Cutler and his colleagues surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and discovered that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or even income. Other research supports the idea that home cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class. A 1992 study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not.* A 2012 Public Health Nutrition study of the elderly in Taiwan found a strong correlation between regular cooking and superior health and longevity.†
So time spent cooking matters—a lot. Which, when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations cook for us, they’re bound to skimp on quality ingredients and go heavy on the sugar, fat, and salt. These are three tastes we’ve been hardwired by natural selection to favor; they also happen to be dirt cheap and to do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed foods. Industrial cookery also increases the range of the tastes and cuisines available to us; we may not know how to cook Indian or Moroccan or Thai, but Trader Joe’s does. Although such variety might seem like a good thing, as Cutler suggests (and any buffet table proves), the wider the choice of food, the more of it we will consume. And then there is dessert: If you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the cooking process, serve as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences.
The question is, can we ever go back? Once it has been dismantled, can a culture of everyday cooking (and “primary eating”) be rebuilt? Because it’s hard to imagine ever reforming the American way of eating unless millions of us—women and men both—are willing to make cooking and eating meals a part of daily life. The path to a healthier diet of fresh, unprocessed food (not to mention to a revitalized local food economy) passes right through the home kitchen.
If this strikes you as an appealing idea, you might not want to call Harry Balzer to discuss it.
“Not going to happen,” he told me. “Why? Because we’re basically cheap and lazy, and the skills are already lost. Who is going to teach the next generation how to cook?”
Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he finds it in the survey data he has spent the last three decades poring over. But for a brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different reality. This took a little doing. Most of his clients, who include many of the big chain restaurants and food manufacturers, profit handsomely from the decline of cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself clearly recognizes what industrial cookery has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world, we might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health.
“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want—just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”
Toward the end of my year of cooking with Samin, I began braising and stewing solo, regularly devoting my Sunday afternoons to cooking various pot dishes on my own. The idea was to make a couple of dinners at a time and freeze them to eat during the week: my own home-meal replacements, homemade. Weeknights, it’s often hard to find more than a half hour or so to fix dinner, so I decided to put in a few hours on the weekend, when I would feel less rushed. I also borrowed a couple of minor mass-production techniques from the food industry: I figured that if I was going to chop onions for a mirepoix or soffritto, why not chop enough for two or three dishes? That way, I’d only have to wash the pans, knives, and cutting boards once. Making pot dishes in this way has proved to be the single most practical and sustainable skill—both in terms of money and time spent to eat well—I acquired in my cooking education.
Sundays without Samin have become a pastime I look forward to most weekends. Isaac usually keeps me company, bringing his laptop down to the kitchen so he can do his homework while I chop and sauté, season and stir. Sometimes he’ll wander over to the pot on the stove with a tasting spoon, and offer some unsolicited seasoning advice. But mostly we work in parallel, both of us absorbed in our respective tasks, with occasional breaks for conversation. I’ve learned that the very best time to talk to a teenager is while doing something else, and our hours at the kitchen island, during what is his last year at home, have become some of the easiest, sweetest times we’ve had together. I believe he feels the same way. One Sunday, Isaac answered the phone while I stirred a sugo; we were planning to make some fresh pasta together a little later in the day. It was my parents on the line.
“It’s cold and drizzly here, but really cozy inside,” I heard Isaac tell them. “Dad’s cooking and the house smells so good. This is my perfect kind of Sunday.”
Once I committed a couple of hours to being in the kitchen, I found my usual impatience fade and could give myself over to the afternoon’s unhurried project. After a week in front of the screen, the opportunity to work with my hands—with all my senses, in fact—is always a welcome change of pace, whether in the kitchen or in the garden. There’s something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense. I don’t want you to get the idea it’s made a Buddhist of me, but in the kitchen, maybe a little bit. When stirring the pot, just stir the pot. I get it now. It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly.
Unitasking.
VII.
Step Seven: Remove Pot from Oven. If Necessary, Skim Fat and Reduce Liquid. Bring to the Table and Serve.
All that first winter of Sundays without Samin, and several of the weekdays thereafter, we enjoyed a variety of tasty pot dishes: sugo over homemade pasta, braised short ribs in dashi, a pork-and-chili stew, braised duck legs, a vegetable tagine, coq au vin, beef stew, osso buco, and so on. After some practice, I found that two hours of so-called active cooking time followed by a few more of unattended simmering could produce three or four nights’ worth of good and—I don’t mind saying—occasionally exceptional home cooking. I’m counting leftovers; stews and braises are infinitely more delicious the second or third night.
