Cooking isn't fun, but you should do it anyway.

December 8, 2014 8:36 AM

" When the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding—instead of copping to the fact that it can also be annoying, time consuming, and risky—we alienate the people who don’t have the luxury of choice, and we unwittingly reinforce the impression that cooking is a specialty hobby instead of a basic life skill."

This article was included in Best Food Writing 2013 anthology (which is where I originally ran across it). (slSlate)

posted by Kitteh (282 comments total)

Cooking an be really fun. Especially if you pretend you are hosting a cooking show, and your cats are the audience. So I have been told. By friends.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:47 AM on December 8, 2014 [98 favorites]

Serious question: assuming that you can afford to buy decent prepared food, why should you cook when you don't feel like it? I feel like we've made cooking into a moral imperative, and I'm not 100% sure why. I generally cook for myself, but I'm not sure why I feel guilty when I get home from work late and buy a salad or sandwich from the grocery store across the street.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:51 AM on December 8, 2014 [32 favorites]

As someone who enjoys cooking, I can still understand where this is coming from since I know that cooking is a luxury for me, not a necessity. If I had to rely on cooking my own food all the time just to survive, I can totally see my attitude changing in a big hurry.
posted by surazal at 8:53 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

I consider myself a foodie, and yet easily I'd say that more than half the time I just don't wanna be arsed to make something elaborate. Most of my "cooking" happens on the weekend, when I do a bunch of in-advance kind of stuff (cook up a big batch of pasta sauce or a soup or something, or pre-cook a bunch of vegetables just as-is) so on weeknights I don't really have to think, all I need to do is dump something into a bowl and reheat. Maybe throw a chicken leg under the broiler (this has become a go-to for me).

Granted, that still also reflects the lifestyle of someone who a) has access to food, b) has the time on the weekend because she doesn't work a second job, and c) has enough experience cooking that she knows how to punt for a meal by going "I could add [x] to [y] and make meal [z] tonight."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:53 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

It's important to remember that no activity should ever be enjoyed if it can be established that some people do it out of necessity.
posted by haricotvert at 8:54 AM on December 8, 2014 [38 favorites]

I'm not sure why I feel guilty when I get home from work late and buy a salad or sandwich from the grocery store across the street.

You shouldn't feel guilty at all, you should eat what you want. I mean unless you mean that you feel guilty about being able to afford such conveniences, which is okay I guess for perspective.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:55 AM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

I really love to cook, but it's certainly a chore when you're rushed, grumpy, come home late, or if you're exhausted after a 14 hour day. That's why I started cooking on weekends/my day off. I'll take a few hours, cook a bunch of stuff and then eat it all week. I've made such a habit out of it that when I have periods where I have to work 7 day weeks, can't cook and I finish everything in my freezer and fridge I actually have a "well what do I eat NOW??" moment. And then I remember restaurants and take out.
posted by nevercalm at 8:56 AM on December 8, 2014

Serious question: assuming that you can afford to buy decent prepared food, why should you cook when you don't feel like it?

Morally? I don't feel like there's any imperative.

Practically? Knowing what is going into your body is helpful on a number of levels. Food prepared industrially is usually not going to be as tasty or as safe (due to ingredients, care of preparation, etc) as food prepared for yourself.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:59 AM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

I sometimes feel like Metafilter's resident anti-cook, BUT I found myself this summer having to be the family chef, and this was my thought process exactly - making food is a chore, so divorce it from the feeling of being hungry as much as possible. I would prep for the next day's meals after we had already eaten dinner. It also meant there were other chores that I couldn't get to.

It seems to me like the more people in a family, the much harder it will be to prep far in advance. It takes fridge/freezer space and it becomes more difficult to account for eater's preferences (which seems like a small thing but for poor families, small things can add up to consequences like CPS investigations).
posted by muddgirl at 8:59 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

as safe (due to ingredients, care of preparation, etc) as food prepared for yourself.

It's like you don't even read askme's "i left these raw shrimps in my car for 18h but im gonna eat them anyway"
posted by poffin boffin at 9:00 AM on December 8, 2014 [52 favorites]

Also, "the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding" is pure bullshit. Hands up if you've ever heard a friend tell a story about a cooking disaster (or told a friend one).

Cooking shows that show the realistically arduous task of trying to feed kids while managing your work and personal life are going to be as popular as the Netflix original series, "Problems Pooping."
posted by IAmBroom at 9:01 AM on December 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

I cook from scratch for my family 5 to 6 nights a week, and yeah, it can be a huge drag -- planning each meal, fitting it into our schedule, stopping at the grocery store 2 to 3 times a week, getting everything to the table in time so we can put the kids to bed at a reasonable hour. But it's better than the alternative: expensive meals out or carryout (which we can afford to a limited degree), or opening a box or can that has the nutritional equivalent of a Big Mac. Mostly it's pretty simple stuff (this week's menu includes hummus and veggie sandwiches, spaghetti, cabbage soup), but it enables me to make sure that my family gets tasty, healthy food, and that I teach my kids good eating habits at a very young age. Plus it helps that I love to cook and can make food that is just as good as anything I can buy prepared.
posted by slogger at 9:04 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Cooking doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be fancy. The end result doesn't have to be fit for a professional photo shoot. Indeed, some of my family's favorite meals are some of the ugliest things to ever waltz onto a plate. It can be really gross and messy. (There's a reason I disappear for another shower an hour before Thanksgiving dinner hits the table.) Cooking is not glamorous, it can be profoundly frustrating. I've been cooking since I was small, and that has presented me ample opportunity to fuck it up. I have done so many times.

I love to cook, I love helping people learn to cook, but there are days when the question of "What's for dinner?" is met with a flat stare and a growl of "Reservations."
posted by MissySedai at 9:04 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

I can see this argument, and yet it was always really hard for me to mealplan and cook for our family until I got comfortable with the act of cooking itself and started to enjoy it. Cooking is like many tasks where it takes a long time and a lot of effort and then the result is gone quickly. So you could say that it's something that you often have to do, and it's possible to enjoy it, so you should at least be open to enjoying it!

Cooking shows that show the realistically arduous task of trying to feed kids while managing your work and personal life are going to be as popular as the Netflix original series, "Problems Pooping."

Hmm, I dunno about that. Many reality TV shows, like the ones about home improvement, are very mundane and extremely repetitive. Someone should go pitch "The Meal Planner Brothers" or something. In fact I am sure such a show already exists, right?
posted by selfnoise at 9:04 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

why should you cook when you don't feel like it?

That question is answered in the pull quote above: "we alienate the people who don’t have the luxury of choice, and we unwittingly reinforce the impression that cooking is a specialty hobby instead of a basic life skill."

Because "why should you cook when you don't feel like it" is a class privilege, and that's not to say you're not allowed to enjoy your privilege, but it would be useful in a social sense to not turn it into "let them eat cake." There's a huge amount of class rolled into food, food availability, nutritional education (and I do not mean that in the "fat poor people hurf durf too stupid to know better" way, I mean that there are deficits all the way up the chain and affecting the policies we make and the kickbacks taken in the process).

I like that the article reframes cooking as a thing you do for food rather than a Pinterest album, where all your meals are sushi with eyebrows and carrot barley pinwheels that require 14 hours of prep. I have a pool of friends for whom cooking used to be a clever thing we all did, and now a lot of them have kids and have been appointed the household cook by partners who just find it too much trouble and yeah, it's a lot of fucking trouble and other stuff doesn't get done because it sucks up a lot of time but you can't really feed your kids from the grocery store deli every day, either for money or health reasons.

