Home Cookery For The Junk-foodaholic

Paul Cooper — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:45:49 +0000

Ok, so you’ve read your Michael Pollan, bought The Art of Simple Food, and now you’re dedicated to the proposition that home-cooking is where it’s at. No more processed food for you. No, sir.

Ah, if only it were that easy. But let’s face it: we’re recovering addicts. Processed food is deliberately loaded with brain-pleasing salt and sugar. It comes in pretty packages and needs only to be emptied into a pot or warmed in the oven. Instant gratification never felt so good.

Hi, my name is Paul and I’m a junk-foodaholic. I fondly remember childhood buckets of KFC. Half the stuff I ate as a kid came from a can. In university the heady aroma of an Egg McMuffin seduced me on many a hungover morning. Junk food still tempts me, as does any sort of processed, packaged, preserved, bottled, instant food that is going to save me precious time in the kitchen.

So what are some possible coping strategies for recovering junk-foodaholics like me?

Be nice to yourself. If you made one fabulous, home-cooked dinner this week and ate crap the other six days, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, try saying: “Well done, me. I could have eaten crap all week long, but I didn’t. I made that one great meal.” Prepackaged, processed foods have been such a marketing success in recent decades because people are busy. It’s really, really hard sometimes to make the time to cook. So pat yourself on the back when you do. Emphasize the positive and don’t be rigid about those resolutions.
Keep it fun. I don’t love cooking all the time. Which is why I usually try to emphasize meals that are dead simple and easy. By not boring or exhausting myself on a daily basis, I find I’m much more likely to go for that genuinely entertaining feast once and a while. You know, the kind where you try something new (occasionally requiring exotic ingredients or a new kitchen toy) and impress whomever you’re sharing it with. Those memorable occasions are the ones that keep me coming back for more. Last summer, for example, I made cherry pie from fresh, whole organic cherries. Pitting the cherries by hand made it an epic five-hour undertaking, which I’m not likely to repeat, but I can still taste that pie, and it still makes me happy to think about it.
Stick to it and gradually learn. Everybody can follow a recipe, so it’s sometimes easy for me to forget what a complex skill cooking is. In the early days of my effort to do more home cooking I had the added stress of not knowing anything about anything. Didn’t know what ingredients or spices to use. Didn’t know what any of the kitchen gear was for. Total ignorance. My only hope was to follow a recipe the way a contractor follows a blueprint. I know now what a drag that was. I couldn’t do anything quickly, and I couldn’t improvise. The point is that it gets a lot—a lot—easier to make good food from scratch over time. Eventually, you’ll be doing everything unconsciously and it’ll be almost as fast and easy as dumping the canned soup in the pot. So stick with it.
Get inspired. Inevitably, there will be times when enthusiasm wanes. Watching hilarious old Julia Child clips on YouTube or picking up an entertaining food book are great ways to rekindle interest. Here are three titles (we’ll take Michael P. as read) I can suggest off the top of my head: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Swindled by Bee Wilson, and Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis. If you’re a twitterer, following the @Jambutter/ProFood list will provide you with interesting food and food politics links. Feed your mind and the stomach will follow.

It’s become an axiom of food politics that progress in a free marketplace is going to require a resurgence in home cooking. The dollar-votes of people who know how to cook are what we’re all counting on to help reform our entire food system from the laboratories of Monsanto to the farmer’s field to restaurants, to distributors and grocery stores. Good food has always been a pleasure. Now it’s a cause as well.

It’d be nice if cooking became something we all encouraged each other to do. It’s good for our health, good for our relationships, and good for the planet. How many pleasurable activities are there that you can so readily say that about? I don’t know about you, but I like the chances of a political movement that’s solidly based on hedonism.

Now…what am I going to make for dinner tonight?

Why Did We Start Eating Junk?

Paul Cooper — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:59:20 +0000

I like to think that the slow food/good food/real food movement (or whatever you want to call it) partly owes its success to the weird diet, the fallout-shelter “food” many of us grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. It all had one thing in common: left to its own devices, it would take months to decompose.

This diet, at least as I remember it in my household, consisted of canned everything, and instant everything. The first time I tasted frozen peas in early adulthood I remember thinking they didn’t taste very good. I had only ever known the pea in its dark, mushy, semi-fermented, straight-from-the-can incarnation. Other household standbys beside canned veggies included Shake’n'Bake chicken, Kraft Dinner, hot dogs on white Wonder Bread buns, and something we called rice and meat sauce.

"Wonder Bread Helps Catch Boys!" 1968

Here’s the recipe for rice and meat sauce: Fry up some ground beef, mix in some spaghetti sauce from a can or jar, dump this on top of a bed of white Minute Rice, and serve. It was my brother’s favorite dish.

Why were we eating this way? Had the evil geniuses in food industry marketing departments talked us into it?

Monty Python did a spoof on marketing back in the ’70s, in which a salesman finds himself with a big box full of short bits of string, and must come up with clever ways to position them. “Simpson’s Individual Stringettes!” he cries. “A million household uses!” This soon gets upgraded to, “pre-sliced, rustproof, easy-to-handle, low-calorie Simpson’s Individual Emperor Stringettes, free from artificial coloring, as used in hospitals!” Marketing is like that. Sometimes the producers are trying to foist something on you. On the other hand, sometimes they’re just eagerly attempting to stay abreast of a burgeoning, consumer-driven demand.

The food movement, as represented by Michael Pollan, often speaks of the food industry as an entity that has sold us on highly profitable processed goods. No doubt there’s plenty of truth in that. But I can clearly remember the pre-modern grocery store. I remember that it had plenty of raw materials on offer, as well as legions of grannies who still knew how to keep the butcher and the produce department manager honest. My family bought the cheap, canned, boxed, processed goods mainly because they required extremely little preparation. And why was that important? Well, for the obvious reason that both my parents had to work.

So we demanded those cheap, convenient processed foods. It was all we were eating. The more processed foods the food industry came up with, the greater the variety at the dinner table. And yes, our family also swallowed all that debunked nutritionist propaganda about fat being the great killer. We believed that so long as we were popping multivitamins and so long as we weren’t eating eggs fried in bacon grease for breakfast every morning, the processed food would take care of our nutritional needs just fine.

It’s certainly convenient to refer to the “food industry” as though there has been one guy in a suit running the whole show for the past forty years, pushing the highly processed food on an unsuspecting public. But when I reflect on food culture and what’s wrong with it, I can’t help thinking of my upbringing, and wondering if maybe the foodies have glossed over first causes.

Consider this: My parents generation was the first in memory that didn’t stand a chance of prospering without two incomes. Almost at the same historical moment that having a career became an option for all women, it became necessary for both parents to work in order to get by. And the food has been mostly crap ever since. If there are dark forces at work here, it has to do with more than just the food industry. Somewhere along the line families saw their workload doubled—without a corresponding increase in wealth and happiness. Perhaps that’s a better explanation for the modern diet.

Conscious Cook » nutrition

Home Cookery For The Junk-foodaholic

Why Did We Start Eating Junk?