What even is the point of cooking at home? This has been a non-question for most humans,
because for most of human history, the only person who was gonna turn this into this into
this was you. "I prepare food because I want to eat" — that's been all of the reasoning
most humans who've ever lived have ever needed. From our hunter-gatherer life, to our agrarian
life, and even into much of our industrial life, the only person who was gonna feed you
was most likely gonna be you or someone in your immediate social group.
But now, for people like me living in highly-developed, post-industrial economies, "Because I want
to eat" is probably one of the weakest reasons for cooking, in my opinion. We live in a world
where this chicken costs about the same as this chicken from the same store. And in this
world, I think it really pays to interrogate why we would buy this one.
Field trip to Oxford — not that Oxford — Oxford, Georgia, where Dr. Deric Shannon is a sociology
professor at Oxford College of Emory University. He specializes in things like political economy
and teaches a course here that's quite relevant to our discussion.
"The sociology of food course that I designed is a part of what Oxford College calls our
theory practice/service leaning program. Part of what my students do is work here on Oxford's
organic farm."
Look at this place — even in the middle of February it's beautiful. The apple trees
over here are blooming, they've got all these garlic and onions and cabbage going. But anyway,
if you ask Dr. Shannon "What's the point of cooking at home these days," the first thing
he says is...
"...because it's an enjoyable and desirable activity. Some people like cooking, just like
some people like knitting when you can go buy a sweater for cheaper than the materials
that it might take."
Indeed, the first good reason for cooking at home is: Because it's fun. This is, in
my view, an unassailable reason for doing anything that isn't particularly harmful to
others, or harmful to your long-term fun-having capacity.
I recently put out a recipe for French macaroons in which I encouraged people to loosen their
expectations about how these things should look. If you just care about how they taste,
and leave the cosmetics up to fate, they become as easy to make as they are delicious.
But if you derive pleasure from working to create cosmetically "perfect" macarons, I
think that's great — you have my blessing, not that you asked for it.
My argument is only this: If it's making you miserable to try to create perfectly round
smooth domes with perfect little ruffled feet, then stop. Make the ugly ones, or buy the
beautiful ones.
Also, maybe try to think a little more critically about whether the things that you do really
do make you happy. This is something I try really hard to do, especially with regard
to my creative work.
Am I struggling to make this thing because I enjoy the challenge?
Good reason!
Am I struggling to make this thing because I'll learn something valuable from the struggle?
Good reason! Part of the reason I've spent so much time and effort trying to recreate
the New York-style pizza from my youth was pure curiosity. I wanted to understand, on
a tactile level, what makes that stuff taste the way it does.
Am I working to make this thing because the end product will give me joy?
Good reason! I think this chicken tastes way better than this chicken.
Am going through hell to make this thing because someone will give me money for it at the end?
You gotta paid, son!
Am I slaving over this thing because it will make someone else happy?
Really good reason! Maybe the best reason.
Am I killing myself on this thing because I think it will impress someone?
Hmm, not such a good reason, in my opinion.
Look, this is a conversation about the meaning of life we're having here, so reasonable people
are gonna disagree. But in my view, cooking should be about nourishing and nurturing people,
including yourself. It should be about giving people pleasure, including yourself.
And while you might be able to make yourself happy by dazzling people with yours skills,
I would question whether that's in the interest of your long-term happiness, or maybe your
deeper, more meaningful happiness. And I would definitely wonder if it might be pleasure
that you are taking at someone else's expense.
This phenomenon was brilliantly crystalized in the 2010 South Park episode...
"Crème Fraîche."
I can't play too much of it for you without angering the copyright gods, but you should
go watch it. The Hulu link is in the description.
"Every time you watch cooking shows, you stay up all night trying to copy what they made!"
"Well I'm sorry if there's something wrong with me helping out with the cooking!"
"Can I have a Pop-Tart?"
So in this instance, the "harm" is relatively mild, right? It's annoyance. Randy's family
is annoyed that he is flexing on them rather than providing them with the food they actually
want to eat, and they are annoyed that he is filling the house with misery and stress
and dirty dishes in the process.
Mild harm. I do think that there's some more serious, or pernicious harm associated with
this phenomenon.
"One of the things that sociologists of food study is how a range of relations of inequality
are embedded in our food supply chain, and that's not just buying — it also includes
preparing, cooking, and so on. And it's not very difficult to find differentials in who
has to cook and who gets to cook and when, who gets prestige in the act of cooking and
who doesn't, and so on."
Right. Who is a "chef," who is a "cook," and who is a "food service worker," and is the
difference people those people really as stark as their different social and economic statuses
would indicate? I don't think it necessarily is, and I think that when we cook to display
our prowess we maybe reinforce the social attitudes that contribute toward that inequity.
At the very least we look like total tools.
"Uhhh."
By the way, I want to acknowledge that I am guilty of everything I'm decrying right here.
I am hardly without sin, and I am throwing stones — I'm throwing them right at myself.
But anyway, if we're going to talk about potential harm to others, there's way more concrete
material we can cover, right? Like does cooking at home do more or less to damage or deplete
our planet's biosphere and the people who live in it?
