For a while now I’ve often wondered if I’m overreacting, or whether the problem I see with my generation is real…
It seems like more and more people in my age group love to eat gourmet food and watch the pretty people flipping and whisking and tossing food around on the shiny, happy Food Network machine. Yet, for all this love of celebrity chefs, gourmet kitchens and cooking culture, fewer people actually do any home cooking, or even know how to, for that matter.
In my opinion, it’s an alarming sign of the times that the popularity of meal assembly kitchens is drastically increasing. These innocuous-seeming “cooking” centres make people believe they’re cooking, as they stumble aimlessly from station to station to assemble the ingredients of a pre-posted recipe from little containers of mise en place. It is to real cooking what paint by numbers is to the Mona Lisa. The quick and easy defence of these establishments is the same old saw about modern people leading busy lives, etc, etc, but that can only hold so much salt. Meal preparation and nourishment will only be important to my generation (or the ones that come after it) if they make it important by declaring it a priority. People say they have no time to cook, yet they’ll happily spend hours zoned out in front of a television or computer screen, or wasting countless time on social networking utilities, which are one of the most ironic inventions. Everyone spends less time having face to face conversations with the people they care about, and more time isolated with their gadgets and trinkets communicating in LOLspeak. Yeah, I can totally see how that would be considered “social”… (eyeroll)
I attribute that change in social dynamics to the decline of the home-cooked family meal. The dinner table used to be the central area in any household for family to gather and discuss the day’s events over a hot meal, but how many people even eat at a table together, anymore? Without that daily interaction, we’re raising a generation of kids who can’t properly communicate or carry on a decent conversation, nevermind manage to cook on their own. Or worse yet, the old Sex and the City joke about Carrie using her stove as storage space never seemed to be met by the appropriate response (how sad) but instead by the giggles of women thinking to themselves, how quaint. The reality is, if she’d eaten all of her meals outside of the home instead of cooking for herself, she’d probably be closer to 300 pounds; but that image is not quite as “sexy”. They laugh because culturally we’ve rebelled against the idea of cooking being women’s work by leaving the household and holding down full time jobs of our own instead, but cooking isn’t “women’s work”, it’s everyone’s work! The injustice of it all is that by rejecting cooking in favour of working, we’ve actually helped to create a generation of kids that don’t know how to cook, because they never experienced it at home. Such a travesty.
The funniest thing is that people are fatter and lazier and unhealthier than ever, yet so few people see the correlation between taking the time to prepare food for themselves and living a healthier lifestyle. Food prepared outside of the home is more likely to contain preservatives, chemicals and additives (like Twinkies) that you may not know anything about, but if you read food labels, you already know that. Better yet, it just makes sense to buy food that doesn’t need to have a label (like whole foods) because then you know they have less additives. When you take the time to cook for yourself, you have the choice to bypass all of those unhealthy extras, whereas you are bloody helpless and at the mercy of a food company if you buy something prepared. The bottom line? Cook for yourself and you are as in control of what you put into your body as you want to be. Leave it up to someone else and who knows what you’ll get, because the truth is they probably don’t have your best interests at heart, they just want to make money.
40 years ago home cooking and baking was still a pretty commonplace activity in most households. Nowadays when I mention to friends that I bake, or jar my own slow-cooked tomato sauce, I’m met with an equal mixture of awe and confusion. It is so far outside of their realm of experience or knowledge anymore that they just can’t imagine taking the time or making the effort to do these things on their own. And in the rare cases that they could, they don’t seem to have the faintest idea where to start. It’s a shame too, because preparing even the simplest meals now seems to be so sadly esoteric to a great swath of my generation. I’m not immune to this scenario either, as the Everyman only knows how to make 3 chicken dishes (plus grilled cheese) which practically guarantees that if I want a home-cooked meal I’m liable to have to make it myself.
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