited to unhealthy fast food.
It’s not a metaphysical certainty, but I know which way I’d bet, and it’s not on Auguste Gusteau’s Frozen Dinners becoming common (or, for that matter, affordable.)
I think the problem here is conceptual. (Shut up, Neddy.) Says Yglesias, “I like to cook. Sometimes. I think it’s fun. And I’m certainly glad I know a few recipes. I hope to learn more. And everyone should know a few, “ but there’s a difference between recipes and techniques, and its the latter that gets the cook through every day.
So let’s have some fun. Not to pick on Yglesias, because I don’t know him, and more to the point I can’t find the follow-up post where he describes cooking as a “hobby”, but the way he describes cooking reminds me of a number of my guy friends and boyfriends, especially during and right after college.
The typical guy in my cohort would have a few recipes at hand that fell into four categories.
The Impressive Dinner: Stuffed manicotti, chicken kiev, lasagna, osso buco, risotto with peas and proscuitto. This is special occasion food. It is time intensive. It probably has some ingredients one doesn’t normally keep on hand. The purpose is to impress girls and to get laid.
The Buddy Meal: Chili, burgers, marinated grilled meats, hot wings, homemade pizza, homemade General Tso’s chicken. This is less time intensive than the first category, but still requires some effort. The purpose is to feed your friends while hanging out and drinking beer.
The Dessert: Any dessert that takes effort and some skill. This is mostly to impress girls. A friend of mine made a cheesecake that he called “Lucky Cheesecake”, for obvious reasons. It was delicious with Riesling. (He didn’t.)
The Specialty: The purpose of this dish is to be “X’s famous Y”. It can be something as simple as a pico de gallo or a great breakfast burrito or crepes with berries and cream or chocolate chip pancakes or a spicy marinara sauce, but the point is for it to be a signature.
These categories may overlap somewhat, but in the words of Aristotle, whose don’t?
Now, when the young guys in my cohort would cook, they would be undertaking a project. They’d have to make a special trip to the grocery store, maybe more than one, to get all the things they needed. They’d be concerned with the timing. Since they were working from a recipe and didn’t cook all that often, until they mastered the dish it would be an event, and even then, they’d not have the skills to get it done efficiently.
Now, if this what home cooking required every night, of course no one would have time to do it. The mistake is thinking that cooking every day is about cooking from a recipe, or something elaborate. I don’t know what the chefs on these shows have planned, but I hope it’s basic techniques, because that’s what turns cooking from a three-hour adventure into something you do when you’re hungry and you need to eat.
Don’t get me wrong — I find Pollan’s food nostalgia as cloying as the next girl with a career — but there is something strange about the development of a certain food subculture where the ideal gourmand is one who can identify seventeen different kinds of humanely sourced peppercorn but who couldn’t make a hardboiled egg without consulting the Internet.
Home cooking won’t be a substitute for sensible public health policy, of course, given the impact of poverty on eating options and habits, something which Pollan continually seems to overlook. Learning to cook also means eating lots of mistakes while you figure it out. But day to day cooking’s not about whipping up five-star cuisine in a casual setting, and I think that realizing that might make people more inclined to try to cook for themselves.
72 comments
November 1, 2009 at 6:47 pm
andrew
Eh. I’m not convinced. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good story about what he learned when he first baked blueberry muffins. Baking treats yourself ensures you know what goes into them.
I think Yglesias’ point is simply that there’s no intrinsic reason that food you prepare will be healthier than food you don’t. I could prepare for myself a stick of butter wrapped in bacon and though that would ensure that I knew it consisted of a stick of butter wrapped in bacon, it still wouldn’t be healthier than a lot of prepared foods.
Of course you can more easily control the ingredients in food you prepare so that you don’t find yourself eating something really unhealthy because you didn’t check the ingredients list, but the difference is in how you control the ingredients, not in the fact that they are under your control.
November 1, 2009 at 7:00 pm
andrew
That said, you’re entirely right about the mistake of thinking of cooking as an event, rather than a routine.
November 1, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Brad DeLong
Re: “Portion size is much easier to control when you cook your own food…”
Are you from the same planet I am from?
November 1, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Josh
there’s a difference between recipes and techniques, and its the latter that gets the cook through every day.
This, a thousand times. I’m tremendously frustrated by the way cooking is presented in the media; it’s all about recipes, never about techniques, and that obscures rather than clarifies. There just aren’t that many different cooking techniques you need to know, and once you’ve figured them out the most challenging part of cooking goes away. (Well, okay, once you’ve mastered them *and* had the importance of mise en place drilled into you. Seriously, people, do your damn prep work ahead of time and you’ll be amazed at how much less stressful cooking is.)
November 1, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Western Dave
In grad school, my housemates and I all had a running joke about the cookbooks we would write. There was the guy from Hong Kong who thought he was a gourmet chef. His was called “how to trash a kitchen,” because he always used every implement in the kitchen and often never ate before 11pm. Another housemate, female, was “How to cook for dates.” She only had three meals she could make. Mine was “Cooking with cans” because I was the one who could walk into the house at 6:30 and have dinner on the table by 7 without having to go to the store. Guess which one of us actually picked up extra bucks as a paid cook?
My favorite cookbook is Desperation Dinners which is the cookbook I would have written but somebody else got there first. And that’s not burned, dinner disaster, it’s cajun style.
