Let's Get Cooking!
Americans are fascinated by cooking---if someone else is doing it. Since 2004, the prime-time audience for the Food Network has increased 55 percent to l.06 million viewers nightly, and names like Rachael Ray, Paula Dean, and Bobby Flay have become household words.To the delight of the television sponsors, their popularity gives no indication of slowing down.
Ironically, the fascination we have for watching these master chefs prepare mouth- watering meals does not seem to motivate us to move from our couches to our kitchens and do the same. According to Michael Pollan, time spent on food preparation in the home has fallen about 40% since 1965. Although it was originally assumed this was a result of women entering the workforce in greater numbers, research has found this is generally not the case. Pollan points out that the collapse of home cooking is not limited to women who work outside the home. Non-working women spend less time cooking as well.
So why is there such a large shift away from preparing meals from scratch? Pollan suggests it is because after World War II, the food industry worked hard to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops during the war: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. He cites evidence from Laura Shapiro’s book, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, which suggests that the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” They didn’t do it right away. Shapiro shows that for many years women resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of the “moral obligation to cook.” It took years of clever marketing to break down this resistance and convince Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix was really cooking. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do---specifically add an egg---she could take ownership of the cake.
Harry Balzar is a food marketing researcher who has been studying American eating habits since 1978. He believes that the food industry’s plan succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. Today people think nothing of buying frozen peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their children’s lunchboxes. Balzar himself is unbothered by the change. He says, “We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods. Now we’re going to have a hundred years of packaged meals.” It’s progress, according to Balzar, and women don’t miss spending time in the kitchen, just as they don’t miss sewing or darning socks.
Pollan doesn’t agree. He concedes that cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But he argues that we have taken it too far. Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (and four minutes cleaning up) which is less than half the time we spent when Julia Child first arrived on our television screens. And it’s not really a matter of being too busy to cook, says Pollan, since we spend more than twice that amount of time to watch a single episode of “Top Chef.”
Pollan sees cooking as something that is vital to our health and our happiness and he says it should involve more than weekend grilling (which ironically is on the rise, especially among men) or watching TV. A 2003 study done by Harvard economists led by David Cutler would appear to support Pollan’s argument. They found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. As the “time cost” of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up, particularly consumption of the sort of snack and convenience foods that are typically cooked outside the home. They also found that when we don’t have to cook meals, we eat more of them---since 1977 we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.
So how can we reverse this trend if it is so bad for us? Balzar insists it is easy. He says, “You want Americans to eat less? I have a diet for you. It’s short and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it….”
That’s a plan that Dr. Helen Zoe Veit, Professor of History at Michigan State University, would love to see implemented. She argues that not only should we go back to fixing meals, we should begin by teaching our young people how to cook these meals themselves. Dr. Veit points out that in the early 20th century home economics was a serious subject. Until then almost no one had heard of vitamins or understood germ theory. Home economics classes offered vital information about washing hands regularly, eating fresh fruits and vegetables, and not feeding coffee to babies, among other lessons. But later, many of these lessons became common sense, and in Veit’s words, “early proponents came to look like old maids stating the obvious instead of the innovators and scientists that many of them really were.”
Professor Veit believes this stereotype is unfortunate because home economics teachers can fill a role that is badly needed. She says, “Too many Americans simply don’t know how to cook. Our diet, consisting of highly processed foods made cheaply outside the home thanks to subsidized corn and soy, has contributed to an enormous health crisis. More than half of all adults and more than a third of all children are overweight or obese. Chronic diseases associated with weight gain, like heart disease and diabetes, are hobbling more and more Americans.” Veit acknowledges that many attempts by cities and states to tax the sale of junk food or ban the use of food stamps to buy soda have failed. Many people are leery of any governmental steps to promote healthy eating, even going so far as to see Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity as “secret food police.” But, asks Veit, “What if we put the tools to fight obesity into the hands of our children instead, by teaching them to cook? "
With obesity on the rise in this country, especially among children, it is clear that something must be done to change both the quantity and the quality of the food we eat. It can be argued, as Pollen and Veit do, that this shift will not occur unless we go resist the lure of fast food restaurants and pre-packaged meals. It will not occur until we go back to valuing the art of real cooking, beginning with home economics classes in school. And most importantly, it will not occur until we (both men and women) move ourselves from the couch to the kitchen and take the time needed to prepare meals that are vital to our family’s health and its wellbeing.
To read more about this topic, read Michael Pollan’s article, “Outside the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” July 29, 2009, New York Times and “Time to Revive Home Ec,” by Helen Zoe Veit, Sept. 5, 2011, New York Times.
