A Cook's Manifesto

photo from flickr.com

If I am to be completely honest, I became interested in food for primarily economic reasons. While I wish I could wax poetic about a moment of culinary inspiration, about a perfect ratatouille draped across a plate, I’m afraid it would be a lie. As a poor college student in South Carolina, I was living in something of a food desert. Affordable options were limited to McDonald’s, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, and, even worse, the Sodexho-operated school cafeteria. None of these options provided what I would call “real food,” so if I wanted to eat something that was neither processed nor injected with artificial flavoring, I would have to learn to make it myself. And so I began my slow, inexorable journey toward conscious eating, a journey which has had its disasters—an attempt at Thai curry using Indian curry powder—but also its revelations.

My discovery of food has happened contemporaneously with America’s own culinary awakening. Over the past decade, many Americans have begun to think seriously about the contents of their dinner plates. We have finally started to ask where our food comes from and whether it might be good for us and the environment. Michael Pollan’s books have played an important role in forcing us to ask these questions, and have provided a way into the discussion for hordes of farmers market shoppers.

Yet I fear that many Americans, notably the working poor, have been left out of these discussions. Food deserts persist throughout great swaths of our national landscape, and, besides planting a White House garden, very little political progress has been made. We’re still subsidizing corn and soy production to the detriment of our health and the environment; we’re still factory-farming animals and eating far too much meat.

I think Italy is an interesting example of a place where people of all economic backgrounds continue to eat real food and where vegetables are often a centerpiece of the meal. Food is intimately tied to culture in Italy, where nonni shop daily for fresh fruits, vegetables, and seafood. The historic Tuscan town of Lucca has even banned non-Italian restaurants from its city center. While this reactionary response to a popular kebab house may be crossing the line, it is certainly interesting how central food is to the Italian sense of cultural identity. While it may be ceding some political power to the European Union, food is a sort of nationalist rallying cry, a way to separate itself from its more multicultural neighbors. The center of the matter is that Italians continue to eat as they have for generations, which has allowed people of all stripes to stay away from newfangled processed and artificial foods.

In America, we are much more open to change and the desire to produce more and to produce it cheaply. When processed foods began appearing after World War II, American housewives saw a way to free themselves from hours slaving over the stove. TV dinners, canned goods, and boxed mixes are an easy and inexpensive way to feed a family and allowed women to enter the workforce in impressive numbers. Yet we have lost something along the way. Perhaps our error was to view cooking as a chore and a bother.

Our homogenizing melting pot has encouraged generations of immigrants to leave behind their age-old foodways and to construct Americanized recreations of traditional dishes – how else can one explain such creations as Sweet and Sour chicken or Chicken Parmesan or lasagna piled six inches high?

America’s journey away from fresh, simply-prepared ingredients has been aided and abetted by our failed agricultural policies. With our surplus of corn and soy we have found managed to subsist on cheeseburgers (made from corn-fed animals) and  French fries (fried in corn oil) and Twinkies (made with high-fructose corn syrup and corn-derived fats).

To avoid these baroque industrial concoctions, we must rediscover the joy in cooking and in sharing meals with our families and friends. We should shop at farmers’ markets, many of which now accept food stamps. We should eat less meat and more seasonal vegetables, though I admit this becomes a difficult task during the interminable New England winter. We should buy fewer prepared products and rediscover what it means to make things from scratch. I cannot live up to all these goals all of the time, but slowly I have become a more conscious eater, and I think consciousness is perhaps the most important step to eating in way that is good for us and good for the environment. For only the unconscious eater can sit down to enjoy a McDonald’s hamburger and not think of the land and of the humans and of the animals that were abused; of the way it manipulates one’s primal desire for salt and sugar; or of the health problems it will cause down the line.