November 1, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Witt
I like the distinction between recipes and techniques; I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
I do think that Yglesias fails to acknowledge that even very good foods — Amy’s Organics, for example — are typically still pretty high in things like sodium. (Yes, I know they make low-sodium versions.) It’s just very hard to make food that you can ship long distances and/or leave on the shelf for a long time, *without* using common preservatives that are generally pretty unhealthy.
The social pressures are immense, it’s true, and I’m not in favor of making people feel guilty for not cooking. But I do think it’s wrongheaded to imply that prepared-ahead foods are typically equally healthy as prepared-on-the-spot (in a restaurant or at home).
November 1, 2009 at 8:22 pm
JPool
There’s an essay at the end of Angela Davis’s Women Race and Class in which she argues that the post-revolutionary solution to the sexual inequality of housework is to industrialize the whole thing: have teams of efficient technologically equipped house cleaners roaming the land, moving efficiently from house to house doing the socially valued work of keeping them clean, thus removing gendered labor from the picture and freeing the rest of us up to engage in other productive pursuits (this is how I’m remembering the essay anyway; I read it a long time ago). This, minus the revolutionary utopianism, is more or less how I’m seeing Yglesias’s proposal. There’s something almost charmingly high-modernist about it. “If only smart people and technology could remove this thing that I don’t particularly enjoy or feel competent at, I wouldn’t have to feel guilty or inadequate about it.”
I love cooking and get a great deal of pleasure and satifaction from it (tonight’s dinner: rotini with onion, garlic, a couple mushrooms and some of the last kale form the garden, braised, with parmesean grated over the top; total cooking time including prep other than placing the pot of water on to boil: ten minutes). I know that some folks just don’t enjoy cooking, that they would rather live in future world where all our food comes in pill form. For them, learning how to cook would at best be a convenience. More commonly, I know people who are intimidated by cooking, who feel incapable of doing it well, or who can, as you say, only muster the energy for occasion cooking. They’re the ones that I wish could take under my wing, teach them how to use a knife, to think in terms of preparations rather than recipes. There are objective advantages to cooking for yourself: the awareness of ingredients that Coates mentions, the ability to use ingredients that are fresh and seasonal, the fact that it’s almost always cheaper to cook from whole foods (the econmies of scale in the food industry not withstanding). What I really think about are the more subjective advantages: the sensual pleasures of preparing something fresh and satisfying, the feeling of connection to (disalienation from) what you eat, the ineffable satisfaction of caring for yourself or others through the preparation of good and tasty food.
November 1, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Witt
the sensual pleasures of preparing something fresh and satisfying, the feeling of connection to (disalienation from) what you eat, the ineffable satisfaction of caring for yourself or others through the preparation of good and tasty food.
There’s your answer: Just get some good research documenting those claims and voila! Evidence-Based Medicine, decrease in mental illness and rise in general well-being.
November 1, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Po-Mo Polymath
JPool’s first paragraph has Yglesias’s best point nailed, or at least the one that I heard and completely agree with.
I find cooking somewhat of a pain in the butt, and would rather never have to deal with it. In fact, I really don’t. However, I would also like for my eat-out options to extend through the variety of healthier meals that still taste delicious, such as one might make for one’s self.
There’s no reason that we couldn’t have a healthy Mediterranean fast food place with take-out chicken schawarma or grilled lamb that would stay open to serve dinners (rice, salad, hummus, etc. round out the order). We have loads of them in the Loop for lunch, but none around for dinner. Or how about take-out stir-fry stands that use minimal oil and serve their dish over white rice? Pho to go? Grilled goat or barbacoa tacos with just a bit of pico de gallo and not too much salt served on fresh tortillas?
All of these things tend to be fairly healthy in their street food incarnation elsewhere, they just haven’t caught on in most of the US as options cheap enough for most people’s dinner choices. If there were more street stands serving healthier food (no tables, minimal overhead!), it would be possible for people to eat fairly healthy without having to cook for themselves.
It may sound hideous to some, especially those who’ve fully embraced cooking as a hobby and skill, but I would absolutely love it.
November 1, 2009 at 9:01 pm
bitchphd
Yes–part of the difference between family cooking–that is, inexpensive daily meals–and foodie cooking is the existence of things like cans and casseroles. And, to be honest, things that I think of as convenience foods like frozen veggies and pre-grated cheese (which is more expensive but god so much easier/faster for quesadillas or whatever). And part of my own struggle to cook more and eat out/order in less isn’t that I don’t know how to cook–I do–it’s getting over the idea that things like casserole made with canned chicken meat is somehow Just Wrong.
November 1, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Martha Bridegam
Trader Joe’s is way ahead of y’all.
November 2, 2009 at 5:04 am
Neil the Ethical Werewolf
Singapore is pretty close to the PoMo Polymath foodtopia, though everything shuts down at 11 PM or so. I’ve lived here more than a year, and I haven’t even gotten the gas turned on so I can use the stove in my apartment. Very cheap good food and cheap very good food are abundant.
November 2, 2009 at 5:28 am
dana
I think Yglesias’ point is simply that there’s no intrinsic reason that food you prepare will be healthier than food you don’t.