But one Sunday afternoon that winter, while Isaac and I were at work in the kitchen, we cooked up a little experiment, a plan for a family dinner later that week that would constitute the precise negation of all the cooking we’d been doing to that point: “Microwave Night.” The deal was, we would each choose whatever entrée most appealed to us in the frozen-food case and make a dinner of them. How much time would we save? What would it cost? And what would the meal be like? Isaac saw it as a chance to indulge his desire for fast food. I was indulging a more journalistic curiosity.
So the next afternoon, after school, we drove to the Safeway, grabbed a shopping cart, and wheeled it down the long, chilly aisle of freezer cases holding the microwavable dinners. The choices were stupendous—almost stupefying, in fact. It took us more than twenty minutes just to decide among the bags of frozen Chinese stir-fry, the boxed Indian biryanis and curries, the fish-and-chip dinners, the multiflavored mac-and-cheese options, the Japanese gyoza and Indonesian satays, the Thai rice bowls, the old-timey Salisbury steaks, the roast-turkey and fried-chicken di
nners, the beef Stroganoff, the burritos and tacos and fully loaded hero sandwiches, the frozen garlic bread and sliders, and the cheeseburgers preinstalled on their frozen buns. There were whole product lines targeted at women trying to minimize their caloric intake, and others at men looking to maximize theirs (the “Hungry Man” promises “a full pound of great-tasting food”), and still others aimed at kids dreaming of an authentic fast-food restaurant experience at home. I hadn’t spent much time on this aisle in years, so had no idea just how many advances there had been in the technology of home-meal replacement. Every genre of fast food, every ethnic cuisine, every chain-restaurant menu item known to man and commerce now has its facsimile in the freezer case.
Judith was willing to go along with our dinner plans but declined to join us shopping for it. She had requested a frozen lasagna, and Isaac spotted a bright-red box of Stouffer’s that looked halfway appetizing. Dubious about eating meat under the circumstances, I first checked out a vegan “chicken cacciatore” entrée, but the lengthy list of ingredients—most of them ultraprocessed permutations of soy—put me off the mock meat. So I opted for an organic vegetable curry from Amy’s that seemed fairly straightforward in composition; at least, I recognized all the ingredients as food, which is saying a lot in this sector of the supermarket. Isaac agonized for a good long time, but his problem was the opposite of mine: There were just too many tempting entrées he wanted to try. Eventually it came down to a call between the bag of P. F. Chang’s Shanghai Style Beef stir-fry and Safeway’s own frozen French onion soup gratinée. I told him he could get them both, as well as some frozen molten (sic) chocolate cookie he’d been eyeing for dessert.
The total for the three of us came to $27—more than I would have expected. Some of the entrées, like Isaac’s stir-fry, promised to feed more than one person, but this seemed doubtful given the portion size. Later that week I went to the farmers’ market and found that with $27 I could easily buy a couple pounds of an inexpensive cut of grass-fed beef and enough vegetables to make a braise that would feed the three of us for at least one night and probably two. (The variable, as ever, is Isaac’s appetite.) So there was a price to pay for letting the team of P. F. Chang, Stouffer’s, Safeway, and Amy’s cook our dinner.
I don’t think it’s boastful of me to say that none of these entrées did anything to undermine my growing confidence in the kitchen. True, I don’t yet know how to engineer dishes that can withstand months in the freezer case, or figure out how to build little brown ice cubes of hoisin sauce, designed to liquefy just in time to coat the vegetables after they’ve defrosted but not a moment sooner. And nothing I learned from Samin could help me design the consecutive layers of cheese curds and croutons topping the chocolate-colored cylinder of frozen onion soup like a Don King fright wig.
So how did it all taste? A lot like airline food, if you can remember what that was like. All the entrées tasted remarkably similar, considering how far-flung the culinary inspirations. They were all salty and had that generic fast-food flavor, a sort of bouillon-y taste that probably can be traced to the “hydrolyzed vegetable protein” that several of the dishes contained. This is an ingredient-label euphemism for monosodium glutamate (MSG)—basically, a cheap way to boost the perception of umami. The dishes all tasted better on the first bite—when you might be tempted to think, Hey, not half bad!—than on the second or third, when those words would be unlikely to cross your mind. There is a short half-life to the taste of a frozen dinner, which I would peg somewhere around bite number three, after which the whole experience rapidly deteriorates.
Oh, but wait: I’ve skipped over the cooking, or not cooking, segment of our meal. Which you probably assumed, as I certainly did, would be nominal, and so not worth going into in this account. That is, after all, the reason people buy these frozen dinners in the first place, isn’t it? Well, if it is they’re sorely mistaken, because it took nearly an hour to get our entrées on the table. For one thing, you could only microwave one of them at a time, and we had four to defrost and heat, not counting the molten frozen cookie. Also, one of the packages warned that we would not get optimal results in the microwave: The various stages that made up the frozen brown rocket of onion soup would meld together pointlessly in the microwave. If we wanted the gratinée effect promised on the package, then we had to bake it in the oven (at 350˚F) for forty minutes. I could make onion soup from scratch in forty minutes!
