Cooked

Michael Pollan says, in the introduction to his book Cooked, that “[t]he premise of this book is that cooking -- defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and drink -- is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we humans do.  This is not something I fully appreciated before I set out to learn how to cook [in preparation for writing the book].... I learned far more than I ever expected to about the nature of work, the meaning of health, about tradition and ritual, self-reliance and community, the rhythms of everyday life, and the supreme satisfaction of producing something I previously could only have imagined consuming, doing outside of the cash economy for no other reason but love.”

And few pages later:  “The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation.  Both nature and culture are transformed by the work.  And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.”  

Michael Pollan can bite me.  

How in heaven’s name a man comes to the age of fifty-nine without having engaged in the everyday task of getting food ready for himself and perhaps even his family escapes me.  Cooking is not  -- most of the time --  a revelation.  It is an always necessary and often unexciting fact of life, like brushing your teeth or doing laundry.  You do it today and then you have to do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.   Some days, it may be kind of fun (woohoo, a new toothbrush) but most of the time you just do it.  Pollan’s next book can perhaps be about his sudden realization of the deep spiritual significance of oral hygiene.  (“Flossed.”)  

I got pissed off when I read this article in the New York Times, promoting Cooked.  In the article, Pollan and Michael Moss (a New York Times reporter who writes about food-related issues) are 1) cooking lunch (not dinner -- lunch!); 2) at their apparent leisure, with time for a special shopping trip for the ingredients; 3) including pizza dough that Michael Moss has prepared the night before and left out to rise all morning -- this man does not have cats, apparently.  Pollan dices up some onions, and puts them in a pot for a chickpea soup.  And then, this line:  ““By the way, what are we engaged in now?” Mr. Pollan deadpanned, as he tended to the pot. “This supposedly impossible drudgery that is just soul-crushing?”

I posted to FaceBook:  “Okay, Michael, let's try this: wake up early, feed your kids breakfast and get them out the door on time for school with packed lunches; drive to work; work all day at something over which you have little control -- why don't you try something that keeps you on your feet and involves having other people telling you what to do all day? then drive home, and at around, oh, six? six-thirty? you can start cooking, with ingredients on hand (let's hope your onions haven't gone moldy and that no one has taken the last can of garbanzos for the school canned food drive) with your kids whining at you because they're hungry, asking for help with this that and the other, making a mess and squabbling (as my late stepmother used to say, it's The Arsenic Hour). Stand there chopping your onions under those circumstances and *then* you can tell me whether it's drudgery or not. And oh yeah -- I want to hear whether the kids eat what you made. And don't forget -- you have to do the dishes and clean up after dinner!”

A new sentence entered my vocabulary:  Michael Pollan can bite me.

I have, since I started using the phrase, actually read the whole book -- I felt obliged.  And found it more than a tad on the clueless side.  Because if your point is that people should cook more, for a variety of excellent reasons (first two:  being healthy and saving money), why focus on four of the most time consuming cooking techniques out there?  Literally, the sections of the book are about 1) all day barbecuing, 2) all afternoon braising, 3) baking sourdough bread from your own starter, a process that takes about a week, with the mixing/rising/baking taking nearly twenty-four hours, and 4) fermenting -- cheesemaking, pickling, and brewing beer -- none of it completed in less than a week. None of this, I’m guessing, is going to tempt people back into the kitchen who right now are picking up prepared dinners at Safeway -- or worse, Happy Meals at McDonald’s.  

My inner literary critic feels obliged to observe that really it’s a problem of trying to do two not-very-compatible things in the same book.  First, Pollan is trying to get us to cook more, by telling us all the very good reasons for it -- reasons I fully agree with, by the way -- and describing some of the wonderful experiences that are open to those who cook.  Second, he’s giving us a loving description the rich cultural history of various cooking techniques -- and he does this masterfully.   

But in doing so he drops the ball on his first goal, trying to get people to cook more.  There is nothing in Cooked to acknowledge that it is possible to cook healthfully and from scratch, but quickly, let alone any recipes or suggestions on how to do so.  I’m a long time recipe clipper (from back when it was actual clipping of actual paper). I now have a pretty big repertoire of healthy and quickly prepared meals, more or less from scratch (if Michael Pollan can use canned garbanzos, so can I).  I will share some of those recipes in future posts.

Pollan is also clueless about how much of the burden of increased time in the kitchen he’s urging (and yes, whatever else it may be, it is a burden) will fall on women.  He does discuss how corporate America co-opted feminist messages to get women to see cooking as something they no longer had time for and didn’t have to do.   But he is very fuzzy on just what women might be doing with the time they could be devoting to cooking -- but, in his version, have been persuaded not to by the sellers of processed food.  Nowhere in his discussion does he consider poor women working overtime, or more than one job, to make ends meet.  Nor on the other end of the economic scale (where, I admit, I reside) does he consider that women might, in order to succeed in the workplace, need to work late hours or engage in professional activities in the after-work hours rather than spending time in the kitchen.  I’ll write more about this, too.

Meanwhile, as I make my own choices, I find myself thinking of Michael Pollan several times a week.   When I’ve gone to the trouble of making a healthy and I hope tasty meal for my family:  Michael Pollan can bite me.  Because yes, as important as this may be, and even when I’m really engaged in it and enjoying it (which is not all that often, if we’re talking weeknights), there’s a lot of drudgery involved.  

When I just can’t do it that night and I get takeout for dinner, to the great delight of my children:  Michael Pollan can bite me.  Because most of us have jobs and commutes and soccer practice carpools (yes, really, for years and years I had to deal with actual soccer carpools) and a lot of other things to juggle.  Cooking is not always top of the list.   

And when I’m at the grocery store, buying plenty of healthy produce and organic meat and dairy -- but also store-bought bread, crackers, cookies, chips, ice cream, and some frozen prepared foods:  Michael Pollan can bite me.  Because I have a teenager and two adults to feed (down, recently, from two teenagers and two adults) and, well, we like that stuff -- for snacks, for quick meals at home, for packed lunches.  And somehow we manage to eat a reasonably healthy diet including some of what I admit to be junk, and some non-junk convenience foods.

Feeding my family is part of who I am.  So is being a working woman who has struggled mightily to reconcile the demands of motherhood with those of my career -- making unhappy compromises on both sides of the equation.  I think a lot about how to care for my family, including how to feed them.  I think a lot about how I can work to make a better world. And I think a lot about how being a woman has affected the choices I’ve made -- and what choices I’ve had.  

So this blog is for all the mothers -- and fathers, but especially mothers -- out there doing their best to get healthy food on the table, and into their kids, night after night after night after getting home from a long day of work and while dealing with everything else that needs to be dealt with.  It is written in sympathy and solidarity with you making all the tough choices and putting in the drudgery to keep the family fed.  It is offered in the hope of helping out, with a useful recipe, perhaps, or a  strategy that’s worked for me to get the kids to eat the healthy stuff.  Or perhaps by telling you that you don’t need to be doing it all, all the time -- go ahead and don’t cook so much, your kids will be okay even if you feed them frozen entrees or canned soup or takeout, whatever you have time for and can afford that they will eat.   I’m near the end of my journey of feeding growing humans, but I’ll offer some reminiscences of how I did it back in the day when the kids were small  as well as current snapshots of how we eat today.  (Spoiler alert:  I cook more often and more healthfully now.  In my book, frozen food is the best friend of a mother of young children.)  

I leave it there for now-- and invite you to share with me whatever thoughts you’ve had, or useful tips you’ve come up with, from your own struggle to get everyone fed -- today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.