Eye Candy

At this point in time we have enough evidence to show, even if it was never in question, that all of our senses play a role in eating and cooking. Before we’re even served a meal, we can smell how delicious (or off-putting) it will be. And if one is cooking or within hearing distance of the kitchen, the sizzle of oils, steaming pressure cookers, bubbling sauces, and kitchen timers all form a familiar and inviting harmony. With our eyes we savor the sight of a feast and we’re tempted to take more than enough. We relish the warmth of a dinner roll, the cool feel of a beverage, and finally experience the chemical reactions that reward us with taste. All of this isn’t gluttony (more on that article in a future post!); in moderation, it’s human nature. However, when translated to the worlds of paper or pixels, food loses much of its sensory effect over us while gaining a different kind of power.

Exhibit A

Television shows dynamically capture the sights and sounds of food, while cookbooks and blogs showcase static representations of it: two-dimensional formulas, descriptions, and photographs. How do we reconcile societies that are exponentially ‘farming out’ their cooking duties while increasingly churning out consumers of two-dimensional food-themed media? I’d argue that this is symptomatic of our media-driven world: we’re conditioned (see exhibit A) to become spectators and virtual participants. Some children play more sports video games than actual sports. People of any age socialize online. Although I couldn’t find conclusive statistics, I’d say that travel shows attract a lot of people who can’t or simply don’t actually travel. This virtual aspect of our lives isn’t innately a bad thing. Part of being a mere mortal is accepting that one cannot do everything, and people have been living vicariously since the dawn of art, music, and literature. When our health and that of others is at stake, however, it’s a very different story.

There is nothing wrong with reading about a blogger’s latest culinary exploits, watching a cooking or culinary travel show at the end of a long workday, or collecting cookbooks like baseball cards. There is something troubling about losing the will to act on what we watch or read when it comes to food because it correlates with handing over the pots, pans, and all control over nutritional value to an arguably dangerous food industry. And that correlates with expanding waistlines and malfunctioning vital organs everywhere.

Exhibit B

A lot of factors have combined to dissuade us from actively participating in our kitchens. As we discussed in last week’s post, some argue that they simply don’t have the time to cook. The ease and convenience of paying for a pre-made meal rather than paying for fresh ingredients and investing the time and energy required to produce something edible is another very real reason. Moreover, much like the world of Hollywood, the world of cooking has its own celebrities (see exhibit B). And while many people idolize these celebrities enough to emulate them, others are content to admire them from afar. The food itself is as glamorized as any celebrity: it’s

Exhibit C

prepared by pros with gourmet ingredients (or faked with some very inedible ones), set up with props and lighting to its greatest advantage, and photographed and edited with the finest equipment. Food preparation industries benefit from this surreal approach to cooking (see exhibit C), while celebrity cooks, foodies, and gourmets (where these are distinguished from the average home cook) seem to revel in the chance to tell their millions of viewers: you can look, but don’t touch!  

Narrating Food: Part 2

It was one of those days when the clock hands moved at glacial speed, when the pause between each tick and tock was audibly longer than usual. Now, as you make your way home in exasperating traffic, you note how the sun is long gone into another horizon, how tempting the roadside neon signs advertising quick, inexpensive meals are. You love a home-cooked meal as much as the next person, but you give in, picking up a ready-made drive-thru meal or stopping a few minutes to “grab a bite.” At home, at long last, you take a glass of wine from your impressively equipped kitchen and put your feet up in front of the television to watch an hour or so of cooking or culinary travel shows, or maybe you pick up the latest celebrity chef’s cookbook from your bedside table and lose yourself in reading their stories, mentally going over each step in their recipes…

Last week, our cursory overview of the history of food narratives brought up the paradox that this scenario illustrates: even as food-preparation technology advances and becomes accessible to more homes, even as cookbook sales rise and cooking blogs flourish, “home cooking continues to wane,” as Rose Prince notes in her article for the Wall Street Journal “The Decline of European Home Cooking.”

