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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] no cooks for fresh food?
  • Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:45:36 -0600


from another list:


Also from the Pollan article and the NPR interview, that the Eat Fresh, Eat
Local movement won't succeed unless people actually know how to cook using
fresh, raw ingredients ("there are no microwave-ready meals at the farmer's
market...")

Here are the last few paragraphs of the Pollan article:

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? [snip]

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."






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