The "you should do it anyway" applies to the partners who can't be bothered to cook as much as to me and whatever fancy bullshit I used to cook (I can't be bothered either, I give up most of a Sunday every week just to spend less than an hour assembling meals during weekdays).
posted by Lyn Never at 9:06 AM on December 8, 2014 [13 favorites]

" It takes fridge/freezer space and it becomes more difficult to account for eater's preferences."

Huh. As a child I had two choices - eat what had been prepared for me, or go hungry.

(I guess I could have prepared my own food).

A friend of mine has a 13 year old daughter who is trying to go vegetarian. I happily gave her advice on things to cook. She refuses to cook for herself, and I showed her little sympathy. Look, if you want to be a vegetarian, don't make the burden on your mom to suddenly cook two different meals of food. Be happy if your mom is willing to keep different ingredients in the house. End result, daughter eats meat fairly often and when she doesn't want to just eats the side dishes her mom makes.
posted by el io at 9:06 AM on December 8, 2014 [10 favorites]

If you have kids of a certain age cooking is every bit a behavioral example/modelling construct as exercise and any other behavior you want them to eventually incorporate into their lives. It is a chore, a huge one many nights, but in most small to medium sized communities the idea of healthy convenience food is a joke. And some dishes are so bloody easy it's a crime not to make them. I can plank a salmon filet on the Traeger and cut up some apples in 20 minutes, and less than half of that is prep time.
posted by docpops at 9:06 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's important to remember that no activity should ever be enjoyed if it can be established that some people do it out of necessity.

Bwuh? I don't see that either in the original article or in the discussion here. In fact--here, let me pull it out from the quote at the top of the post--the argument is against the notion "that it is only ever fun and rewarding", not that it is never fun and rewarding.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:08 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Yeah I don't really get the moral-imperative aspect of this either. I'm on board with the idea that everyone ought to know how to do basic cooking, in the same way that I think everyone ought to be able to use basic hand tools, or identify the different fluids that can be found in a mysterious puddle under your car, or make a household budget. They seem like good life skills of the sort that I would make mandatory in 8th grade, if I were emperor of the world.

But I'm not sure it's a better or more important social good for people to cook at home, than it is for them to be able to get healthy, reasonably-priced prepared food.

Eating prepared food isn't a problem in and of itself, the problem is that so much prepared food is spectacularly bad for you, and we don't really make any attempts to ensure people can make a good (or, hell, even informed) choice.

It's also sort of weirdly inefficient to suggest that everyone should spend a non-trivial amount of their day acquiring raw ingredients, preparing them, eating them, and then cleaning up afterwards. Why is this particular activity not subject to the same pressures to specialize as most everything else in life? Just because you can do something yourself, doesn't mean that you should. I know how to change my car's oil, and sometimes I will do it more-or-less recreationally, but if I'm in a hurry I'll just have a garage do it because they can do in 20 minutes what I can do in an hour, and with less of a mess, because they are set up to do that. They specialize in it.

I could easily see someone deciding that cooking is the same way. Why eat at home, and create a bunch of mess that you have to clean up, if you could go to a cafeteria and let someone who has specialized in food-preparation, and who has a big industrial kitchen and economies of scale, do it?

It seems like there is a market failure that should be remedied, regarding the access to reasonably-priced, healthy, prepared food. Cooking vs. not cooking shouldn't, ideally, be a status marker. (Having someone serve you food is probably always going to be a status marker, because you are essentially renting a servant on a fractional basis for a short amount of time. It's intentionally not efficient.) If you want to cook, great, cook. If you don't want to, or don't have the time, you shouldn't be forced to choose between penury or heart disease.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:08 AM on December 8, 2014 [21 favorites]

Serious question: assuming that you can afford to buy decent prepared food, why should you cook when you don't feel like it? I feel like we've made cooking into a moral imperative, and I'm not 100% sure why.

Because you are a good American, and therefore part Puritan, and cooking for oneself is healthier, and thriftier, and more wholesome, and therefore considered more virtuous. Doing anything yourself which you could hire servants to do for you is always considered more virtuous, in our culture, from fixing the furnace to Warren Buffett driving himself to work in his Caddy. Paying people to do things you are capable of doing yourself is shirking.

I mean, personally speaking I'm a epicurean on the subject: life is short, if you don't like cooking and can afford it, become BFFs with your delivery guy and/or the deli case at whole foods, why not? I just think that on the Role of Food In American Life tip, cooking for oneself is perceived as more virtuous for all the reasons above.

I quite liked the piece --- as someone who learned to drive after learning to cook, they reminded me of each other in a way --- both processes can be so intimidating when you don't understand them, consist of stringing together such simple, basic steps when you do, and can be as powerfully freeing, I think, anyway.
posted by Diablevert at 9:09 AM on December 8, 2014 [19 favorites]

I can plank a salmon filet on the Traeger and cut up some apples in 20 minutes, and less than half of that is prep time.

Yeah, but this is where privilege and affordability comes in, you know? Not everyone has the money for a Traeger and not everyone can afford to screw up a salmon filet.
posted by Kitteh at 9:09 AM on December 8, 2014 [25 favorites]

Everyone I know likes to cook at least some of the time.

The problem isn't lack of desire or training or what have you. It's that in America full time work is understood to be a 50-60 hour + commuting time commitment and really, when you work that much, grabbing some Applebees or frozen pizza on the way home is probably the only way to get a hot dinner before bed.

People talk about how, say, French people are so skinny and say - it's because they cook at home and eat snails! No. It's because they work 35 hour work weeks and if you had an extra 15-20 hours per week, you could be skinny too.

American work culture sucks.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:10 AM on December 8, 2014 [73 favorites]

Serious question: assuming that you can afford to buy decent prepared food, why should you cook when you don't feel like it?

I think most of the 'everyone should cook!' drama comes from health and environmental concerns. The environmental concerns are a moot point if you're not wealthy, because you can't afford to buy meat from 'happy' cows even if you're cooking at home. The health concerns are real though. Restaurant food is tasty because it's loaded with more sugar, salt, and fat than most cooks would add if they are cooking for themselves. Of course, that's not universal. It is 100% possible to eat out for every meal and still eat healthily. But that also requires a certain amount of privilege.

TLDR: there are legitimate reasons, but poor, busy people are screwed either way.
posted by tofu_crouton at 9:10 AM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

I said this in a similar thread many moons ago...Cooking, in the abstract, is great fun. But, being responsible for planning and putting a meal on the table for a family, day after day, year after year, becomes a job. A grind. Something you because you have to, rather than something you do for fun and enjoyment.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:11 AM on December 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

docpops: I had to google to find out that a Traeger is a 1000$ grill.
posted by el io at 9:11 AM on December 8, 2014 [30 favorites]

Yeah, but this is where privilege and affordability comes in, you know? Not everyone has the money for a Traeger and not everyone can afford to screw up a salmon filet.

That's a meal for three for under 10 bucks and can be cooked under a broiler. I assume most people have stoves?
posted by docpops at 9:12 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

I don't mind cooking, but a lot of days I'd love to have a meal plan at the local college cafeteria (which has amazingly good food) because cooking takes time and gets boring.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:12 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Jesus people, a Traeger in the NW can be found for a few hundred bucks used and they're as ubiquitous as blue tarps in winter around here.
posted by docpops at 9:13 AM on December 8, 2014

You shouldn't. Seriously!
posted by Kitteh at 9:13 AM on December 8, 2014

Also, "the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding" is pure bullshit.

I think there's definitely selection bias at work, though. Much as lots of people tend to put a curated version of their lives on Facebook to make them appear to only be happy, successful, fun, etc., so to do we see this with people taking staged pictures of their culinary successes for Instagram or blogging about the elaborate meals they cook for dinner parties or whatever.
posted by indubitable at 9:13 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

That's a meal for three for under 10 bucks and can be cooked under a broiler. I assume most people have stoves?

you're also assuming everyone a) can afford salmon and b) knows how to cook it.

