How Do We Fix This?

As a society, this is a very important question: How can we cook better – better for our own health, and better for the health of the planet? The good news is that little by little people are much more conscious of food and agriculture politics than they were a few years ago. The farm bill gets noticed from time to time. This awareness is the first step. When you look at other movements you realize how long they took, they didn’t change in a decade, and surely this is the case with food.

The way I see it, we have lots of great writers and chefs, foodies and creative types, but we need more smart politicians to go to bat. Part of what we do need and what chefs and foodies are promoting is the cultural reevaluation of food: recognizing the importance of food: to your health, your culture, your environment.

What we can do is promote cooking, going back to preparing meals for your family, as opposed to just buying a pre-prepared, packaged meal from the grocery store or fast food chain. This should be a pleasurable experience. If people can find pleasure and enjoyment in this act, I feel more and more people would get on the bandwagon. Cooking is stimulating. It takes mental engagement, it offers sensual pleasures, and cooking is a very enriching experience.

In a time where our lives are so inundated with technology, I think there is actually more mental and emotional space for activities such as cooking and gardening. There is a hunger to use our hands, our senses and our imagination. Right now we are growing up so sensorially deprived, often just using our eyes and ears, and neglecting the use of our bodies. There is another element to consider, and that is the fact that when we engage with all of our senses there are deeply positive effects on our mental and physical health. We’re hungry and desiring for all the sensory information and benefits that cooking can provide when approached in the right light.

Love for the Kitchen

A big part of when things shifted away from the kitchen and toward pre-prepared foods was due to isolation. Cooking alone can be unpleasant, boring and daunting. Historically, cooking has been a very cooperative activity. When things got to busy for people to spend time together in the evenings around the house, it pushed everyone out of the kitchen, which was a big mistake.

Cooking is much more enjoyable together, not to mention things taste better and feel better when we do them together. We need to bring that sense of communality back into our cooking. I think people need to take responsibility for more aspects of their lives. Instead of narrowly focusing on careers and making money, we need to see the value in spending time together, with families and friends, preparing meals together, gardening, sewing, music, social time. In other words, weaning ourselves from a system reliable on technology and fossil fuel.

Hope?

Yes! People are beginning to rebel against the ways in which we’ve increased our dependence on corporations to provide for us. People are recognizing “organic vs. non-organic”, “local,” “GMO’s,” processed foods, etc. The food movement has lots of struggles, but it offers so much. It’s one of the rare instances where the right choice is generally the more pleasurable choice. Get knowledgeable and find pleasure in your new way of thinking and living you life.

When Did Home Cooking Begin to Decline?

Basically, after World War II things changed – women wanted to work, wanted independence and freedom from the home. However, this made things complicated for families, for domestic relationships. Women seemed happy to delegate other tasks and housework, but cooking was something they enjoyed. Cooking was a time to be with families, and I think in a sense it was and is meditative. When sociologists ask women which domestic activities they like best, cooking ranks rather high. But, as I mentioned, if women were working, there was no longer time to prepare meals from scratch, and therefore men needed to step in. Not to fret, before things grew difficult, the food industry stepped in and said, “We will take care of it.”

Apparently, the food industry had been trying to sneak in for many years before it was actually accepted. It was rejected for many years before it wiggled its way in. The food industry adopted the language of feminism with claims such as: Women’s Liberation. They were very clever and everyone went along because it made things easier. This all began shortly after World War II and was resisted until the sixties and seventies. Although McDonalds began in the forties, the fast food industry did not take off until the seventies and eighties when fast food became a third of what American children eat every day.

Supplementing home cooking with industrial cooking is one of the largest driving forces behind the obesity epidemic, not to mention the growth of so many diseases. Corporations use obscene amounts of sugar, salt and fat because those ingredients are tasty and cheap, bottom line. These ingredients also mask the poor quality of processed foods. Chemicals make anything possible – make foods look pretty, last a long time, taste decently and have “deception” written all over them in invisible marker.

Cooking is the Biggest Deal

Cooking tells the story of mankind. Learning to cook was one of humanities greatest achievements. “Cooking allows our brains to grow and our guts to shrink (Michael Pollan). This allowed for all sorts of cognitive development to take place and is the underlying force in the development of culture. Cooking stood for cooperation, patience, trust, bonding and relationships to take place. Sitting down and eating together is an enormous force in the development of relationships and hugely impacted the rise of civilization. Cooking itself and cooking tools, such as pots and pans, gave way to creation of foods – learning to combine vegetables with meat, make cheese and butter, bread, beer. These processes are critical to our development as humans and as a species, both then and now.

At What Point Did Things Go Awry?

At some point we crossed over from making food more nourishing, more digestible and more delicious to having the exact opposite effect. Up until the nineteenth century, the history of cooking was all in the direction of making food more nutritious. However, in the late nineteenth century we took food to another level. We learned to refine grain and make white flour, we learned how to turn cane and beets into pure sugar, we learned how to pick nutrients apart and manipulate them. For instance, you take raw materials – corn, soy, wheat – and you “add value” by creating processed foods from those building blocks. So instead of selling nutritious brown rice, we genetically engineered white rice that has vitamin A in it and you get “golden” rice. Because sugar is an innate taste, meaning we are born with it, we love it. This made things even easier for the industry because the beauty is that white flour is so cheap and pairs perfectly with this capitalist economy. It’s a commodity and it’s imperishable. The more complex you make a product, the more profitable. Only, we forget that our gut knows differently.

We became too smart for our own good, we were moving from cooking to “food processing.”

A Profound Article Series Taking a Look at our Food System..

Whether we are talking about preconception and prenatal nutrition, specific diseases, intolerance, or overall health, the way we eat is having a profound impact on us and our environment. The industrialization of food has made food very cheap, and the poor can eat ‘better’ than they once did, but at what cost? Now, just about everyone can eat meat at three meals a day. Fast food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, most brutally processed and medicated, but it’s within reach nonetheless. I will get into the carbon footprint at another time, but the bottom line is that this is affecting us on every which level. On a personal level we are being affected by all the chemicals we are putting into our bodies, and on a much larger level the environment is taking a beating with the amount of beef being produced.

What Can We Do?

COOK more! Home cooking is essential to solving these environmental issues, not to mention for our health. As long as we allow large corporations to cook for us, we have an industrialized agriculture that is much too big and too abusive for the resources available. When fast food chains are doing the cooking they will buy from the biggest producers possible. There used to be many more small farms, and now we are left with a few much larger ones that run the roost. By shopping at one producer, corporations like McDonalds or KFC can have the lowest costs all around, including the “transaction costs” – the fewest contracts and negotiations. We need more people to get back to cooking in order to prevent the movement for a sustainable food system from hitting a wall. The farmers’ market movement, the push toward individual growers, CSA boxes, small farms etc. .is all limited by people’s willingness to cook. If cooking continues to decline, there no hope of building an alternative to this mass level agriculture system we have in place today.

REAL FOODIE xo

Look out for the next article in the series!