Isaac didn’t want to wait that long, so we ended up taking turns standing in front of the microwave. Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking, but it is not enjoyable and surely not ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self and humanity.
Anyway, as soon as the first dish was hot, we swapped it out for the second, but by the time the fourth entrée was hot enough to eat, the first one had gotten cold and needed re-nuking. Isaac finally asked permission to start eating his onion soup before it got cold again. The advent of the microwave has not been a boon to table manners. He was already down to the bottom of his bowl when Judith’s lasagna emerged from the oven.
Microwave Night turned out to be one of the most disjointed family dinners we have had since Isaac was a toddler. The three of us never quite got to sit down at the table all at once. The best we could manage was to overlap for several minutes at a time, since one or another of us was constantly having to get up to check the microwave or the stovetop (where Isaac had moved his stir-fry after the microwave got backed up). All told, the meal took a total of thirty-seven minutes to defrost and heat up (not counting reheating), easily enough time to make a respectable homemade dinner. It made me think Harry Balzer might be right to attribute the triumph of this kind of eating to laziness and a lack of skills or confidence, or a desire to eat lots of different things, rather than to a genuine lack of time. That we hadn’t saved much of at all.
The fact that each of us was eating something different completely altered the experience of (speaking loosely) eating together. Beginning in the supermarket, the food industry had cleverly segmented us, by marketing a different kind of food to each demographic in the household (if I may so refer to my family), the better to sell us more of it. Individualism is always good for sales, sharing much less so. But the segmentation continued through the serial microwaving and the unsynchronized eating. At the table, we were each preoccupied with our own entrée, making sure it was hot and trying to decide how successfully it simulated the dish it purported to be and if we really liked it. Very little about this meal was shared; the single-serving portions served to disconnect us from one another, nearly as much as from the origins of this food, which, beyond the familiar logos, we could only guess at. Microwave Night was a notably individualistic experience, marked by centrifugal energies, a certain opaqueness, and, after it was all over, a remarkable quantity of trash. It was, in other words, a lot like modern life.
I thought about that at dinner the following night, when we sat down together to eat one of the pot dishes I’d made the previous Sunday. Duck, which I had braised following Samin’s recipe, with red wine and sweet spices in my new terra-cotta pot. Since the dish had been in the fridge since Sunday, it was easy to skim off the fat before putting the pot in the oven to reheat. By the time the sweet smells of allspice, juniper, and clove began to fill the house, Isaac and Judith had gravitated to the kitchen; I never had to call them to dinner. I brought the pot out to the table, and began serving everyone from it.
The energies working on the three of us at the dinner table this evening were the precise opposite
of the ones that had been loosed in the house on Microwave Night. The hot, fragrant casserole itself exerted a gravitational force, gathering us around it like a miniature hearth. It was no big deal, really, a family sharing a meal from a common pot on a weeknight, and yet at a time when so many of the forces working on a household are so individualistic and centrifugal—the screens, the consumer goods, the single-serving portions—it’s a wonder such a meal ever happens anymore. It certainly doesn’t have to, now that there are easier ways to feed a family.
There’s something about a slow-cooked dish that militates against eating it quickly, and we took our time with dinner. Isaac told us about his day; we told him about ours. For the first time all day, it felt like we were all on the same page, and though it would be overstating things to credit that feeling entirely to the delicious braise, it would also be wrong to think that eating the same thing from the same pot, this weeknight communion of the casserole, had nothing to do with it, either. Afterward, when I lifted the lid from the pot, I was glad to see there would be leftovers for lunch.
Part III
AIR
THE EDUCATION OF AN AMATEUR BAKER
“There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Bread is older than man.”
—old Albanian saying
I.
A Great White Loaf
One way to think about bread—and there are so many: as food or Food, matter and Spirit, commonplace, communion, metaphor, and medium (of exchange, transformation, sociality, etc.)—is simply this: as an ingenious technology for improving the flavor, digestibility, and nutritional value of grass. True, the technology doesn’t work for all grasses, mainly just wheat, and it really only works for the seeds of that particular grass, not the leaves or stems. So it’s not quite as ingenious as the ruminant’s system for processing grass. The cow carries around a whole other stomach for the sole purpose of fermenting all parts of all kinds of grass into usable food energy. Our single stomach can do no such thing, but when, about six thousand years ago, we learned how to leaven bread, we joined the grass eaters of the world in earnest, much to the benefit of our species (not to mention the grasses).