Sure, and I think that’s fair. I just know which way I’d bet. I doubt you’re going to go home tonight and decide you want a pound of bacon fried in butter… but you might stop at McDonald’s.
It’s just very hard to make food that you can ship long distances and/or leave on the shelf for a long time, *without* using common preservatives that are generally pretty unhealthy.
Exactly.
It may sound hideous to some, especially those who’ve fully embraced cooking as a hobby and skill, but I would absolutely love it.
Me too! I don’t want to cook all the time. But there’s two problems that I can see. First, I’m not sure that we can get pho in every rural small town absent people already appreciating it. Second, most of the people I know who cook all the time, in the non-gourmand sense, have small children. It’s expensive to eat high quality pre-packaged food, let alone takeout. To the extent that we’re concerned with nutrition, as Yglesias was, I think the level of basic cooking knowledge is going to have to come up.
casserole made with canned chicken meat is somehow Just Wrong.
I was with you until the casseroles. (Fuck mushroom soup.) Seriously, though, you’re right that there’s this whole middle ground between gourmand-approved eating and fast-food. It might mean using one of TJ’s sauces or pre-washed baby greens or canned tomatoes.
Well, okay, once you’ve mastered them *and* had the importance of mise en place drilled into you.
I think the importance of mis en place is different for the home cook, because part of getting things done efficiently in the kitchen is knowing what you can start ahead of time. E.g., if I’m roasting some potatoes, they’re going in the oven before I’m prepping the rest of the vegetables and meats, because potatoes take a while to cook.
November 2, 2009 at 7:35 am
Jeremy
“Singapore is pretty close to the PoMo Polymath foodtopia, though everything shuts down at 11 PM or so. I’ve lived here more than a year, and I haven’t even gotten the gas turned on so I can use the stove in my apartment. Very cheap good food and cheap very good food are abundant.”
I’ll second that, though I blow a lot of beer there, which makes up the difference.
I typically one-pot my dinners, lots of stir-fry, or grill some fish with steamed vegetables, and my rice cooker is my most-used possession, after pc and bike. It’s not the most exciting thing, but it gets me by day-to-day, and I’m single so cooking only for one, which has its ups and downs. Easier to cook to my tastes, but can’t split the work.
But I do have the special dinners, and recognize the extra time it takes to make them could be cut down if I cooked more often. Some friends of mine make what I’d consider special meals every day and make it seem like nothing. They make a hobby of it, though, so it takes up what I spend video gaming or clubbing.
November 2, 2009 at 8:15 am
Josh
Having survived a tough culinary school experience, I have to chip in that it’s all about technique. Do you know how many recipes school taught me? Big fat whopping ZERO. School was about technique, methods, and planning.
Without consulting a recipe, how many people now days could turn two chicken legs, some veggies, and potatoes into a quick evening meal? My grandmother would. So would my mom. Not so much my brother. The first two have a library of techniques to pull from – boil the potatoes, pan fry the chicken, steam or saute the veggies. Dinner done in 30ish minutes, half of which is spent waiting.
Cooking dinner every night doesn’t take much either. Make a menu at the beginning of the week, go shopping for what you need. Then stick to the menu. Don’t be overly ambitious (you aren’t cooking for Zagat or Michelin), and think smart – don’t plan an hour long meatloaf for the night you habitually get home two hours late – and utilize leftovers. Turn yesterday’s mashed potatoes into tonight’s croquettes.
Home cooking IS healthier and cheaper. We cook at home almost every night. We eat mostly vegetarian with meat dishes two, maybe three times a week. Has Yglesias read the ingredients list and nutritional info of mass produced food? Has he priced organic mass produced food? Every ingredient in our kitchen would be recognizable to my grandmother (except maybe the curry paste and soy sauce). We’re also feeding ourselves almost as well as a dinner out for around $3/person per night.
November 2, 2009 at 8:18 am
bitchphd
One does not need (and indeed, one does not use) canned soup, mushroom or otherwise, to make a casserole.
One boils pasta, chops veggies and/or microwaves frozen veg and/or drops ‘em in the pasta water for a few seconds before draining. Then one stirs together pasta, veg, some form of protein (TJ’s canned chicken is quite convenient for this purpose), p’raps a sauce of some sort or maybe cheese, whatever seasonings seem interesting, and voila.
Then one’s kid complains that it looks kind of gross and one says “yeah, eat it anyway.”
November 2, 2009 at 8:20 am
bitchphd
Turn yesterday’s mashed potatoes into tonight’s croquettes.
See, this is where the food people lose their audience. “Croquettes”? Come on.
(Also, let’s not forget that the real problem with cooking isn’t the cooking–it’s the goddamn washing up afterwards.)
November 2, 2009 at 8:39 am
kid bitzer
so i used to read this great history blog, and it was great, but then nobody started talking about history, so i found other places where they discuss history.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011831.html
November 2, 2009 at 8:48 am
Po-Mo Polymath
Singapore is pretty close to the PoMo Polymath foodtopia
Yep. Vietnam definitely was, as well. I think it’s pretty common in southeast Asia, especially due to lower wages leading to smaller prep costs, and a willingness to buy dinner or breakfast off a stand set up in the sidewalk or beside a wall.
dana, I think that’s the real missing link for most major American cities to have a range of healthy and affordable take-out options. The right kind of food is mostly there, they just need to produce it at tiny stands at volume in order to cut costs to an affordable range. Perhaps we could even use our own containers (I suppose we could go slightly fancier than providing our own bowls), which would reduce container waste and further reduce the costs of carry-out!
