1. JULIA’S CHILDREN
I was only 8 when “The French Chef” first appeared on American
television in 1963, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this
Julia Child
had improved the quality of life around our house. My mother began
cooking dishes she’d watched Julia cook on TV: boeuf bourguignon (the
subject of the show’s first episode), French onion soup gratinée, duck
à l’orange, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat. Some of the more ambitious
dishes, like the duck or the mousse, were pointed toward weekend
company, but my mother would usually test these out on me and my
sisters earlier in the week, and a few of the others — including the
boeuf bourguignon, which I especially loved — actually made it into
heavy weeknight rotation. So whenever people talk about how Julia Child
upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively. I owe
her. Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV
dinners, and those were pretty good, too.
Every so often I would watch “The French Chef” with my mother in the
den. On WNET in New York, it came on late in the afternoon, after
school, and because we had only one television back then, if Mom wanted
to watch her program, you watched it, too. The show felt less like TV
than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly
exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor,
which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough)
but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the
squeal of an oven door in need of WD-40, all the kitchen-chemistry-set
spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast
uncut and unedited, so it had a vérité feel completely unlike anything
you might see today on the Food Network, with its A.D.H.D. editing and
hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia
waited for the butter foam to subside in the sauté pan, you waited,
too, precisely as long, listening to Julia’s improvised patter over the
hiss of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips
and lore. It all felt more like life than TV, though Julia’s voice was
like nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python
came to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly
suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC
supposedly took “The French Chef” off the air because viewers wrote in
complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented.
Meryl Streep, who brings Julia Child vividly back to the screen in Nora Ephron’s
charming new comedy, “Julie & Julia,” has the voice down, and with
the help of some clever set design and cinematography, she manages to
evoke too Child’s big-girl ungainliness — the woman was 6 foot 2 and
had arms like a longshoreman. Streep also captures the deep sensual
delight that Julia Child took in food — not just the eating of it (her
virgin bite of sole meunière at La Couronne in Rouen recalls Meg Ryan’s
deli orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally”) but the fondling and
affectionate slapping of ingredients in their raw state and the magic
of their kitchen transformations.
But “Julie & Julia” is more than an exercise in nostalgia. As
the title suggests, the film has a second, more contemporary heroine.
The Julie character (played by Amy Adams)
is based on Julie Powell, a 29-year-old aspiring writer living in
Queens who, casting about for a blog conceit in 2002, hit on a cool
one: she would cook her way through all 524 recipes in Child’s
“Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 365 days and blog about her
adventures. The movie shuttles back and forth between Julie’s year of
compulsive cooking and blogging in Queens in 2002 and Julia’s decade in
Paris and Provence a half-century earlier, as recounted in “My Life in
France,” the memoir published a few years after her death in 2004.
Julia Child in 1949 was in some ways in the same boat in which Julie
Powell found herself in 2002: happily married to a really nice guy but
feeling, acutely, the lack of a life project. Living in Paris, where
her husband, Paul Child, was posted in the diplomatic corps, Julia (who
like Julie had worked as a secretary) was at a loss as to what to do
with her life until she realized that what she liked to do best was
eat. So she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and learned how to cook. As with
Julia, so with Julie: cooking saved her life, giving her a project and,
eventually, a path to literary success.
That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any
kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so
thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s
legacy. Julie Powell operates in a world that Julia Child helped to
create, one where food is taken seriously, where chefs have been
welcomed into the repertory company of American celebrity and where
cooking has become a broadly appealing mise-en-scène in which success
stories can plausibly be set and played out. How amazing is it that we
live today in a culture that has not only something called the Food
Network but now a hit show on that network called “The Next Food
Network Star,” which thousands of 20- and 30-somethings compete eagerly
to become? It would seem we have come a long way from Swanson TV
dinners.
The Food Network can now be seen in nearly 100 million American
homes and on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable
news channels. Millions of Americans, including my 16-year-old son, can
tell you months after the finale which contestant emerged victorious in
Season 5 of “Top Chef” (Hosea Rosenberg, followed by Stefan Richter,
his favorite, and Carla Hall). The popularity of cooking shows — or
perhaps I should say food shows — has spread beyond the precincts of public or cable television to the broadcast networks, where Gordon Ramsay
terrorizes newbie chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen” on Fox and Jamie Oliver is
preparing a reality show on ABC in which he takes aim at an American
city with an obesity problem and tries to teach the population how to
cook. It’s no wonder that a Hollywood studio would conclude that
American audiences had an appetite for a movie in which the road to
personal fulfillment and public success passes through the kitchen and
turns, crucially, on a recipe for boeuf bourguignon. (The secret is to
pat dry your beef before you brown it.)