"A meal for under 10 bucks" sound great to you, but there's a lot of people trying to make themselves a meal for under TWO bucks each day.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:14 AM on December 8, 2014 [24 favorites]

When examining privilege, please remember it's not located in your navel.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:14 AM on December 8, 2014 [13 favorites]

Jesus people, a Traeger in the NW can be found for a few hundred bucks used and they're as ubiquitous as blue tarps in winter around here.

Try buying one when you're not on a doctor's salary, dude.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:15 AM on December 8, 2014 [25 favorites]

These conversations have never been improved by bringing up specific recipes you know how to make.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:16 AM on December 8, 2014 [34 favorites]

It's weird that she name-checks Mark Bittman with a swipe at the end, because Bittman's message is largely, "Keep it simple, it's easier than it looks, relax and enjoy yourself." His little manifesto on cooking, "Cooking Solves Everything," is a great read.
posted by jbickers at 9:16 AM on December 8, 2014 [7 favorites]

I'm always confused by these threads when people assume that the sole alternative to cooking a meal from scratch is to go to a restaurant every single night. I do restaurants maybe 1x a month. The rest of the time I will get a grilled chicken breast or 2 from westside and some salad greens or something. It's not cooking unless you consider "assembling precooked food" as cooking.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:17 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

I could easily see someone deciding that cooking is the same way. Why eat at home, and create a bunch of mess that you have to clean up, if you could go to a cafeteria and let someone who has specialized in food-preparation, and who has a big industrial kitchen and economies of scale, do it?

Interestingly, medieval Europe had cookshops, which were basically take-out windows patronized by poor people who didn't have kitchens. Some of them were like industrial affairs but I think I remember that some of them were sort of transient things where if you had enough ingredients, you might open a window for a few days. (In the same way, a lot of women sold ale at one point or another- if you had enough grain, you would make an extra batch and sell it.) It's sort of a precursor to fast food, but I always imagine it like the walk-up service windows at Disney parks and it sounds really nice. But I hate cooking, so.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 9:18 AM on December 8, 2014 [18 favorites]

Being obliged to cook isn't fun. Being obliged to do anything that involves creativity or imagination sucks the fun out of the endeavor, reading a book for class, painting a picture, watching a movie.

With cooking though you at least get to eat what you want.
posted by vapidave at 9:19 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's not cooking unless you consider "assembling precooked food" as cooking.

This is 90% of how I cook, so I say it is. (Granted, I try to be the one to do the pre-cooking as well...)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:19 AM on December 8, 2014

For the most part I'm on board with the article, but I don't buy this: "The second myth is that cooking is easy." Huh? Who actually believes this? As far as I can tell, the vast majority of cookbooks and web articles out there are guides to make cooking easier. I've never seen a foodie suggest that cooking is easy, just that it's worth the effort.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 9:20 AM on December 8, 2014

Also, "the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding" is pure bullshit. Hands up if you've ever heard a friend tell a story about a cooking disaster (or told a friend one).

So, I have this Thing about turkey. I pop it in a brine for 24 hours. Then I smoke it over Apple, Hickory, or sometimes chunks of wine barrel staves. I finish it in an electric roaster, low and slow overnight, basting it in a blend of butter, broth, and brandy (or bourbon). It is A Task, but it is always worth the effort, and OMG, does it produce the best gravy ever. We do this a couple times a year, my family are turkey-holics. We even put on a full Thanksgiving dinner in July for our French exchange student.

One Thanksgiving, I had set the roaster to 200, as usual, and gone to bed. At 6AM on Thanksgiving, the Husband got up to pee, and noticed the kitchen was full of smoke about half a second before the smoke detector started howling. The electric roaster had shorted, and the temperature had gone to 500. My beautiful turkey was a smoking mass of charcoal. After I cried in frustration for a little bit, and had a small panic attack, I remembered that my Kroger was open until 2PM. At 7AM, we were off to Kroger to buy another turkey. Thankfully, they still had a few. They were fresh turkeys, so expensive as hell, but we were expecting 15 guests for dinner. No brine, smoked it for only a couple hours, then into the oven to finish. Dinner hit the table on time, but I was dismayed.

I ended up telling the tale after the second bottle of wine. It's probably the family's favorite cooking disaster story. That might be because Elder Monster brought out the misshapen mess of the first turkey and provided voice acting for it, though.
posted by MissySedai at 9:20 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Unbelievable.

Let's try turkey chili. Chicken thighs, a couple pork chops, perhaps an omelette? Last time I checked a doctor's salary wasn't key to those things.

I've never eaten as cheaply as I have when we just use the Safeway for our meal planning, and I've never seen as high bills and waistlines as when we've had to rely on take-out. It's a health issue. Learn to cook or learn to be overweight, because with rare exception, there is no one who loses weight by eating their meals outside the home. The whole rationale for the article to me was that from a health and cost basis, there is simply no substitute for having the basic skills to wander the aisles of a grocery store and piece together a meal for yourself or your family.
posted by docpops at 9:21 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

poffin boffin: "as safe (due to ingredients, care of preparation, etc) as food prepared for yourself.

It's like you don't even read askme's "i left these raw shrimps in my car for 18h but im gonna eat them anyway""

I realized I left a pellet of goat cheese on the counter this morning. I'm still going to use it for pasta tonight and you can't stop me.
posted by boo_radley at 9:21 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

This is 90% of how I cook, so I say it is.

fine, then i can prepare a home cooked meal in 30 seconds, what do i win.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:21 AM on December 8, 2014

Huh. As a child I had two choices - eat what had been prepared for me, or go hungry.

(I guess I could have prepared my own food).

That's fine for families that aren't poor and black and thus already suspected by CPS. Letting your child go hungry can be called "neglect" in many communities.

"Keep it simple, it's easier than it looks, relax and enjoy yourself."

Isn't the "relax and enjoy yourself" the parts she's criticising? When was the last time anyone said, "Gosh, doing laundry at home is easier than it looks, even if you don't have a washer/dryer! Just relax and enjoy yourself!"

"The second myth is that cooking is easy." Huh? Who actually believes this?

Mark Bittman, apparently. Or at least, he believes that it's "easier than it looks."
posted by muddgirl at 9:23 AM on December 8, 2014 [7 favorites]

then i can prepare a home cooked meal in 30 seconds, what do i win.

The right to be insufferably smug and lecture people about how "there simply is no substitute for having the basic skills to wander the aisles of a grocery store" even though you maybe didn't do that yourself.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:24 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

I learned to cook out of necessity. I was ten and needed cake and no one was baking me one.
posted by Ham Snadwich at 9:26 AM on December 8, 2014 [38 favorites]

For the record, I'm still cooking the same healthy meals now that I learned to cook in med school and residency, on a salary probably equivalent to 30K or less in today's dollars. Making this into an economics lesson for all but a few people is intellectually lazy. It's like saying you can't clean your bathroom for want of basic supplies so you choose to live in filth. But by all means make this all about our insensitivity to the poor for having the gall to suggest we all learn to actually be in control of what we put in our bodies.
posted by docpops at 9:27 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you don't mind eating the same thing for lunch and dinner, four days in a row, with a carb-based filler like rice made on the side, the you might want to look into the crockpot life.

Pour out a serving of three day old curry, microwave with rice of questionable freshness, sit down at the computer and consume while worrying about the important things, like how your 12 man squad is going to get on point with two companies of bullshit camping the hill.
posted by Slackermagee at 9:28 AM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

Cooking for one is incredibly lonely.
posted by PinkMoose at 9:30 AM on December 8, 2014 [25 favorites]

It's interesting that we get trapped, over and over again, in this box of regular old neoliberal assumptions - so it's moralizing and recipes on one side, and "but but but" on the other, because making cooking non-horrible for many people under contemporary conditions is almost impossible.