Cynthia Bertelsen, of the Francophile food blog Gherkins & Tomatoes explores in her essay “Philosophy of Food and Cooking, Writing and Life” “why a country that prides itself on efficiency and speed and no-fuss […] wants to read about food and oogle [sic] beautiful pictures of it instead of cooking it or even eating it.” Bertelsen states that reading about food is "safer than the actual act [of cooking]" and concludes: 

Everyone eats. Eating really is universal and reduces life to a common denominator. In ancient times, the saying goes, once two people ate together, no longer were there strangers sitting at the table. In today’s world, stuffed with distrust and rising xenophobia, food may be the only common ground left to us.

The act of eating itself may be a universal common denominator, but the acts of obtaining and preparing food are far too complex to reduce to a unified plane. Whereas Bertelson’s argument is ultimately a philosophical and abstract explanation of the allure of reading and writing about food, other authors have tackled the practical side of the paradox, exploring the reasons why people who theoretically love cooking aren’t doing so.

Rose Prince, mentioned earlier, and Pete Wells, of the New York Times magazine column Cooking with Dexter agree on at least one of these reasons: time, or rather, the lack thereof. Prince declares that “in every European country, families—especially women—complain they simply don't have the time.” She surmises that “the changing role of women in European society in the past 40 or 50 years” has significantly contributed to the decline of home cooking. (Do you support “the accusation that liberated women (who gave up cooking) inadvertently generated a modern irresponsible food industry”? True or not, you can count on a future post about this controversial idea.) 

Rather than arguing the time defense for only women, Wells is adamant that both women and men don’t have time to cook anymore. In his article “Cooking With Dexter: Busy Signal,” Wells endearingly admits that his column about “meals prepared by a working father who cooks […] hasn’t exactly worked out that way.” According to Wells’ own two-years experience with the column:

When people say they’re too busy to cook, it isn’t like when they tell their doctors they exercise three, maybe four times a week. They mean it: they’re too busy to cook, or at least too busy to cook dinner every night of the week before the children go to bed.

The underlying problem is again, work, or rather, the excess of it:

Since the golden age of home cooking — if there ever was such a time — parents work more. And more parents work. If you add up the hours worked by all the adults in the average American household, the change is profound, epochal. In many families, there is nobody around to do housework of any kind, including buying and preparing food.

People love reading and writing about cooking and eating: both are universal and essential. Yet, people are cooking less and eating less healthily: theoretically, it's safer to read about cooking than to engage in it; in more practical terms, there's no time for it in the modern household. Julia Child summed up the paradox nicely when she contended: "Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet." Food and its preparation can be as beautiful and alluring as a ballet. Both usually attract large audiences, not of professionals, but of the enthusiasts that appreciate the art, that secretly yearn for the skill, but that simply don't have the time. 

Narrating Food: Part 1

"No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers."-Laurie Colwin

Hieroglyphs from the Tomb of Seti I

The diffusion of every kind of narrative in every age of history occurs through a variety of mediums. Thus, the history of the cultures that have inhabited our world can be read in everything from cave drawings, hieroglyphics, and scrolls, to sculptures, paintings, and architectures, to oral stories, letters, and books. We undertake every venture in life surrounded by these stories, and they alternately inform, guide, caution, and prescribe the steps that we will take. The medium and the message transmitted vary with the indelible passage of time, but we can be sure that narratives themselves will always accompany us. 

Prometheus Brings
Fire to Mankind
by Heinrich Fueger, 1817

Have you ever considered the narratives of cooking and eating? Some of these narratives are ancient: just think of Eve biting into the forbidden fruit or Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and handing it to mortals, arguably setting in motion the birth of cooking. As with many narrative threads in history, the visceral story of food and its preparation has been transcribed into modern language: consider Gerber baby food, the cafeteria food that you ate for about thirteen years in public schools, and all of those brand-name products and fast food meals that you’ve consumed throughout your life. Media-saturation is a part of modern life, but certain traditional narratives remain constant.