But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch
other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to
brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of
cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse
and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically,
coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the
decline and fall of everyday home cooking.
That decline has several causes: women working outside the home;
food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and
advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking
is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that
has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the
culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject.
It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give
up talking about it — and watching it.
Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food
preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half
the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on
our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to
watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food
Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are
spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on
television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic
activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.
What is wrong with this picture?
2. THE COURAGE TO FLIP
When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to
her, she explained that “for so many of us she took the fear out of
cooking” and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato
show (or, as Julia pronounced it, “the poh-TAY-toh show!”), one of the
episodes that Meryl Streep recreates brilliantly on screen. Millions of
Americans of a certain age claim to remember Julia Child dropping a
chicken or a goose on the floor, but the memory is apocryphal: what she
dropped was a potato pancake, and it didn’t quite make it to the floor.
Still, this was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any
modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than
let such an outtake ever see the light of day.
The episode has Julia making a plate-size potato pancake, sautéing a
big disc of mashed potato into which she has folded impressive
quantities of cream and butter. Then the fateful moment arrives:
“When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your
convictions,” she declares, clearly a tad nervous at the prospect, and
then gives the big pancake a flip. On the way down, half of it catches
the lip of the pan and splats onto the stovetop. Undaunted, Julia
scoops the thing up and roughly patches the pancake back together,
explaining: “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the
way I should have. You can always pick it up.” And then, looking right
through the camera as if taking us into her confidence, she utters the
line that did so much to lift the fear of failure from my mother and
her contemporaries: “If you’re alone in the kitchen, WHOOOO” — the
pronoun is sung — “is going to see?” For a
generation of women eager to transcend their mothers’ recipe box (and
perhaps, too, their mothers’ social standing), Julia’s little kitchen
catastrophe was a liberation and a lesson: “The only way you learn to
flip things is just to flip them!”
It was a kind of courage — not only to
cook but to cook the world’s most glamorous and intimidating cuisine —
that Julia Child gave my mother and so many other women like her, and
to watch her empower viewers in episode after episode is to appreciate
just how much about cooking on television — not to mention cooking
itself — has changed in the years since “The French Chef” was on the
air.
There are still cooking programs that will teach you how to cook.
Public television offers the eminently useful “America’s Test Kitchen.”
The Food Network carries a whole slate of so-called dump-and-stir shows
during the day, and the network’s research suggests that at least some
viewers are following along. But many of these programs — I’m thinking
of Rachael Ray, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee — tend to be aimed at
stay-at-home moms who are in a hurry and eager to please. (“How good
are you going to look when you serve this?” asks Paula Deen, a Southern
gal of the old school.) These shows stress quick results, shortcuts and
superconvenience but never the sort of pleasure — physical and mental —
that Julia Child took in the work of cooking: the tomahawking of a fish
skeleton or the chopping of an onion, the Rolfing of butter into the
breast of a raw chicken or the vigorous whisking of heavy cream. By the
end of the potato show, Julia was out of breath and had broken a sweat,
which she mopped from her brow with a paper towel. (Have you ever seen
Martha Stewart break a sweat? Pant? If so,
you know her a lot better than the rest of us.) Child was less
interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because
cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a
gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the
muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you
did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the
impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child
did. In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of
the women who have followed her on television.
Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan
published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of
American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery,
indeed as a form of oppression. You may think of these two figures as
antagonists, but that wouldn’t be quite right. They actually had a
great deal in common, as Child’s biographer, Laura Shapiro, points out,
and addressed the aspirations of many of the same women. Julia never
referred to her viewers as “housewives” — a word she detested — and
never condescended to them. She tried to show the sort of women who
read “The Feminine Mystique” that, far from oppressing them, the work
of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of
fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s
too.) Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender
politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex” that
though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of
“revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in
a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one
must have the gift.” This can be read either as a special Frenchie
exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c’est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.