1. Wages for housework, as per Sylvia Federici. Cooking falls more to women than to men and is undervalued, like most women's work and caring work. Cooking is about the reproduction of labor - it's a real cost of doing work that capitalism does its best to foist onto the workers.

2. Wage reform generally, preferably by direct payments to people rather than by paternalistic methods like vouchers. Take away the perpetual anxiety about "enough food versus healthy food" and "do I have three hours to make beans and I am so sick of beans".

3. Housing reform - stable places to live, reliable stoves, reliable food storage, no more need to choose between food and rent or heat.

And probably other reforms.

But as long as we live in a system whose goal is to squeeze every last drop of profit out of working people, it's going to be the same old moralizing about how you ate beans morning noon and night every week for five years and would I like your recipe?
posted by Frowner at 9:30 AM on December 8, 2014 [28 favorites]

"The second myth is that cooking is easy." Huh? Who actually believes this?

Mark Bittman, apparently. Or at least, he believes that it's "easier than it looks."

But that's the thing -- even Bittman doesn't claim that "cooking is easy." Much of his writing is about demystifying cooking and making it easier and tastier. He has a gigantic book that is a basic guide to cooking. McMillan's declaration that cooking is a "learned skill" is taking a stand against something no one is actually saying.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 9:30 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Learn to cook or learn to be overweight

Or learn to cook and be overweight. Because, as I noted above, I have access to cake whenever I want it.
posted by Ham Snadwich at 9:31 AM on December 8, 2014 [30 favorites]

there is simply no substitute for having the basic skills to wander the aisles of a grocery store and piece together a meal for yourself or your family.

Ah, but your choice of words gives you away, doc. Single mothers don't so much "wander the aisles" as sprint from one job to the next while changing diapers and helping with homework and trying to decide whether to pay the electric or the water bill and so on, and maybe try to get a good night's sleep once in a while and, oh, yeah, the kids are hungry and what can I feed them right now?

I don't disagree with your fundamental belief that everybody is better off with some basic cooking chops under their belt - see my Bittman link above - but hoo-boy, are you coming off as smug and dismissive.
posted by jbickers at 9:31 AM on December 8, 2014 [27 favorites]

Making this into an economics lesson for all but a few people is intellectually lazy.

The OP points out that poor families can't afford to eat out, anyway. It is absolutely an economics lesson - people who can afford to pay other people to do a chore often choose to pay other people to do that chore. We don't think it's immoral to hire a house cleaner or send out clothes to the wash-and-fold, because we don't look at cooking like it's a chore. That's the whole point of the OP.
posted by muddgirl at 9:31 AM on December 8, 2014

This coincides with an article in today's Guardian: Tory peer says poor people go hungry because they do not know how to cook
posted by marvin at 9:34 AM on December 8, 2014

We don't think it's immoral to hire a house cleaner or send out clothes to the wash-and-fold

It would seem you have never met my mother.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:34 AM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

We don't think it's immoral to hire a house cleaner or send out clothes to the wash-and-fold, because we don't look at cooking like it's a chore.

It's always driven me bananas that this chore is so much harder to outsource than laundry or floor cleaning or oil changing or snow shoveling. When I was single, I dearly wished that old fashioned boarding houses, where you rent a single room or mini-suite, and get access to a parlor and kitchen with at least one meal a day, were still a viable option for housing. Now that I'm married, I'm not so dismayed at having a whole apartment for the two of us, but I want a return to the old urban prepared food windows and quasi-cafeterias. Or access to a dining hall. I'd be super down for that.

I mean, I can cook, just like I can change oil and mow a lawn. But I've opted out of having a yard or driving a car. I haven't figured out how to really opt out of eating yet.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 9:39 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

From the article:
In reality, it is the middle class that patronizes the Golden Arches and its competitors.

I apologize if some of my comments were tone-deaf. I can certainly see that. I guess my reaction comes from a place of spending years trying to undo the damage to people's health that could have been prevented if they just didn't eat garbage all the time, and then come in and sit passively and helpless because it was just too hard to cook, or shop instead of eating out. It's maddening, and these are people with the means to reverse their health issues. It's laziness, pure and simple. Not money, not any more a lack of time than millions of other people that find the time because it is important, like exercise or reading to your kids.
posted by docpops at 9:41 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Unless you count making a packet of Maruchan ramen with an egg cracked into it to be cooking, the only times I ate home-cooked food growing up were Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas at my grandparents' house. Everything else I ate was store-bought, pre-made, or food pantry-procured, everything. The best part about convenience food was always that it didn't make any dishes or mess to clean up -- you could microwave your Dinty Moore or Chef Boyardee right in the pop-top cup, eat it with a plastic utensil, wash it down with a Little Hug, wipe your hands on your pants in lieu of a napkin, and chuck everything straight into the bin when you were done, which creates no problems at all because when you're poor and perpetually exhausted, you don't really have the psychological bandwidth to give a shit about the environment anyway. Bonus: Literally no cooking also means literally no dishes!

Now I'm vegan, which means I have to cook almost every day. I love to cook, it's relaxing and uplifting to me and I think I'm really good at it, but man, sometimes I just don't want to do it -- even the simplest foods can be a real pain in the ass to prepare from scratch.

What I find helpful whenever I find myself having a dumb, kneejerk Why Don't You Just Make Simple Recipe X moment is how even my very simplest from-scratch meals require the following, in addition to a safe, clean, functional kitchen with potable water and a working stovetop:
- a (sharp) chef's knife,
- a (plastic) cutting board (so it doesn't fuck up your chef's knife),
- some bowls or plates or cups for mise en place,
- at least one (usually two) pots and/or pans for actual cooking,
- an onion,
- a few cloves of garlic, and
- a handful of choice selections from my gargantuan pantry of shelf-stable dried goods and spices, which is a project I've spent the past ten years building up so it will be able to serve me in times of financial duress.

Intense! And that's just for, like, lentil soup or spaghetti and marinara, the kind of 'open maw, insert calories' low-impact foods I like to call "bachelorette chow."

That knowledge base has only come after a great deal of investigation, i.e. spending my whole adult life learning how to cook through pure trial and error, and it doesn't even touch upon learning how to prepare animal proteins, some of which can be rendered inedible in the blink of an eye; working with dietary restrictions or allergies; figuring out how to un-fuck your fucked-up dish -- knowing to sprinkle some baking soda into an overly acidic tomato sauce, f'rex -- or feeding an entire family.

In general, it's important to remember that just because a resource is available and workable to you, personally, does not mean it is equally (or even marginally) available and workable to anyone who is not you.
posted by divined by radio at 9:46 AM on December 8, 2014 [22 favorites]

could have been prevented if they just didn't eat garbage all the time, and then come in and sit passively and helpless because it was just too hard to cook, or shop instead of eating out

If you think your doctor is silently sneering at what you eat and assuming you're lazy, he is. He just outed himself on the green.
posted by Bentobox Humperdinck at 9:48 AM on December 8, 2014 [35 favorites]

The problem with being a person known for enjoying cooking -- as the article says, sometimes, under specific conditions -- is that it makes it easier for the recipients of said cooking to take it for granted at all times. Just because I enjoy making a big pot of chili on a cold and rainy December weekend, or cooking up an elaborate holiday feast for friends, doesn't mean I enjoy all the meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking that it takes to put a fresh new meal on the table every. single. night.