November 2, 2009 at 9:03 am
Chris
What I really think about are the more subjective advantages: the sensual pleasures of preparing something fresh and satisfying, the feeling of connection to (disalienation from) what you eat, the ineffable satisfaction of caring for yourself or others through the preparation of good and tasty food.
But people who feel those things are probably already cooking, if they own land on which to plant kale and have the free time to take care of it.
The kind of non-cooks Matt is talking about (IMO) are people who probably mostly rent and therefore can’t garden, or don’t have time to take care of a garden in addition to the time spent on cooking; they may or may not be able to get to a grocery store stocking fresh ingredients (let alone a farmer’s market) on a several-times-a-week basis; and their kitchen is probably smaller and definitely less well equipped than yours, a deficiency they may not be able to afford to fix. And they probably don’t share your feelings about the intangible benefits of cooking or they’d be doing it already.
Little wonder, then, that they leave both the time and the capital investment of food preparation to professionals.
ISTM that Matt is mainly concerned with the question of, given that some people are going to outsource their food preparation, how can society arrange itself so that they are less screwed over by the taste-at-the-expense-of-health decisions professional food preparers are prone to make?
As long as the consumer-eater pays more attention to taste than to nutrition, so will the professional food-preparer (or go out of business). Greater nutrition awareness would reshape the market for food and the successful businesses in that market would follow along, but ISTM that this problem is essentially orthogonal to whether food is prepared inside or outside the home.
P.S. Usually the answer is “both”, anyway; I’ll bet that JPool’s rotini didn’t enter his house as a bag of wheat. Trade in preprocessed food is as old as the centralization and professionalization of milling and butchery, to say nothing of baking, brewing and cheesemaking. I just don’t see that much of a clear line between pre-pressed olive oil and pre-peeled (let alone pre-chopped) garlic and a premade mix of rice, beans and spices that you add water and boil for 20 minutes.
November 2, 2009 at 9:28 am
dana
While I think it’s good to keep in mind that one cannot begin discussing problems of nutrition and food with “first, assume a stand mixer and a fully equipped kitchen”, one should also be wary of going too far in the other direction. People do manage to cook in tiny kitchens and in apartments; in many, many cases, knowledge is the limiting factor.
a premade mix of rice, beans and spices that you add water and boil for 20 minutes.
Check the sodium content. I don’t think anyone’s arguing that we have to make our own cheese and pasta (at least I’m not — my interest in cheese lies in the eating), just that I don’t think the question of preparation is orthogonal to the question of nutrition largely because pre-packaged food has to be kept shelf-stable somehow. The more packaging, the more of a question that is, and the closer to a meal the thing is, the more packaging is going to be required.
Plus, there’s the question of scale. If I buy a $2.50 packet of seasoned rice and beans and eat it for dinner, that’s not very expensive, and if I’m shopping for one, it would cost me more initially to make that dish myself. But, if I’m feeding a family of four, or if I have that dish more than once, it becomes much more cost effective per serving to make it myself.
November 2, 2009 at 10:45 am
JPool
Chris,
I rent. The garden is at my mom’s house, which my wife and I spend a few afternoons each summer helping her to maintain in return for a share of the herbs and vegetables that we plant. We also put a couple of things in pots outside of our apartment. Kale itself requires almost no tending and has the advantage of being hardy past the first couple of frosts. There are few kitchens smaller than mine, but it is reasonably well appointed (thanks, wedding gift registry!). It doesn’t take me any longer to get through the farmers market during the non-winter time than it does to get through the grocery store. These choices are an investment of time that we choose to make in return the benefits that we see from it. Other people can make other choices based what they enjoy, but, in most cases, it’s not because they couldn’t do what I do, it’s because they feel unprepared to.
ISTM that Yglesias is not talking about the working poor. He’s talking about the middle class: those with more money but less time, who would rather spend their leisure time on various internet pursuits than on home cooking. I actually don’t have a problem with this. I think it’s conceptually possible for prepared meals to be about as healthy as something you prepare yourself (though generally speaking it doesn’t work out that way), but it’s never going to be as satisfying. Freezing and then thawing food, and all the other things you do to make it shelf stable, does stuff to it that you can’t get back. Which, if that’s the bargain Yglesias and others want to make, is fine, but let’s not pretend that it’s something we’re forced to do or that Smart People could magically make it better.
I’m not Pollan, and I’m not a purist about whole foods versus prepared foods thing. The line between theoretically pressing my own olive oil and chopping my own garlic is that one is very easy for me to do and the other is nearly impossible. If you don’t mind the taste of pre-chopped garlic, then rock on with your bad self. My point is not that everyone should cook like me or share my tastes or whatever. There are, however, benfits to cooking for yourself, it gets easier with time and practice, and it’s more rewarding if you have some help figuring out what to do with different ingredients.
If you love something like cooking it’s hard not to be a bit evangelical about it. Yes, if someone felt exactly like me, then they probably are already exactly like me. What I was trying to say in that first comment is that, while I recognize that there are some people who will never enjoy cooking, there are plenty of others who would if they had a supportive environment for learning how.