3. TO THE KITCHEN STADIUM
Whichever, kitchen work itself has changed considerably since 1963,
judging from its depiction on today’s how-to shows. Take the concept of
cooking from scratch. Many of today’s cooking programs rely
unapologetically on ingredients that themselves contain lots of
ingredients: canned soups, jarred mayonnaise, frozen vegetables,
powdered sauces, vanilla wafers, limeade concentrate, Marshmallow
Fluff. This probably shouldn’t surprise us: processed foods have so
thoroughly colonized the American kitchen and diet that they have
redefined what passes today for cooking, not to mention food. Many of
these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation;
the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food
marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff. So the
shows encourage home cooks to take all manner of shortcuts, each of
which involves buying another product, and all of which taken together
have succeeded in redefining what is commonly meant by the verb “to
cook.”
I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone
with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained
that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their
grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a
frozen pizza.” Balzer has been studying American eating habits since
1978; the NPD Group, the firm he works for, collects data from a pool
of 2,000 food diaries to track American eating habits. Years ago Balzer
noticed that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had
grown so broad as to be meaningless, so the firm tightened up the
meaning of “to cook” at least slightly to capture what was really going
on in American kitchens. To cook from scratch, they decreed, means to
prepare a main dish that requires some degree of “assembly of
elements.” So microwaving a pizza doesn’t count as cooking, though
washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does.
Under this dispensation, you’re also cooking when you spread mayonnaise
on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty.
(Currently the most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner,
is a sandwich; the No. 1 accompanying beverage is a soda.) At least by
Balzer’s none-too-exacting standard, Americans are still cooking up a
storm — 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that
figure has been falling steadily since the 1980s.
Like most people who study consumer behavior, Balzer has developed a
somewhat cynical view of human nature, which his research suggests is
ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, optimally, both. I
kept asking him what his research had to say about the prevalence of
the activity I referred to as “real scratch
cooking,” but he wouldn’t touch the term. Why? Apparently the activity
has become so rarefied as to elude his tools of measurement.
“Here’s an analogy,” Balzer said. “A hundred years ago, chicken for
dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a
chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be
considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your
grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other
choice. Get over it.”
After my discouraging hour on the phone with Balzer, I settled in
for a couple more with the Food Network, trying to square his dismal
view of our interest in cooking with the hyperexuberant, even
fetishized images of cooking that are presented on the screen. The Food
Network undergoes a complete change of personality at night, when it
trades the cozy precincts of the home kitchen and chirpy softball
coaching of Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee for something markedly less
feminine and less practical. Erica Gruen, the cable executive often
credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late ’90s,
recognized early on that, as she told a journalist, “people don’t watch
television to learn things.” So she shifted the network’s target
audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a
considerably larger universe and one that — important for a cable
network — happens to contain a great many more men.
In prime time, the Food Network’s mise-en-scène shifts to masculine
arenas like the Kitchen Stadium on “Iron Chef,” where famous restaurant
chefs wage gladiatorial combat to see who can, in 60 minutes, concoct
the most spectacular meal from a secret ingredient ceremoniously
unveiled just as the clock starts: an octopus or a bunch of bananas or
a whole school of daurade. Whether in the Kitchen Stadium or on
“Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star” or, over on Bravo, “Top
Chef,” cooking in prime time is a form of athletic competition, drawing
its visual and even aural vocabulary from “Monday Night Football.” On
“Iron Chef America,” one of the Food Network’s biggest hits, the
cookingcaster Alton Brown delivers a breathless (though always gently
tongue-in-cheek) play by play and color commentary, as the iron chefs
and their team of iron sous-chefs race the clock to peel, chop, slice,
dice, mince, Cuisinart, mandoline, boil, double-boil, pan-sear, sauté, sous vide,
deep-fry, pressure-cook, grill, deglaze, reduce and plate — this last a
word I’m old enough to remember when it was a mere noun. A particularly
dazzling display of chefly “knife skills” — a term bandied as freely on
the Food Network as “passing game” or “slugging percentage” is on ESPN — will earn an instant replay: an onion minced in slo-mo. Can we get a camera on this, Alton Brown will ask in a hushed, this-must-be-golf tone of voice. It
looks like Chef Flay’s going to try for a last-minute garnish grab
before the clock runs out! Will he make it? [The buzzer sounds.] Yes!