I've put off grocery shopping about as long as I can this weekend. In fact, I will probably be heading to the store within the hour. Last night I misremembered what dregs were left in the freezer/fridge/cupboard, and after coming up with a pretty good plan to make some parmesan-green peas risotto, I opened the cabinet doors to find that I only had about 3 tablespoons of arborio rice left. If I hadn't been on day 4 of a 5 day weekend, I might have started crying.

And as I've commented before, I'm solidly middle class, with all of the luxuries of time, money, and kitchen skills and equipment that entails. I can't imagine the stress and pressures of getting food on the table for myself and kids. At least when I'm at my wit's end and my boyfriend unleashes the dragon by asking "what's for dinner?" I can yell at him or tell him to figure it out himself without worry of being accused of child abuse or neglect.

Sometimes I wish I wasn't so good at making up meals on the fly because it feels like I'm expected to perform miracles every day in the kitchen, even when all we have is half a box of pasta, 3 limp stalks of celery, and orange juice.
posted by misskaz at 9:49 AM on December 8, 2014 [11 favorites]

And some dishes are so bloody easy it's a crime not to make them. I can plank a salmon filet on the Traeger and cut up some apples in 20 minutes, and less than half of that is prep time.

Jesus people, a Traeger in the NW can be found for a few hundred bucks used and they're as ubiquitous as blue tarps in winter around here.

I'm sure you don't MEAN to come off as smug and classist. But wow, dude. Did we really need to know that you have a super-expensive grill? Do you refer to your stove by its brand name, too? You should go back and re-read yourself, and consider that there are people for whom a salmon filet is a luxury, and a "few hundred bucks" is the difference between making rent and being evicted.

I am in love with food. I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that I can stick my head in the freezer or pop over to the grocery store or throw random shit into the crockpot and have something tasty when I'm done. But I haven't had salmon - on a grill OR under a broiler - in about two years. Essentially, not since we went through foreclosure AND the Husband's commissions dried up. Thank Deutschland for Aldi, I can take my current grocery budget ($150/week for a family of 4, plus 2 dogs, down from $300/week) and feed my family decently, and only need to buy my meat elsewhere. But at $9 a pound, salmon ain't happening for a while longer yet. We're eating a lot of roasted or smoked chicken, then making stock and having soup later in the week. Lots of spaghetti and meatballs, or biscuit topped pot pie things that are mostly potatoes and carrots and not much meat. Chili made with end cuts that I get from the butcher for cheap. That sort of thing.

When we lost the house, we left behind our grill. It was falling apart anyway, we couldn't afford to replace it. We did finally get a hybrid grill - because we won a gift certificate to a local appliance shop. If we hadn't, we'd still be without one, because the money is just not there for such a big purchase. We were very grateful that the smoker was still in good shape. Hell, it's only in the past 6 months that we've been able to afford to go out to eat every now and then. It used to be a weekly treat at some pretty high end joints. Now it's the family owned Mexican joint, the family owned Chinese joint, and the tavern that serves comfort food, and then maybe only once a month.

Step back and have a look at the big picture, yeah?
posted by MissySedai at 9:50 AM on December 8, 2014 [44 favorites]

Being able to buy what I consider semiprepared food - cooked chicken breasts, ready-to-cook or plainly-cooked vegetables, the sort of thing a lot of larger grocery delis usually have - is least likely to be available in the places the working poor live. And if it's available where they work, they may not have the means to keep it at an appropriate temperature until they get home.

I wish that sort of food were more universally available, but a person making $30k a year and paying for child care still probably couldn't take advantage of it. I can swing by a Fresh And Easy on the way home, pick up salmon for two and green beans with almonds all ready to hit the pan as soon as I walk in the door, or I can stop at Von's and get grilled (possibly "grilled") chicken breasts and pretty much the same green beans, but either of those options is going to cost me about $12 for 2 people, and leave no leftovers for us to take to work the next day.

docpops, I deal with doctors with your attitude all the time, even after I explain that we don't eat out so I can afford a pretty reasonable diet at home, so could we maybe actually have a conversation about my inability to lose weight and my thyroid numbers and my luxurious beard, and then they snap back to attention and tell me to stop eating McDonalds. Like, it's a running joke, out here in the real world, among people who fail to arrive at the doctor's office perfectly healthy already.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:50 AM on December 8, 2014 [31 favorites]

It's laziness, pure and simple. Not money, not any more a lack of time than millions of other people that find the time because it is important, like exercise or reading to your kids.

If you ever find yourself wondering why people hate doctors, remember this comment.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:51 AM on December 8, 2014 [31 favorites]

Oh boy, another article why nobody should ever enjoy anything! Good to know, yet again, that deep down I really shouldn't like doing one of my favorite things in the world.
posted by Itaxpica at 9:53 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Cooking could be considered type II fun. It's not particularly joyful or satisfying while your doing it, but, if done right, it's totally worth it after the cooking is finished.
posted by fook at 9:53 AM on December 8, 2014

When I finally learned how to change the oil in my car, I was pretty chuffed because I'd gained what I'd always acknowledged was a basic life skill (I was 44 btw). But I'd never get sanctimonious about doing your own oil changes, because the fact is that everything you do in life involves tradeoffs, and people have different priorities. Healthy eating is great, but not everyone can prioritize optimal diet -- and all the mental/physical energy it requires -- over other things demanding our time and money that might be more important.

If you're not fortunate enough to be able to buy your way out of the toxic physical/mental/spiritual cloud we're constantly engulfed in here in the good old USA, there are probably about five or six things that are killing you more actively than whatever crap you're fueling your body with, so it's like, sorry pancreas, but I'll be with you as soon as I'm no longer one paycheck away from living on the street!
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 9:53 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

That's a meal for three for under 10 bucks

Am I to understand there will be no side dishes? (Southpark reference)
posted by achrise at 9:57 AM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Pretty sure acknowledging the work involved in putting freshly cooked meals on the table, day-in and day-out, doesn't mean you're not allowed to enjoy cooking. I enjoy cooking! But the grocery store sometimes sucks (and imagine if you can't afford half the shit in it or have to go to the lower-price stores with poorly stocked shelves and longer lines). A dish not turning out can be pretty disappointing; again, devastating if you're on a budget. Accommodating dietary needs or requests is difficult.

Acknowledging that other people are not morally bankrupt for not enjoying it doesn't stop you or anyone else from getting satisfaction out of your activities. Jeez.
posted by misskaz at 9:57 AM on December 8, 2014 [13 favorites]

This thread just reminded me that I didn't defrost the ground beef last night and I just contacted my husband to let him know he needed to dig some out of the freezer. Thanks, Metafilter!

Seriously, though. I not only like cooking, I like the grocery shopping that goes with it, and the organizing of the pantry, and digging through the fridge once a week for half-rotted okra to toss in the composter. The grocery shopping is one of my weekend rituals, and helps me wind down from the stress of work; I do it first thing Saturday morning, and usually take my daughter for some mom-daughter bonding. It also helps that the local grocery story hands out deli samples like they were going out of style, and she's just cute enough to usually net a few slices of mortadella.

We've recently been forced to go on a pretty severe budget because I'm the only salary keeping our little family afloat. I don't have a choice anymore -- I cook, or we go bankrupt when the unemployment checks run out. Which is about two weeks away. It's probably a good thing I like cooking, and can cook pretty much anything I fancy.

But we've definitely scaled down where we eat out anymore, as well as stepped back from the expensive grassfed meats, wild-caught fish, and organic veggies, while adding in "bulk" like rice and potatoes. We just can't afford it. And I make a pretty good salary. Just, y'know, too bad I make it in California.
posted by offalark at 10:00 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

If you ever find yourself wondering why people hate doctors, remember this comment.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:51 AM on December 8 [+] [!]