November 2, 2009 at 10:46 am
chris y
Turn yesterday’s mashed potatoes into tonight’s
croquettes.bubble and squeak.I learn from this thread that lasagne is a subset of Casserole a la Bitch.
November 2, 2009 at 11:19 am
Josh
(Also, let’s not forget that the real problem with cooking isn’t the cooking–it’s the goddamn washing up afterwards.)
Clean as you go. You’d be surprised at how much of a difference it makes. It won’t help with the actual dishes you eat from, but unless you’re cooking for 20 even washing those up won’t take very long.
(BTW, I haven’t gone to culinary school, and while I welcome the perspective of those who have I’d really appreciate it if they’d choose some other name to comment under. I was here first, dammit.)
November 2, 2009 at 11:29 am
Josh
I think the importance of mis en place is different for the home cook, because part of getting things done efficiently in the kitchen is knowing what you can start ahead of time. E.g., if I’m roasting some potatoes, they’re going in the oven before I’m prepping the rest of the vegetables and meats, because potatoes take a while to cook.
Oh sure. But the basic idea of mise en place is still tremendously valuable for home cooks: do the appropriate prep work ahead of time, and you won’t be stressed when it comes time to actually *cook*.
November 2, 2009 at 12:40 pm
bitchphd
People do manage to cook in tiny kitchens and in apartments
I learned to cook in a dorm room with a hot pot, so there you go.
Clean as you go. You’d be surprised at how much of a difference it makes.
I do, actually. Problem is that my husband doesn’t, and he also often leaves the dinner dishes for tomorrow, which means they pile up. I could, of course, just do all the shopping and cooking and dishes myself, and probably should since he does all the money-earning, but it chaps my hide.
November 2, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Witt
I just don’t see that much of a clear line between pre-pressed olive oil and pre-peeled (let alone pre-chopped) garlic
Aside from what others said above, and somewhat tangentially, I haven’t been able to look at pre-peeled garlic the same way since I met some of the teenagers who spend their weekends peeling it. (Of course, I was too cheap to buy it anyway, so it’s easy for me to avoid it; probably there are a dozen other items in my kitchen that are equally objectionable. But they’re not so LOCAL.)
November 2, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Matt
(Also, let’s not forget that the real problem with cooking isn’t the cooking–it’s the goddamn washing up afterwards.)
Isn’t that what a husband is for? (It is at my place.) Or kids. Kids or whoever didn’t cook (husband, wife, roommate, etc.) can and should be expected to clean up, or at least help in it. It’s not hard and is good training or a minimally decent contribution. (Sometimes I cook dinner, and I usually cook breakfast, but my wife is the better cook- it’s the techniques!- so she cooks dinner more often while I clean.)
Also, for people who have kids, cooking, if done right, will often be faster than going out, if you figure in getting people to the car, driving, waiting, eating, driving back, etc. Eating out can be easier, but it’s often enough not faster.
November 2, 2009 at 2:11 pm
andrew
I have doubts about the nutritional value of my store bought mac & cheese + canned tuna. It’s probably healthier than McDonalds – but suppose I bought a salad and stayed away from the unhealthy dressings – but the main reason the food I make at home isn’t worse for me is that I’m too lazy to home cook unhealthy food.
November 2, 2009 at 3:29 pm
josh
Re: Croquettes
BitchPHD,
This is the first Josh, of the culinary school experience.
I wasn’t aware croquettes were Foodie food. I learned about croquettes from the my first girlfriend’s dad, a construction worker. This was circa 1993. It’s mashed potatoes, some onions, a touch of flour, maybe some ham if you have it on hand (a traditional Southern home like his ALWAYS had ham). Mix all that in a bowl, and pat portions out into patties. Heat some butter in a skillet, fry ‘em till golden brown. I’ve also seen the same basic recipe on the side of $0.75/can canned salmon, subbing canned salmon for mashed potatoes.
November 2, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Josh
This is the first Josh
November 1 comes before November 2.
November 2, 2009 at 4:56 pm
bitchphd
Josh, “croquettes” are what fancy people call “potato pancakes.”
November 2, 2009 at 6:17 pm
dana
This is the first Josh, of the culinary school experience.
This technically makes you the second Josh. ChefJosh. CroquetteJosh. Pick a nickname, please!
The other Josh is an established Josh, and we already have about sixteen goddamn bens and so I would like to keep the other names straight if at all possible.
November 2, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Josh
Josh, apologies, must’ve skipped over your comment this morning while waking up. Then later today saw your newer comments and misunderstood my place.
Bitchphd, must be a regional thing. In the American South, croquette is most anything patty-like that’s fried – crab, potato, canned salmon. It’s often associated with quick and easy. But then, I’m a white Southerner, so I guess all my acquaintances are fancy, landed white gentry.
November 2, 2009 at 6:39 pm
masfarmer
Looking at all the beautiful commentary above, I think what differentiates the competent daily cook from the droves of struggling food-makers is a willingness to stop and think. I find that having a beer before delving in can help a lot, and really it’s amazingly meditative to stand in front of your cutting board and just say “okay, what am I doing here?”