There's an argument you could make that buying prepared foods, from a store or from a restaurant,
is less taxing on the world's resources, simply because of the economies of scale — the
efficiency of mass production.
"Well, I mean, there's a few counter-arguments. One, economists often-times view economic
models as if humans are these, sort of, rational, utility-maximizing machines. In which case,
then, of course, it's going to be cheaper to buy something off of the dollar menu, in
terms of both money and time, than to buy an organic spread that you go home and good,
right? But what if we talked about cooking some set of processed foods that are super
soy-heavy, right? The cost of cooking that is gonna be quite different in energy, than
the cost of cooking something that was organically grown on this farm right here. Those calculations,
then, are gonna look quite different. It might be better for me to go buy an organic meal
than cook at home a meal with processed goods with, you know, a whole lot of mono-crap — mono-cropped..."
Wait, what did he say there? Mono-what?
"You know, a whole lot of mono-crap."
Sorry, I just think mono-crap is a pretty funny Freudian slip. Because there's an argument
that says: A lot of the cheap prepared foods we buy are not cheap because they're economically
or environmentally efficient to produce. They're cheap because they're government subsidized.
Like corn — corn is hugely subsidized here in the United States. And while there may
be legitimate policy motives behind those subsidies — or totally craven political
motives — it is also true that corn and similar crops are heavy on calories but light
on other nutrition, and yeah, they're also the big mono-craps — I mean crops.
"Monocrop means that you're trying to grow a certain crop and, you know, that form of
farming is designed in such a way to kill anything that could get in the way of growing
this single cash crop. That leads, then, to losses of biodiversity and things like that."
So yeah, the environmental calculation is tough, and science shows us how realty can
often be very different from what you would intuitively expect.
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That whole issue of food waste leads to the next good reason for cooking at home: Because
it's cheaper. Is it cheaper? It absolutely can be cheaper, but it depends on what you're
cooking, and it depends on how much of it you're cooking, and it depends on whether
or not you're minimizing waste.
Take coq au vin — chicken stewed in wine — one of the great peasant stews of French
cuisine. It's a meal born of rural poverty, not of courtly opulence, as is the case of
lots of other French classic.
You can totally cook this at home for less money than you would pay at your local bistro,
but not if you're just trying to make one or two portions.
Efficiency is achieved with scale. In a restaurant, they achieve scale by making a few different
dishes for a whole ton of people every night. In your kitchen, you achieve scale by making
a big batch of one thing and eating many meals from it, especially if you're just feeding
yourself or a small family.
Or maybe you achieve scale by buying a lot of one ingredient, and then making a bunch
of slightly different meals from it. Regardless, you can't expect the same level of variety
that you would get if you were eating out at a restaurant for every meal, and you certainly
can't expect to follow every single recipe to the letter if you want to eat cheaply.
Like coq au vin is cheap to make, but not if you buy the $6 bottle of Herbes de Provence
that the recipe calls for and then push it to the back of your cabinet and never cook
with it again.
You gotta get comfortable with using the fresh rosemary you do have instead of the Herbes
de Provence you don't have. Or if you do get the Herbs de Provence, you gotta get used
to the idea of, down the road, using it in that recipe that calls for poultry seasoning.
Substitutions minimize waste, and minimizing waste saves you money.
That's why good recipes don't just tell you what to do. They tell you why, thus empowering
you to think for yourself, and you can be like, "Oh, OK, I don't have that, but I've
got this other thing that could potentially perform the same function." That's what's
really going to help you to cook efficiently and to save money by cooking at home. End
of Home Ec lecture. Let's go back to sociology class.
The final, and perhaps most important reason to cook your own food is to forge and maintain
social bonds.
"Some people use the term commensality for people cooking and eating together. Food is
related integrally to our sense of community, and in some cases our sense of identity, which
might be another reason why people would choose to cook. 'I can cook X thing in a way, and
it expresses as sense of who I am, and it fits the sense of taste that I was raised
to develop, right?"
Take me. I'm half third-generation Italian-American, half general-issue Euro-American mutt — that's
my mom's side. I live a thousand miles from my parents and my brother and everyone I grew
up with. Thanks to technological change, I live my life very differently from how my
grandparents lived their's, and compared to their grandparents, I might as well be a freaking
martian.
What keeps me clinging to the tattered shreds of a cross-generational cultural identity
I have left is food. It's cooking. It's the things my dad taught me to cook. It's the
things I will teach my boys to cook. The stove is the shrine where I convene with my ancestors.
Laugh if you want to, but a big sloppy Italian-American red sauce is the continuity of my life.
Me, my forebears and my descendants — we're all meatballs swimming in that sauce. The
sauce makes me feel not-so-bad about being at the statistical midpoint of my life. The
sauce is tangible evidence that something of my grandparents' life lives on, and that
something of my life will live on. Yes, it will change. It will mutate. It will hybridize.
It will adapt as it should. Hopefully it'll get better, but it will go on.
Cooking gives us those connections, to say nothing of the connections that it helps us
forge with other people's cultures. That's why I cook at home. Tell me why you do.