And yet we so want you to love us...
posted by docpops at 10:00 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

I just wish I'd known how (relatively) easy and cheap it can be to eat decently (assuming that you have enough money and access to adequate cooking facilities, which of course not everyone does). When I was in university I thought anyone who could cook a meal requiring more than four ingredients was some kind of culinary wizard, privy to knowledge far too arcane for me.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:01 AM on December 8, 2014

I guess my reaction comes from a place of spending years trying to undo the damage to people's health that could have been prevented if they just didn't eat garbage all the time, and then come in and sit passively and helpless because it was just too hard to cook, or shop instead of eating out.

So, I found this article to be very enlightening and empathy building around this topic. The main focus of the story is around Whole Foods opening a store in Detroit and attempting to be the salve for all the problems of working poor. (spoiler: it's not)

But the part I found to be very relevant was the woman who came to talk to the in store nutritionist suffering from obesity, COPD, seizures, and more. The nutritionist takes her around the store, shows her what to eat and when and how much better she'll feel when she does. The journalist follows up with her. Has she made any of the changes to her diet? No, not really. Wouldn't she feel better if she did? Wasn't her ignorance of what to eat the final barrier in her ability to transform her diet and thus her life?

No. She knew what was healthy to eat before she met that nutritionist. Vegetables, lean meats, stay away from processed and sugary foods, etc. She still aspires to be able to eat like that, but at the end of the day, surviving was more important than thriving. And in some ways, surviving meant not rocking the boat. Surviving meant buying the thing that would reliably satiate her hunger, that she knew she would like, that she knew she could afford and could prepare and wouldn't spoil.

Not to put too much of a fine point on it (and you've been a good sport Doc), but sure she could prioritize eating healthier, and plank some salmon on Monday. But what if, come Friday she urgently needs those extra $10? What good is a healthy meal when you don't have heat, or a place to live?

Bandwidth poverty is a topic that's been discussed before, but I think this is very relevant and very empathy developing. It's easy to say "but you know better". But applying that to real life is much more difficult.
posted by fontophilic at 10:02 AM on December 8, 2014 [14 favorites]

Oh boy, another article why nobody should ever enjoy anything! Good to know, yet again, that deep down I really shouldn't like doing one of my favorite things in the world.

I really, really enjoy doing car maintenance, and yet I'm not offended that there's not a vast cultural narrative that everyone should be changing their own oil, it's so much cheaper and more efficient, and the reason that poor people can't get to work on time is that they simply don't know how enjoyable it is to own and care for their own car.
posted by muddgirl at 10:03 AM on December 8, 2014 [16 favorites]

BBC recently showed a series where Lorraine Pascale went around to ordinary people's houses and helped them gain confidence in a kitchen. I was pretty cynical at first, but I ended enjoying the joy on people's faces when they realised cooking didn't need to involved fancy skills or special equipment. Just the look on a guy's face the first time he sliced a peach was pretty incredible. As is wont with these programmes, the people did end up cooking with slightly high-end ingredients but it was all about "you can do it too and don't worry". I liked that.
posted by kariebookish at 10:03 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

McMillan's declaration that cooking is a "learned skill" is taking a stand against something no one is actually saying.

Oh, I don't think that's true. I mean, there's no best-selling how to out there on "how to build a nuclear reactor" or even "how to build a house". There are some things for which it is accepted that it will take years of study and dedication and practice to become skilled, worthwhile if you have the passion for them, but not necessarily something you should be capable of if you lack the talent and interest to devote to them. And then there's cooking, and Bittman's book is called "How to Cook Everything". One book. Every thing.

Again, I think cooking's like driving --- something that everyone can and should learn at a basic level, because it's a powerfully useful skill to know. (And also, at the higher levels, a skill for which some people have a gift, and whose talent and years dedication allow them to achieve things I could never be capable of, as an interested amateur.)

But Bittman's is hardly the only example --- there's this whole schizo industrial complex of celebrity chefery and reality shows and cooking competitions which simultaneously presents cooking as easy --- 30 minute meals, semi-homemade, easy italian --- which seduces with its glossiness and its "and after 45 minutes it'll look like this one, which I have prepared ahead of time..." It's all meant to seem doable, otherwise why would you buy the damn cookbook? At the same time, they also market the glamour of intensity, of creativity and improvisation, the macho thing of "gimme a some mint jelly, a box of tropical flavored tums and a mutton shoulder and in 20 minutes I'll give you a roasted jiggot of lamb that'll have you crying for your mother in Greek" thing they do on Chopped, where the chefs sweat bullets and hurl cleavers around and bish bash bosh, something you could present at Le Bernadin. I think on the whole, most of the way food is written about in the media and shown as entertainment on TV is meant to eliminate the drudgery of it and highlight all the fun stuff. Which is fair enough, really.

But if you're sitting there as a novice and it's taking you 45 minutes to do what the chef did in five, why wouldn't you be unpleasantly surprised? I remember when Rachel Ray was more popular, lots of people complaining that it'd take them an hour to do her 30 minute meals--- in my experience, that's mostly down to Ray being all in all decent and efficient prep cook, capable of breaking down a meal's worth of produce in 10 minutes, In between stirring and searing and so forth; most of the newbie cooks I know can take that long to painstakingly chop a single onion.
posted by Diablevert at 10:05 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Unless you count making a packet of Maruchan ramen with an egg cracked into it to be cooking

YES! Totally cooking. This is basically the meal my mom requests I make her as "comfort food." But I admit, I crack in *two* eggs. And also put a quarter onion and a clove of garlic into the water before it starts boiling. And personally, when I eat it, I top it with ketchup and hot sauce because, why not?

My favorite comfort food is spaghetti with olive oil and vinegar, with a can of sardines on top. Eating it right now for lunch in fact. But my favorite food as a teenager was Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli, which I would spread on a plate to microwave so the "pasta" got weirdly hard and chewy. YUM. I still eat it pretty often, maybe every couple weeks.

But anyway, I had to favorite your comment because you name-checked Hugs. The most awkward name ever, does anyone ever call them that in person?

Sorry, I know this is off topic. Divined By Radio just happened to mention like 90% of my favorite foods, which yes, are mostly "shelf stable." I actually do know how to cook -- not anything fancy, but give me a raw ingredient and I can probably figure out how to make it into a meal alright. The prepared stuff can just hit the spot, though.
posted by rue72 at 10:06 AM on December 8, 2014

I feel pretty lucky that my first job in hight school, & my next ten jobs, were working in restaurant kitchens. I worked at fast food places, breakfast places, Vegetarian health food, Mexican, Cajun, burger joints, and continental, where I learned my sauces & how to roast, sautee & braise meat. It paid for shit, but has given me some of my most-used life skills.

Never did work in an authentic Italian place, or any sort of eastern/oriental but I've learned how to wing it with what's on hand & am pretty good at improvising & pretty much never set something inedible down on the table, even though the last few years, I've leaned too heavily on simple one-dish stuff like tuna cassarole & king ranch chicken because I've been feeding kids, and working overtime.

And some days, it does suck. I bought whole chickens yesterday to save 50 cents a pound over cut-up chickens, and then labored over the little fuckers with a knife for 20 minutes, trying to get them hacked up & into a freezable state. I cursed a bunch, and am lucky I still have all my digits.