These shows move so fast, in such a blur of flashing knives, frantic
pantry raids and more sheer fire than you would ever want to see in
your own kitchen, that I honestly can’t tell you whether that
“last-minute garnish grab” happened on “Iron Chef America” or “Chopped”
or “The Next Food Network Star” or whether it was Chef Flay or Chef
Batali who snagged the sprig of foliage at the buzzer. But impressive
it surely was, in the same way it’s impressive to watch a handful of
eager young chefs on “Chopped” figure out how to make a passable
appetizer from chicken wings, celery, soba noodles and a package of
string cheese in just 20 minutes, said starter to be judged by a panel
of professional chefs on the basis of “taste, creativity and
presentation.” (If you ask me, the key to victory on any of these shows
comes down to one factor: bacon. Whichever contestant puts bacon in the
dish invariably seems to win.)
But you do have to wonder how easily so specialized a set of skills
might translate to the home kitchen — or anywhere else for that matter.
For when in real life are even professional chefs required to conceive
and execute dishes in 20 minutes from ingredients selected by a third
party exhibiting obvious sadistic tendencies? (String cheese?)
Never, is when. The skills celebrated on the Food Network in prime time
are precisely the skills necessary to succeed on the Food Network in
prime time. They will come in handy nowhere else on God’s green earth.
We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not
things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow; the contests
fly by much too fast for viewers to take in any practical tips; and the
kind of cooking practiced in prime time is far more spectacular than
anything you would ever try at home. No, for anyone hoping to pick up a
few dinnertime tips, the implicit message of today’s prime-time cooking
shows is, Don’t try this at home. If you
really want to eat this way, go to a restaurant. Or as a chef friend
put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about
cooking by watching the Food Network, “How much do you learn about
playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?”
What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is
culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out
of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of
ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!)
Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about
food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of
high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous
consumption. (I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves. . . .)
Surely it’s no accident that so many Food Network stars have
themselves found a way to transcend barriers of social class in the
kitchen — beginning with Emeril Lagasse, the working-class guy from
Fall River, Mass., who, though he may not be able to sound the ‘r’ in
“garlic,” can still cook like a dream. Once upon a time Julia made the
same promise in reverse: she showed you how you, too, could cook like
someone who could not only prepare but properly pronounce a béarnaise.
So-called fancy food has always served as a form of cultural capital,
and cooking programs help you acquire it, now without so much as
lifting a spatula. The glamour of food has made it something of a class
leveler in America, a fact that many of these shows implicitly
celebrate. Television likes nothing better than to serve up elitism to
the masses, paradoxical as that might sound. How wonderful is it that
something like arugula can at the same time be a mark of sophistication
and be found in almost every salad bar in America? Everybody wins!
But the shift from producing food on television to consuming it
strikes me as a far-less-salubrious development. Traditionally, the
recipe for the typical dump-and-stir program comprises about 80 percent
cooking followed by 20 percent eating, but in prime time you now find a
raft of shows that flip that ratio on its head, like “The Best Thing I
Ever Ate” and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” which are about nothing but
eating. Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who
hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” ducks into the kitchen whenever he
visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with
the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time he’s
wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations: a 16-ounce Oh
Gawd! burger (with the works); battered and deep-fried anything
(clams, pickles, cinnamon buns, stuffed peppers, you name it); or a
buttermilk burrito approximately the size of his head, stuffed with
bacon, eggs and cheese. What Fieri’s critical vocabulary lacks in
analytical rigor, it more than makes up for in tailgate enthusiasm:
“Man, oh man, now this is what I’m talkin’ about!” What can possibly be the appeal of watching Guy Fieri bite, masticate and swallow all this chow?
The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest
in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it —
surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also
has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually
overtakes anything in television’s orbit. It’s no accident that Julia
Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it
used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually
inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal
would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off
the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at
least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the
food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients
(unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual
supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich
sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French
fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red
Lobster.