November 2, 2009 at 7:25 pm
bitchphd
Today’s dinner: boiled little potatoes, peeled and quartered; half a bag of frozen “grilled” peppers, nuked; four thick slices of sandwich/deli ham, sliced into strips; some olive oil, pepper, rosemary, salt, dill, I dunno, maybe a couple other things. It’s actually not terrible.
November 2, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Matt
I find that having a beer before delving in can help a lot
I find that this is true of most things in life, and is perhaps even more true with hard liquor or, in some cases, a nice glass of wine.
November 3, 2009 at 12:30 pm
ben
There’s me, ben, and there’s Ben Alpers. All the others are dross.
November 3, 2009 at 12:31 pm
ben
“There’s me, ben, and there’s Ben Alpers” was meant to be a list with two members, with “ben” standing in apposition to “me”. I apologize for the unclarity.
November 3, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Carl
Ack! Eek! The sodium. You must look at the Sodium! Won’t someone PLEASE think of the SODIUUUUUM!
As much as I’ve enjoyed this post and agreed with/salivated at most of the discussion, since I like being scolded with tastes and preferences masquerading as ethics just about as much as the next guy, I’ll reciprocate by pointing at the missing class/status dimension of the analysis. There is no elite in history I am aware of that has prepared its own food. In fact, the daily preparation of food for dominant groups is pretty universally the work of servants, or failing that women. As Douglas and Isherwood argue in A World of Goods, the kind of repetitive service work usually described as ‘chores’ is pretty much the definition of low status. This explains men’s orientation toward ’special occasion/project’ cooking, cooking in public (barbecue, see Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue?), paying for restaurant food, and going limp when daily cooking is the agenda.
In the United States, where our accommodation to the class structure involves stripmining the world’s wealth to redistribute for the symbolic ennoblement of our working class, we offer a whole range of incredibly cheap and nasty ways for the proles to feel classy, among which abominable other-prepared foods (and other-made clothing, etc.). For these people stepping back into the choreness of daily food-prep cannot help but be a class comedown.
We of the intelligentsia, the ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class’ as Bourdieu called us, are of course a liminal case. We’re in the elite symbolically but not materially, and therefore make virtue of all sorts of necessity, which is pretty transparently what’s going on with the rhapsodies about the joys and benefits of cooking.
November 3, 2009 at 1:39 pm
dana
I apologize for the unclarity.
This amuses me because I think you are two bens, depending on your computer.
November 3, 2009 at 1:51 pm
JPool
I was expecting one of those bens to show up and point out that potato pancakes are generally understood to be made with shredded potatoes or that casseroles are, by definition, baked, but I gues that ben is gone.
November 3, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Carl
On no other authority than my upbringing by a New Englander I second ‘potato pancakes’ as the product of leftover mashed, and insist that shredded potatoes nominally constitute ‘hash browns’. (Whereas ‘hash’ is made with home fries.) But this begs the urgent question of whether latkes and boxtys are properly potato pancakes or croquettes.
November 3, 2009 at 2:41 pm
serial catowner
Ironically, excavations at Pompeii indicate that a substantial number of the residents purchased their dinners pre-cooked from small cooking shops.
Nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
November 3, 2009 at 2:47 pm
kyllaros
Hmm… I object to the idea that potato pancakes can be made from mashed potatoes. Potato pancakes, in the German or Jewish meaning, are made from grated potatoes, onions, egg and flour. They are delicious and a completely different food from potato croquettes (which may be made from leftover mashed potatoes). That’s my unnecessary distinction of the day.
“I just don’t see that much of a clear line between pre-pressed olive oil and pre-peeled (let alone pre-chopped) garlic and a premade mix of rice, beans and spices that you add water and boil for 20 minutes.”
There are obviously different levels of homemade. I have nothing against pre-prepared meals, partially prepared ingredients (like pre-chopped garlic), or ingredients which required a certain amount of work to create them (like olive oil). That being said, garlic which you peel and chop yourself tastes better (sitting in the water changes the taste), so you’ve got to balance time and taste. Same goes for the pre-prepared meals – if one were inclined and had the time, one could usually make a better tasting, healthier version of the pre-prepared meal.
As for customarily premade ingredients, I’m all for trying one’s hand at making them as some point, at least to appreciate the work that went into it. I’m currently growing two coffee trees in the hope of someday brewing a cup of coffee from it, and I’m also fermenting some olives. Unless the olives are significantly better than store bought, I’ll probably not do it again, but it’s been fun to try.
I don’t really think that small kitchens or lack of fancy gadgets is really a huge problem – I live in a small Chicago apartment and have no stand mixer. It’s just that most people have no particular desire to work with food at that level (which is completely fine).
November 3, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Vance
How can a pancake made from potatoes not be a potato pancake? Obviously there are traditions, but I don’t see why any one of them (especially a German or Jewish one) has a lock on that sequence of two English words.
Speaking of the raw and the cooked, RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss.
November 3, 2009 at 4:37 pm
dana
Ironically, excavations at Pompeii indicate that a substantial number of the residents purchased their dinners pre-cooked from small cooking shops.
And look what it got them!
November 3, 2009 at 4:42 pm
ben
On no other authority than my upbringing by a New Englander I second ‘potato pancakes’ as the product of leftover mashed, and insist that shredded potatoes nominally constitute ‘hash browns’. (Whereas ‘hash’ is made with home fries.) But this begs the urgent question of whether latkes and boxtys are properly potato pancakes or croquettes.