Although I only get to make it once every few years, my Hollandiase sauce ranks up there with any you've had, I think.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:12 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Diablevert, I don't disagree with what you're saying, but the article is suggesting that there's some cadre of smug foodies out there who believe cooking to be an inborn skill that requires no instruction. All those "30 minute meals" cookbooks and cooking shows are premised on the fact that cooking is hard, and people need resources to make it easier. I have never seen anything cooking-related that took as its premise that cooking is inherently easy. Bittman doesn't say it, Pollan doesn't say it, and Waters doesn't say it. In fact, I'd guess that any of the three would assert that cooking is too hard for many people, in large part because government food policy makes it unnecessarily so.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 10:15 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Docpops - laziness, really? You deal with individuals, so you're bound to think in terms of individuals' actions. But is this the best explanation? Look at the rising rate of obesity, globally. The distribution of laziness (ok going with that) in the general population probably hasn't changed much in the past 50 years. Some might say yours is an easier way of looking at things than the state of things warrants. I don't want to call it lazy, because I think moral language doesn't help us understand much, but some might.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:16 AM on December 8, 2014 [7 favorites]

Not to put too much of a fine point on it (and you've been a good sport Doc), but sure she could prioritize eating healthier, and plank some salmon on Monday. But what if, come Friday she urgently needs those extra $10? What good is a healthy meal when you don't have heat, or a place to live?

Bandwidth poverty is a topic that's been discussed before, but I think this is very relevant and very empathy developing. It's easy to say "but you know better". But applying that to real life is much more difficult.
posted by fontophilic at 10:02 AM on December 8 [2 favorites +] [!]

Thanks for the really informative comment. And it matches what I see in practice. The seriously poor, from my perspective, are contending with issues both clearcut and abstract that I cannot ever grasp, and I assure you most of us in medicine don't look at their situation in the same way as some one we know exists in a realm of stable middle-income, 2 earner households with kids and expectations of a normal life span. Remember, we know the context of our patients, at least insofar as we often have many years of data and experience and awareness of their family structure, their habits and attitudes toward many things in addition to nutrition. I see how it comes across as judgmental, but frankly the poor work so much harder than most of the middle-class health nightmares that we see that it is doubly offensive to hear the excuses people hold on to for not changing behaviors when so many others around them surmount far more challenging issues just to survive.
posted by docpops at 10:16 AM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

If you are on an incredibly tight budget you literally cannot afford to make a mistake in the kitchen because then you (and your family if applicable) will either go hungry that day or be forced to spend another day's food allowance on new food. "Changing behaviors" can literally take food from your children's mouths, and if you are poor and not white this can get your kids taken away from you.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:20 AM on December 8, 2014 [21 favorites]

The distribution of laziness (ok going with that) in the general population probably hasn't changed much in the past 50 years. Some might say yours is an easier way of looking at things than the state of things warrants. I don't want to call it lazy, because I think moral language doesn't help us understand much, but some might.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:16 AM on December 8 [+] [!]

No idea how you quantify laziness, but I imagine anyone looking at our daily regimen of energy expenditure as recently as a few decades ago would be floored by how little we move in an era of big screen TV's and cell phones. So yeah, it may not be 'laziness' in the sense of deliberate avoidance of work or activity, but once it becomes evident that a lack of activity is detrimental to your health and you choose not to change despite adequate intellectual, temporal and financial resources, then I'm calling it laziness.
posted by docpops at 10:21 AM on December 8, 2014

but the article is suggesting that there's some cadre of smug foodies out there who believe cooking to be an inborn skill that requires no instruction

That wasn't my takeaway at all. My takeaway is that the author thinks that food writers don't treat cooking as a chore. They treat it as a hobby because, for food writers, cooking is their hobby. She states that thesis right at the very beginning:

Which brings me to the dirty little secret that I suspect haunts every food writer: When you have no choice but to cook for yourself every single day, no matter what, it is not a fun, gratifying adventure. It is a chore. On many days, it kind of sucks.

When she does discuss how cooking isn't easy, she discusses things that really aren't or can't be taught in a cookbook

To cook whole foods at a pace that can match box-meal offerings, one needs to know how to make substitutions on the fly; how to doctor a dish that has been overvinegared, oversalted, or overspiced; how to select produce and know how long you have to use it before it goes bad; how to stock a pantry on a budget... Those mistakes are a natural part of learning to cook, but they will cost you and your family time, ingredients, and money without actually feeding you. They also make a persuasive case that cooking is not worth the trouble and that Hamburger Helper is worth the cost.

posted by muddgirl at 10:21 AM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Remember, we know the context of our patients, at least insofar as we often have many years of data and experience and awareness of their family structure, their habits and attitudes toward many things in addition to nutrition. I see how it comes across as judgmental, but frankly the poor work so much harder than most of the middle-class health nightmares that we see that it is doubly offensive to hear the excuses people hold on to for not changing behaviors when so many others around them surmount far more challenging issues just to survive.

Okay - arguably I'm middle-class, of the kind of middle-class patient you're dealing with. And if you came to my house sometime after work, there are occasionally nights you'd catch me eating something sucky for food. I guarantee you that it is not due to laziness, though -it is due to honest, straight-up fatigue, because while I am indeed middle-class, the only reason I am middle-class is because that is how hard I am working to NOT be below the poverty line.

And I suspect that the ONLY differences between me and some of the patients you're talking about is that I don't have kids and I have a strong background in knowing how to cook and having tried cooking and having grown up feeling comfortable in a kitchen, so I not only know the importance of cooking better, I have the actual time to do something about it, so I pre-load my fridge with the means to at least half-ass something when I'm that tired.

And even STILL I sometimes make do with "oh, I just ate a whole box of Cheetos. I guess that's dinner." If I were spending my weekends taking care of kids, or if I didn't know much about cooking, I'd be screwed.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:23 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

No idea how you quantify laziness, but I imagine anyone looking at our daily regimen of energy expenditure as recently as a few decades ago would be floored by how little we move in an era of big screen TV's and cell phones. So yeah, it may not be 'laziness' in the sense of deliberate avoidance of work or activity, but once it becomes evident that a lack of activity is detrimental to your health and you choose not to change despite adequate intellectual, temporal and financial resources, than I'm calling it laziness.

So the rise in obesity is due to big-screen TVs and cell phones? Jesus dude, you have no idea what you're talking about.
posted by leopard at 10:24 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

I don't think mental fatigue gets enough acknowledgment in these discussions. Even if it's possible to make a healthy meal for four in 30 minutes for $5, you've still got to deal with the associated tasks involved in home cooking. If you work a typical 8-5 in a typical largeish city, you've got to battle your way through rush hour traffic to your local supermarket, find a parking space, mill about with all the other commuters with the same idea you had, with all the unpleasant encounters that entails, and drag your stuff home, unpack it, do all the other crap you have to do when you get home, and then you're set to whip up that magic 30 minute meal, with a mental fuel tank that's now a few hairs below "E." You don't have to be lazy to be overwhelmed by all that (although no doubt it helps).
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 10:24 AM on December 8, 2014 [13 favorites]

once it becomes evident that a lack of activity is detrimental to your health and you choose not to change despite adequate intellectual, temporal and financial resources, than I'm calling it laziness.


Do people have adequate temporal resources, though? If they do, I agree, I don't see why rational people would choose to do harmful things to themselves. Something else must be going on.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:25 AM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

And oh yeah, the comment about TV-induced laziness was made in the context of explaining why people are too lazy to cook. I guess those big TVs make people so lazy they just sit around on the couch and can't get up to the kitchen to whip up a meal. And over the past few decades, laziness has spread all over the world, a remarkable coincidence in a world shaped by independent individual choices.

Fucking doctors.
posted by leopard at 10:28 AM on December 8, 2014 [11 favorites]

When I was little - and I had two working parents, and a stable home where all but one weekly meal was always home-cooked from scratch - salmon was a luxury. (Now I'm vegan-with-lapses, I don't eat salmon.) Salmon was a treat, and we had it occasionally on Sunday nights. "Ooh, let's grill some salmon, it's so healthy and simple!" would have required easily another $10,000 a year in income, and short of sending me out to the bottle factory like little Charlie Dickens, that wasn't going to happen.
posted by Frowner at 10:34 AM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

That wasn't my takeaway at all. My takeaway is that the author thinks that food writers don't treat cooking as a chore. They treat it as a hobby because, for food writers, cooking is their hobby.