Buying, not making, is what cooking shows are mostly now about —
that and, increasingly, cooking shows themselves: the whole
self-perpetuating spectacle of competition, success and celebrity that,
with “The Next Food Network Star,” appears to have entered its baroque
phase. The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about
what’s cooking than who’s cooking. A few years ago, Mario Batali neatly
summed up the network’s formula to a reporter: “Look, it’s TV! Everyone
has to fall into a niche. I’m the Italian guy. Emeril’s the exuberant
New Orleans guy with the big eyebrows who yells a lot. Bobby’s the
grilling guy. Rachael Ray is the cheerleader-type girl who makes things
at home the way a regular person would. Giada’s the beautiful girl with
the nice rack who does simple Italian food. As silly as the whole Food
Network is, it gives us all a soapbox to talk about the things we care
about.” Not to mention a platform from which to sell all their stuff.
The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you
do into something you watch — into yet another confection of spectacle
and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch. The formula is as
circular and self-reinforcing as a TV dinner: a simulacrum of home
cooking that is sold on TV and designed to be eaten in front of the TV.
True, in the case of the Swanson rendition, at least you get something
that will fill you up; by comparison, the Food Network leaves you
hungry, a condition its advertisers must love. But in neither case is
there much risk that you will get off the couch and actually cook a
meal. Both kinds of TV dinner plant us exactly where television always
wants us: in front of the set, watching.
4. WATCHING WHAT WE EAT
To point out that television has succeeded in turning cooking into a
spectator sport raises the question of why anyone would want to watch
other people cook in the first place. There are plenty of things we’ve
stopped doing for ourselves that we have no desire to watch other
people do on TV: you don’t see shows about changing the oil in your car
or ironing shirts or reading newspapers. So what is it about cooking,
specifically, that makes it such good television just now?
It’s worth keeping in mind that watching other people cook is not
exactly a new behavior for us humans. Even when “everyone” still
cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men, for the most
part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our
mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very
much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat.
Watching my mother transform the raw materials of nature — a handful of
plants, an animal’s flesh — into a favorite dinner was always a pretty
good show, but on the afternoons when she tackled a complex marvel like
chicken Kiev, I happily stopped whatever I was doing to watch. (I told
you we had it pretty good, thanks partly to Julia.) My mother would
hammer the boneless chicken breasts into flat pink slabs, roll them
tightly around chunks of ice-cold herbed butter, glue the cylinders
shut with egg, then fry the little logs until they turned golden brown,
in what qualified as a minor miracle of transubstantiation. When the
dish turned out right, knifing through the crust into the snowy white
meat within would uncork a fragrant ooze of melted butter that seeped
across the plate to merge with the Minute Rice. (If the instant rice
sounds all wrong, remember that in the 1960s, Julia Child and modern
food science were both tokens of sophistication.)
Yet even the most ordinary dish follows a similar arc of
transformation, magically becoming something greater than the sum of
its parts. Every dish contains not just culinary ingredients but also
the ingredients of narrative: a beginning, a middle and an end. Bring
in the element of fire — cooking’s deus ex machina — and you’ve got a
tasty little drama right there, the whole thing unfolding in a
TV-friendly span of time: 30 minutes (at 350 degrees) will usually do
it.
Cooking shows also benefit from the fact that food itself is — by
definition — attractive to the humans who eat it, and that attraction
can be enhanced by food styling, an art at which the Food Network so
excels as to make Julia Child look like a piker. You’ll be flipping
aimlessly through the cable channels when a slow-motion cascade of
glistening red cherries or a tongue of flame lapping at a slab of meat
on the grill will catch your eye, and your reptilian brain will
paralyze your thumb on the remote, forcing you to stop to see what’s
cooking. Food shows are the campfires in the deep cable forest, drawing
us like hungry wanderers to their flames. (And on the Food Network
there are plenty of flames to catch your eye, compensating, no doubt,
for the unfortunate absence of aromas.)
No matter how well produced, a televised oil change and lube offers no such satisfactions.
I suspect we’re drawn to the textures and rhythms of kitchen work,
too, which seem so much more direct and satisfying than the more
abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs nowadays.
The chefs on TV get to put their hands on real stuff, not keyboards and
screens but fundamental things like plants and animals and fungi; they
get to work with fire and ice and perform feats of alchemy. By way of
explaining why in the world she wants to cook her way through
“Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” all Julie Powell has to do in
the film is show us her cubicle at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, where she spends her days on the phone mollifying callers with problems that she lacks the power to fix.