With food being so central to the sustenance of life and so easily enjoyed as well, it is no wonder that people have put words to its tastes, smells, and textures, recorded its chemical compounds and formulas, and widely distributed this information. Food and fiction writer Laurie Colwin said that no matter how alone a cook appears to be, one is generally surrounded by “generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” 

Still Life with Coffeepot,
by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Just the other day, I found myself literally surrounded by these people. Julia Child was prompting me to make something delectable and French, James Beard was arguing for the richness of American cuisine, and myriad unknowns tempted me with collections of what appeared to be the rest of the world’s recipes. Nearby, Cheryl Mendelson was casting her vote for home cooking from her 800+ page tome on home economics. I was in the library, you see, gazing in wonder at the sheer volume of words and pages dedicated to making things to eat and eating them. 

Among all of these books, it was easy to see what Colwin meant. The narrative fiber of humanity runs strongly through kitchens and time, connecting us to all of the cooks ever written about, their stories and their recipes. Yet, these countless books only tell a meager half of the story to modern audiences. Although decidedly less tangible, dedicated television shows and networks, websites, and personal blogs add audio and image to the narrative. How is it, then, that “although a large, enthusiastic minority of home cooks grow more and more sophisticated, the majority become ever more de-skilled” (as Mendelson affirms in her book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House)? On next week’s menu: an exploration of this paradox. 

The end is where we start from

    Welcome to The Starter Cook! I'm Ariadne Gaskell, a foodie and home-cook newbie (emphasis on new) with a budding passion for all things sweet, salty, and savory (emphasis on sweet).

   You may well question how anyone can harbor a passion for food—isn’t it simply a basic necessity of life? Take, if you will, a mental inventory of the world around you: the truth is that we take this elemental part of our lives for granted far too often. In America, for instance, ever-expanding fast food chains and prepared-food aisles in supermarkets mirror the changing pace of life, the shifting values of an entire population. As author Thomas McNamee asserts in his article “Cooking,” from The New York Times, these trends go hand-in-hand with “the chain-linked epidemics of obesity, diabetes, arteriosclerosis and cancer.” Alternatively, in her article “The Decline of European Home Cooking,” from The Wall Street Journal, Rose Prince reasons that issues such as social and economic restructuring after World War II, including urbanization and female liberation, placed European families at the risk of “rearing a generation of ‘kitchen orphans’ who have never seen their mothers use the oven.”  

   In light of the sobering realization that cooking and eating have taken such a markedly negative turn, the phenomenon currently sweeping through bookstores, television-attuned homes, and the Internet is particularly astonishing. McNamee remarks: “while accurate statistics don’t seem to exist, the cooking sections of bookstores look to be overflowing [and] sales of a hundred thousand copies aren’t uncommon.” In addition to bookstore aisles, food has entire television networks, with their scores of celebrity chefs, dedicated to it. Moreover, anyone with access to the Internet has—literally, at their fingertips—a wealth of individual blogs cataloguing food that is made, photographed, and written about by authors that range from professionals, epicures, and gourmets to home-cooks, foodies, and hobbyists.

   Prince rightly argues that there is no substitute for the traditional process of learning how to cook from one’s parents. Nevertheless, as I reflect on the current relationships with food in the world around me, I feel grateful that there is a community of food lovers on print, on television, online that generously share their advice, recipes, and even gorgeous food photographs, that stand in for the cultural, communal traditions of buying, making, and eating food which seem to have disappeared and left us orphaned in the kitchen. I hope to explore the intricate evolution of this relationship throughout recent history: how passed-down recipe cards and cookbooks switched places with television shows, networks, websites, and blogs to provide inspiration and education for anyone around the world who wishes to rebuild their relationship with food. If you, dear reader, are among the novices like me, or are perhaps orphaned from or out-of-touch with the wonder of a home-cooked meal, take heart in T.S. Elliot's wise words, quoted in this post's title: "What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."