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.