“You know what I love about cooking?” Julie tells us in a voice-over
as we watch her field yet another inconclusive call on her headset. “I
love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I
mean nothing — you can come home and
absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and
milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do
work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends —
assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and
tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the
soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about
most of what you will do at work tomorrow.
5. THE END OF COOKING
If cooking really offers all these satisfactions, then why don’t we
do more of it? Well, ask Julie Powell: for most of us it doesn’t pay
the rent, and very often our work doesn’t leave us the time; during the
year of Julia, dinner at the Powell apartment seldom arrived at the
table before 10 p.m. For many years now, Americans have been putting in
longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, we’ve
added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the
total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households
where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans
today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized
nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those
countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have
more time to devote to it.
It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work
force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns
out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home
spend less time cooking — but so do women without jobs. The amount of
time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same
precipitous rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has
among women who do: in both cases, a decline of about 40 percent since
1965. (Though for married women who don’t have jobs, the amount of time
spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36
for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on
restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have
more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American
women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.
Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let
them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered
the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily
to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had
invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods,
dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant
everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something From the Oven:
Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to
“persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals
that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime
conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic
fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve
gas, also industrialized our eating.
Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in
response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a
supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women,
whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as
a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they
believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It
took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance
and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was
cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in
the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at
least something for the “baker” to do —
specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake.
Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at
simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly
fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from
being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent
today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.
Harry Balzer’s research suggests that the corporate project of
redefining what it means to cook and serve a meal has succeeded beyond
the industry’s wildest expectations. People think nothing of buying
frozen peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their children’s
lunchboxes. (Now how much of a timesaver can that
be?) “We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods,” Balzer told me,
“and now we’re going to have a hundred years of packaged meals.”
Already today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to
someone other than a farmer, which is to say to industrial cooking and
packaging and marketing. Balzer is unsentimental about this
development: “Do you miss sewing or darning socks? I don’t think so.”
So what are we doing with the time we save by outsourcing our food
preparation to corporations and 16-year-old burger flippers? Working,
commuting to work, surfing the Internet and, perhaps most curiously of
all, watching other people cook on television.
But this may not be quite the paradox it seems. Maybe the reason we
like to watch cooking on TV is that there are things about cooking we
miss. We might not feel we have the time or the energy to do it
ourselves every day, yet we’re not prepared to see it disappear from
our lives entirely. Why? Perhaps because cooking — unlike sewing or
darning socks — is an activity that strikes a deep emotional chord in
us, one that might even go to the heart of our identity as human
beings.
What?! You’re telling me Bobby Flay strikes deep emotional chords?
Bear with me. Consider for a moment the proposition that as a human
activity, cooking is far more important — to our happiness and to our
health — than its current role in our lives, not to mention its
depiction on TV, might lead you to believe. Let’s see what happens when
we take cooking seriously.
6. THE COOKING ANIMAL
The idea that cooking is a defining human activity is not a new one.
In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that “no beast is a
cook,” called Homo sapiens “the cooking animal,” though he might have
reconsidered that definition had he been able to gaze upon the
frozen-food cases at Wal-Mart. Fifty years later, in “The Physiology of
Taste,” the French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed
that cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had
“done the most to advance the cause of civilization.” More recently,
the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing in 1964 in “The Raw and
the Cooked,” found that many cultures entertained a similar view,
regarding cooking as a symbolic way of distinguishing ourselves from
the animals.
For Lévi-Strauss, cooking is a metaphor for the human transformation
of nature into culture, but in the years since “The Raw and the
Cooked,” other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the
idea that cooking is the key to our humanity. Earlier this year,
Richard Wrangham, a Harvard
anthropologist, published a fascinating book called “Catching Fire,” in
which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early
ancestors — not tool-making or language or meat-eating — that made us
human. By providing our primate forebears with a more energy-dense and
easy-to-digest diet, cooked food altered the course of human evolution,
allowing our brains to grow bigger (brains are notorious energy
guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much
more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of
our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend
many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day. (That’s
nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.) Also, since
cooking detoxifies many foods, it cracked open a treasure trove of
nutritious calories unavailable to other animals. Freed from the need
to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then
chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their
metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.
Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the
practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was
something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would likely
have fed himself on the go and alone, like the animals. (Or, come to
think of it, like the industrial eaters we’ve become, grazing at gas
stations and skipping meals.) But sitting down to common meals, making
eye contact, sharing food, all served to civilize us; “around that
fire,” Wrangham says, “we became tamer.”
If cooking is as central to human identity and culture as Wrangham
believes, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking in our time
would have a profound effect on modern life. At the very least, you
would expect that its rapid disappearance from everyday life might
leave us feeling nostalgic for the sights and smells and the sociality
of the cook-fire. Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray may be pushing precisely
that emotional button. Interestingly, the one kind of home cooking that
is actually on the rise today (according to Harry Balzer) is outdoor
grilling. Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is
cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the
raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense
that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when
cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture.
(While men have hardly become equal partners in the kitchen, they are
cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals,
many of them on the grill.)
Yet we don’t crank up the barbecue every day; grilling for most
people is more ceremony than routine. We seem to be well on our way to
turning cooking into a form of weekend recreation, a backyard sport for
which we outfit ourselves at Williams-Sonoma, or a televised spectator
sport we watch from the couch. Cooking’s fate may be to join some of
our other weekend exercises in recreational atavism: camping and
gardening and hunting and riding on horseback. Something in us
apparently likes to be reminded of our distant origins every now and
then and to celebrate whatever rough skills for contending with the
natural world might survive in us, beneath the thin crust of
21st-century civilization.
To play at farming or foraging for food strikes us as harmless
enough, perhaps because the delegating of those activities to other
people in real life is something most of us are generally O.K. with.
But to relegate the activity of cooking to a form of play, something
that happens just on weekends or mostly on television, seems much more
consequential. The fact is that not
cooking may well be deleterious to our health, and there is reason to
believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to corporations and
16-year-olds has already taken a toll on our physical and psychological
well-being.
Consider some recent research on the links between cooking and
dietary health. A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by
David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home
could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. Mass
production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of
price but also in the amount of time required to obtain them. The
French fry did not become the most popular “vegetable” in America until
industry relieved us of the considerable effort needed to prepare
French fries ourselves. Similarly, the mass production of cream-filled
cakes, fried chicken wings and taquitos, exotically flavored chips or
cheesy puffs of refined flour, has transformed all these
hard-to-make-at-home foods into the sort of everyday fare you can pick
up at the gas station on a whim and for less than a dollar. The fact
that we no longer have to plan or even wait to enjoy these items, as we
would if we were making them ourselves, makes us that much more likely
to indulge impulsively.
Cutler and his colleagues demonstrate that as the “time cost” of
food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up,
particularly consumption of the sort of snack and convenience foods
that are typically cooked outside the home. They found that when we
don’t have to cook meals, we eat more of them: as the amount of time
Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals
Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added
approximately half a meal to our daily intake.
Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed cooking patterns across
several cultures and found 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
income. Other research supports the idea that 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 more likely to eat a more healthful diet than
well-to-do women who did not.
So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should
come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re
bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re
hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good
job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And 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 process, served 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 put the genie back into the bottle?
Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be
rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work? One in which the
cooking shows on television once again teach people how to cook from
scratch and, as Julia Child once did, actually empower them to do it?
Let us hope so. Because it’s hard to imagine ever reforming the
American way of eating or, for that matter, the American food system
unless millions of Americans — women and men — are willing to make
cooking a part of daily life. The path to a diet of fresher,
unprocessed food, not to mention to a revitalized local-food economy,
passes straight through the home kitchen.
But if this is a dream you find appealing, you might not want to call Harry Balzer right away to discuss it.
“Not going to happen,” he told me. “Why? Because we’re basically
cheap and lazy. And besides, the skills are already lost. Who is going
to teach the next generation to cook? I don’t see it.
“We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next
American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the
supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drive-through
supermarket.”
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 past 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. Many
of his clients — which include many of the big chain restaurants and
food manufacturers — profit handsomely from the decline and fall of
cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet
Balzer himself made it clear that he recognizes all that the decline of
everyday cooking has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world,
Americans 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. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”
Michael Pollan, a contributing
writer, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of
California, Berkeley. His most recent book is “In Defense of Food: An
Eater’s Manifesto.”
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