Let’s overlook your improper use of “begs the question” and get down to the real issues: latkes are potato pancakes; potato pancakes are not made with leftover mashed potatoes; shredded potatoes can be made into hash browns or potato pancakes.
November 3, 2009 at 4:43 pm
dana
I have to agree with ben, if only because my mother once tried to turn leftover mashed potatoes into potato pancakes and it came out icky.
November 3, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Vance
latkes are potato pancakes
True; this does not imply that “potato pancakes” are latkes.
November 3, 2009 at 5:59 pm
bitchphd
potato pancakes are generally understood to be made with shredded potatoes or that casseroles are, by definition, baked
Again with the foodie elitism.
November 3, 2009 at 6:22 pm
kyllaros
In my defense, I did say it was my unnecessary distinction of the day.
It’s true that whether you use grated or mashed potatoes to make a disk-like food that is then fried in a pan, it is technically a “potato pancake” by virtue of being made out of a potato and fried in a pan. However, they taste nothing like each other. If you want to say that they are both potato pancakes but that they are further distinguished by being either “latkes” or “croquettes”, that’s fine with me.
November 3, 2009 at 7:07 pm
bitchphd
I did not say they tasted alike! They totally don’t. The grated ones are better. But if you have mashed potatoes and are bored with the mashedness of them, it’s an option.
November 3, 2009 at 7:49 pm
kyllaros
@bitchphd – Sorry, my response was more directed at Vance. I wasn’t saying that one should never use mashed potatoes that way. It’s a useful way of recycling them. I was arguing that the grated variety should have the claim on the name “potato pancakes” and that the mashed potato variety should be “croquettes” since they are different enough to merit different names (in my opinion). My suggestions as to the naming are entirely hair-splitting and entirely based on nostalgia for my grandmothers potato pancakes.
November 3, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Vance
kyllaros, I have no trouble believing that latkes in general and your grandmother’s in particular are worlds better than any pancake made of mashed potatoes.
(Also, above I seemed to imply that no Jewish tradition could be Anglophone: a goof.)
November 3, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Carl
Ben, let’s say that I did not misuse “begs the question.” What would I have meant? Would it be consistent with other elements of my comment? ;p
Now, as to croquettes, this is sometimes what tater tots are called. But tater tots are not made out of mashed potatoes, they are made out of shredded potatoes. Mmmm, tater tots.
Pancakes are clearly made out of wheat flour. Any other use of the term ‘pancake’ is colloquial, and metaphorical. Are mashed or shredded potatoes more like wheat flour? My grandpa used to make cornmeal ‘pancakes’ when we visited. Very disappointing as pancakes for a careful taxonomist like me, though not at all disappointing as tasty pan-cooked vehicles for butter and syrup. I am curious what the exact point would be in the admixture of blueberries with pancakes where the item tips over from blueberry pancakes to blueberry porridge.
Sometimes when I make fried rice I become distracted and the rice kind of clumps up, but I do not call the results rice pancakes, although perhaps I should.
November 3, 2009 at 8:56 pm
bitchphd
Mmm, cornmeal pancakes.
November 3, 2009 at 10:51 pm
ben
But you did misuse the phrase. You meant “raises the question”.
Your pancake ontology is eccentric and weird. For one thing, one clearly indicates that wheat flour isn’t to the point when one says “potato pancake”. For another, even if the wheat flour–deficient could only be called pancakes sensu lato, that doesn’t mean that the strictest application of the term would still be to the thing whose main ingredient most closely approximated wheat flour. They are all pancakes because they are little cake-like things made in the pan. In that respect, the existence of flourless cakes makes obvious that flour need not be present.
November 3, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Jeremy
Well, I for one have gotten a few new recipe ideas out of this discussion.
November 3, 2009 at 10:51 pm
ben
True; this does not imply that “potato pancakes” are latkes.
It does imply, however, that “potato pancakes” can’t be identified with any class that doesn’t include latkes.
November 3, 2009 at 11:07 pm
ari
Your pancake ontology is eccentric and weird.
My favorite sentence ever. Also: eccentric and weird?
November 4, 2009 at 5:07 am
Nakku
Your pancake ontology is eccentric and weird.
EotAW needs a mouseover text.
November 4, 2009 at 8:15 am
kid bitzer
we are aware of all entremet traditions
November 4, 2009 at 12:09 pm
JPool
I knew that ben wasn’t gone.
November 4, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Carl
Ben, I’m so glad someone knows what I mean. But since all but the first of my comments have been deploying a vulgar wittgensteinian analytic to goof on the use of language to create arbitrarily self-evident categories (‘it’s a pancake because that’s what I’m used to calling it’ being the signature move), I’m still of the opinion that I used ‘begs the question’ in the correct sense of an argument in which the conclusion is assumed in the premise. And since unlike many people you know that this is the correct sense and were therefore ideally positioned to get the joke, it’s especially bemusing that we’re having this little spat. Is this perhaps a reflex peeve of yours I’ve stumbled into? A holy mission to make the world safe for proper question begging? If so we are all in your debt, and for the glorious concept of eccentric and weird pancake ontologies.
Kid, I relish your subtlety.
