Deen responded, saying, “…not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine…I cook for regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills…It wasn’t that long ago that I was struggling to feed my family, too.”Red meat and wine probably wouldn't be that healthy either.
Two or three generations back, before the advent of cheap, highly processed foods (or at least when it was still only accessible/marketed to wealthy housewives) being exhausted, overworked and poor didn't keep anyone from cooking. There simply wasn't a choice. And families passed down the knowledge of how to skillfully prepare good food out of pennies.... So my question is, how do we revive home cooking and a willingness to budget time for it without being paternalistic?You don't. I know this is really hard for people to believe, but the women who switched to convenience foods weren't morons or dupes of food conglomerates. My grandmother knew what it meant to make all your own food. She watched her own mother do that, and she didn't want that life for herself. My great-grandmother worked like a dog every day of her life from the time she learned to walk until she dropped dead of a stroke at the age of sixty. It wasn't a romantic or glamorous life. It involved working two shifts, one at a sweatshop and one at home, as a girl and young woman, and it involved taking in boarders to supplement the family income after she had children. My grandmother was not lazy or bad for wanting things like leisure time and/or a job that allowed her to leave the house.
These days anyone who can read and carefully follow directions can get out a recipe, turn an oven on to 350 degrees and bake a perfect cake.That's actually really only true if you have a decent oven. My oven sucks, because I live in a cheapo rental apartment with crap appliances, and it's really hard to get a cake to rise properly. My oven temperature is off, which means that I needed to buy a separate oven thermometer to get it right, and I've still got all sorts of hot spots and cool spots. For most things, I can compensate by turning frequently to ensure even cooking, but that doesn't work for things that need to be baked without being disturbed.
If you don't 'shop to the recipe,' you really are using just the small amounts at a time, and you count the per-meal cost as only the amount of those things you used. If I buy four pounds of ground beef for 5.00 and only use two pounds in a recipe, I used $2.50 worth of ground beef, and I still have $2.50 worth of ground beef to be used in another meal.Right, I'm aware of that. And that's why the standard way of talking about food costs always comes across as so patronizing and clueless. Smug middle-class foodies always like to lecture us on how it's cheaper to cook at home if we just acquire some basic pantry-building "skills," as if there's a skill that allows you to conjure up money that you don't have. But the point is that you can only afford the initial outlay if you have spare money, and many people don't. According to the US government, which has no reason to inflate these numbers and every reason not to, about 15% of US households are "food insecure," so we're talking about a substantial number of people here. This isn't about accounting. It's about the fact that a lot of people really just can't afford to buy more than they are going to eat right now.
This isn't some kind of dirty trick - this is a pretty standard way of food costing, useful in the food service industry and of course, necessary when you live on a budget. This is common on food blogs, government cooking-education sites, etc.posted by craichead at 1:59 PM on September 23, 2011
THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat.That literally made me gasp. Do you think Mark Bittman has ever tried to feed himself on $5 a day?
I also think you're missing the point that lentil-based recipes are very easy to vary; in India, tens of millions of people happily lived on it for thousands of years, and by happily I mean it wasn't considered a kind of food to look down on, to barely survive on when you're down and out in Delhi and Calcutta.I shared cooking responsibilities with my Bengali roommate for several years, and she would never have considered lentils a complete meal. We always cooked at least two other dishes, not counting rice and/or chapatis. We also completely relied on weekly trips to the Indian grocery, which were only possible because I had a car. If we'd been limited to the groceries available in our neighborhood or places easily accessible by public transit, we would either have been spending vastly more money or eating a much less varied diet.
Before we have a chance of solving anything we need to have a clear idea of what the problems are. If you're arguing that healthy food is expensive, you're setting up a position that's trivial to shot down.I am arguing that this is not just a cultural problem, and to ignore issues of access and time, as Bittman does, is really wrong-headed.
While the working week for men in full-time jobs in Europe is only marginally shorter than for US men, women in Europe work far fewer hours than their counterparts, and are more likely to hold part-time jobs. Both genders in the US work on average 41 hours a week, women a little less. In Europe, women work just over 30 hours, compared to around 38 for men.So basically, European women have approximately 11 hours a week more than US women do to devote to food preparation.
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posted by Cerulean at 4:36 AM on September 23, 2011 [4 favorites]