November 4, 2009 at 1:41 pm
JPool
Because I can’t leave well enough alone:
We’re in the elite symbolically but not materially, and therefore make virtue of all sorts of necessity, which is pretty transparently what’s going on with the rhapsodies about the joys and benefits of cooking.
This is one of those places where I think Bordieu is just wrong, or at least on to a very to a very partial truth. You’ve got this great concept of habitus to help explain how people can develop different communities of taste and valuation centered in different socio-economic positions, and then you’re going to throw some weird aethetic version of false consciousness back into the mix? That’s just silly.
This, however,
In the United States … we offer a whole range of incredibly cheap and nasty ways for the proles to feel classy, among which abominable other-prepared foods (and other-made clothing, etc.). For these people stepping back into the choreness of daily food-prep cannot help but be a class comedown.
seems a complete misreading of Distinction. Bourdieu knew that class symbolism was almost entirely fluid (think of his discussion of the way the the class markers of body types has almost completely reversed, from the over-fed luxury body and the sinewy working person’s body to the disciplined body of person trainers and dieticians and the obese body of cheap calories). Fast food can be a comfort, and folks from a variety of class backgrounds can eschew various kinds of labor as a chore. The choice to engage in domestic labor isn’t neccessarily about compensating for the lack of a personal staff, any more than eating fast food makes poor people feel higher status than those fools with their stand mixers.
November 4, 2009 at 1:42 pm
JPool
And now I have to hang holliday decorations, but some fool keeps eating the crêpe paper.
November 5, 2009 at 10:13 am
Carl
Hi JPool, thanks for picking up on this and moving it along. I’d say Bourdieu would be totally vulnerable to the ‘false consciousness’ critique if he thought there was a ‘true consciousness’ people could have instead, which he didn’t. So you’re right about the great concept of habitus and that it does not authorize anything but an ethnographic understanding of where tastes and preferences come from and how they work. Which, despite my shorthandy and self-ironic rhetoric, is all I’m up to. Bourdieu does think we’re capable of self-reflection, however, so that we don’t just go tromping about taking our habits and strategies for granted and self-evident.
So the next question is whether this particular aesthetic accommodation the intelligentsia has made with our material conditions of existence is plausibly translatable into a rule for all others to follow regardless of their material conditions of existence. And of course to put the question that way is to show its absurdity, I hope.
On the other hand I can’t entirely agree that Bourdieu shows class symbolism to be almost entirely fluid. Not in any given moment, anyway. What I take him to be showing is that beyond the strictures of brute necessity there are often a variety of optional symbolizations of class, and that their selection and deployment is largely arbitrary. But once a symbolic regime is in place, it is not fluid and appears natural and self-evident to its participants, even as it changes over time. So while it may be that this fraction of the intelligentsia will at some later time or in some other cultural milieu find a different way to symbolize our participation in the elite than adopting our betters’ tastes in food (or even serving as symbolic leaders in this respect), while unlike the elite being bound by class necessity to self-preparation, that is in fact how it works for many folks now. In short we need to distinguish between the general fluidity of symbolic regimes and their solidity, even rigidity in specific instances.
November 6, 2009 at 9:01 am
JPool
The thread’s run out of steam, but a couple thoughts in response before moving on.
If I were going to make a very careful critique of the “virtue of necessity” thing, I’d have to go back through Distinction and see exactly how he used it. My sense, though, was that there seemed to be the implication that high-brow (to use that formulation as a short hand for the larger field of consumptive practices and systems for allocating cultural capital) operates in some sort of original form, where low/middle brow are all derivations and rationalizations. Not only does this break down in the face of a more functionally multi-cultural society (in Bourdieu’s France he can’t imagine a cross-over artist and Johnny Hallyday remains the most salient example of popular music), but of course rich folks are just as much (de)formed by their habitus as anyone else is. Shorter: I think there are places where Bourdieu loses his own plot and assumes that he knows how people are thinking when he, you know, doesn’t really.
So the next question is whether this particular aesthetic accommodation the intelligentsia has made with our material conditions of existence is plausibly translatable into a rule for all others to follow regardless of their material conditions of existence. And of course to put the question that way is to show its absurdity, I hope.
OK, but it remains unclear, to me at least, which part it is that you find absurd. Is it the patronizing attitude that one necessarily takes in advocating for changes in behavior by others or by those in other class positions? Or is it the presumption that discussions of public virtue or personal behavior responsibility are necessarily farces? Because, for me, it’s the second position that’s absurd and condescending. Certainly, one wants to be aware of both different material circumstances and structural constraints in advocating for changes in personal behavior. I think people in this discussion have mostly done that. It’s still worth having public discussions about our private choices, because we’re all looking for sense/guidance and because they add up to public effects. My response to the poisoned-well post-structuralism of “We can’t even talk about this, because all of our categories are over-determined!” is “Maybe you can’t…”
On fluidity, I think I was pretty clear in what I wrote and the examples that I used that I was talking about fluidity across epistemeic periods. In your original comment you suggested that because these practices have had this particular historical association, that that logic must still be underpinning them today.
November 8, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Anonymouse
People in 2009 have more money than people in 1959? Really? I think that needs fact-checking.
November 8, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Vance
They definitely have more income.
November 9, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Carl
Agreed with you JPool, thanks (and All) for a stimulating discussion.