That's true, but it's a thesis she doesn't back up in any way. She says something like this:

When the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding—instead of copping to the fact that it can also be annoying, time consuming, and risky—we alienate the people who don’t have the luxury of choice, and we unwittingly reinforce the impression that cooking is a specialty hobby instead of a basic life skill.

I read something like that, and I really need a citation where anyone has ever said that "cooking is only ever fun and rewarding." Certainly the names she cites at the end don't say this. Mark Bittman constantly writes about how to make cooking less of a chore. People who post photos of dishes online aren't showing off how easy they are to make -- they're proud to have pulled off something rather challenging.

Her sentiment may resonate with readers who hear the same messages she does, but as far as I'm aware those messages aren't coming from any actual people. It's a straw man.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 10:34 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Interestingly, medieval Europe had cookshops, which were basically take-out windows patronized by poor people who didn't have kitchens.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that at all. It makes sense though, since having a kitchen suitable for food preparation in every urban dwelling is a pretty recent idea (and in some areas still sort of theoretical; I have friends whose apartment "kitchens" are so small you can't open the oven all the way, but nobody cares because they are just notional kitchens anyway, and would be better termed 'refrigerator closets').

In chatting with some coworkers over lunch, one of them mentioned the "cafeterias" of the Southern US, which are now something of a dying breed, but were a working-class institution throughout much of the 20th century. They seem to have been built on the idea of taking advantage of economies of scale (big kitchens, bulk purchase of ingredients), to provide appealing (if probably not exactly healthy, by modern standards) food, to working people at a reasonable price.

Supposedly such facilities are still quite common in parts of Asia; why they have become so rare in the US is kind of an interesting question.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:42 AM on December 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

How about Mark Bittman's "Quick and Easy Recipes," a collection of his recipes from his newspaper column, which you can peruse excerpts from here. Personally, I think the introduction is rife with the kind of fallacies that McMillan is complaining about. I can't copy-and paste, but refer to paragraph 4 of the introduction where Bittman refers to very advanced cooking skills as "not the style of chefs but of traditional home cooks." He does nod to the idea that novice cooks will want a foolproof step-by-step recipe. He says that cooking is a craft that requires hours and hours of practice, but he treats it not like an essentially-mandatory adult chore but rather like learning to paint or to play the piano. He never acknowledges the price of failure - an inedible meal, wasted money, and hungry bellies.
posted by muddgirl at 10:44 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Just a final point before closing up shop...

Traeger grills are not toys for the wealthy. You can pick up a basic model for a few hundred bucks at Sears. Yes, out of reach for many but certainly not a price point that makes it absurd, especially given what people spend on grilling supplies. America spends billions on this single aspect of life, so I guess there are a lot of us elitists out there to skewer. They are popular because they can't burn your food and don't stink up your kitchen. I guess it's a regional thing. Many people around here save up for them as they would any other valued possession, but saying you own a Traeger isn't the same as saying you spent Spring Break in Gstaad (which, of course, I do every year).

Salmon - in the northwest, you can often find it more cheaply than cuts of beef or chicken. But its real merit in terms of articles like this is that it is practically idiot proof to cook properly. Throw some salt and lemon juice on it and walk away for 10-20 minutes and it's done. Don't buy it if it isn't affordable. But take-out for 3 or 4 people at any place not McDonald's or it's ilk is generally 25-30$ or higher, so the math isn't ambiguous here.
posted by docpops at 10:46 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Hell, I make a decent salary and I still don't eat salmon often. I live in an apartment without a proper kitchen vent fan, and without any exterior space for a grill. So if I cook fish, I either get to keep a fan in the window venting my space for several hours, or I (and my neighbors) smell fish for the next three days. Given that I pay my own heat in the winter, that means fish is effectively off the menu at home from November-April.

I actually like both fish and cooking, but living in an apartment means some compromises. I'm extremely lucky in that fish is one of the few things I have to compromise on.
posted by pie ninja at 10:47 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

It seems like a lot of people are assuming the choice is between:

1. The idea that people's lives are shaped mostly by individual choice, so people deserve shame if they go wrong. In this case, not cooking at home leading to unhealthy eating.

2. The idea that people's lives are shaped mostly by larger forces, like the long workweek, lack of resources, and stuff like that. So even though lots of people eat out and that's expensive and unhealthy, we shouldn't blame them, but instead should concentrate on fixing structural problems.

That dichotomy might be partially false, because there's a middle position which goes like this:

People's lives are shaped mostly by larger forces, like the long workweek, lack of resources, and what other people expect of them. Therefore, even if someone does not deserve shame in some neutral, cosmic sense, shame can still be a useful way of getting people to do what they should. We should indeed fix structural problems; at least one of which is that people can often get away with bad habits for a really long time without social repercussions, and this will harm them much more in the long run than if their bad habits had been interrupted right away. Therefore, if we want to fix some large problem with people's behavior, one solution is to gossip and scold much more.

Who's up for that? Probably not many people. But it is an answer to the narrow problem about cooking, right? So here's the real question -- when there are many solutions to some small, specific problem like cooking, why do we prefer some answers to others? This isn't just about cooking, it's about something much bigger. What is it? If this conversation is a lot of lines that all converge to a point off screen, where's the point? And why should I go there, and not a different point?
posted by officer_fred at 10:48 AM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Eh, I feel like this is matter of interpretation: I think if you write a book that promises it can teach you how to cook everything in its very title --- then implicitly you're saying cooking is easy. Come, child and grab my hand, you may think this is difficult but it's actually not --- not once I show you. I would say most of the writing and portrayal of cooking emphasises the fun stuff to the point of suggesting that's the essence of the task. It may be similarly virtuous and useful for me to do my own taxes, but nobody's trying to sell me on the idea that that's going to be a good time. There are no legions of videos on YouTube of accounts in green visors cheerily hacking at calculators and waving 1099s around. The attitude is more, alright, well, this sucks but it's necessary, so here's how to do it. There's a lot less cheerful cajoling and closing your eyes in wonderment as you taste you creation, etc.

And you know, a lot of that is because cooking is more fun than doing your taxes. But I think when McMillen's using we she's referring to herself and her fellow food writers. And for the most part I think they do tend toward far more C'mon! This will be awesome! than, Alright, let's just suck it up and get through this.
posted by Diablevert at 10:53 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

And you know, a lot of that is because cooking is more fun than doing your taxes.

I honestly find filling out forms and reading instruction manuals more fun than cooking. Of course, the IRS doesn't demand that I file my taxes every day or face starvation. In that case I'd probably consider using TurboTax or even H&R Block some of the time, even though they're way more expensive.
posted by muddgirl at 11:01 AM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

No idea how you quantify laziness, but I imagine anyone looking at our daily regimen of energy expenditure as recently as a few decades ago would be floored by how little we move in an era of big screen TV's and cell phones

A few decades ago, eh? You mean when most people had only one spouse working outside of the house, and the other spouse working FULL TIME to 'keep house' (cleaning, cooking, etc, etc)... So the spouse working outside of the house spent less time cooking now than most people do, and the spouse working in the house had keeping house as a full-time-job.

But do tell more about how people are lazy now, and they used to be hardworking.
posted by el io at 11:01 AM on December 8, 2014 [12 favorites]

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. (Twain).

I've been teaching myself to cook this year, in order to be able to make dinner for my SO when work is too much trouble and stress. (SO is a wonderful cook, but favors more elaborate meals). I've been using Bittman's How to Cook Everything (the simple one with pictures), and have made a dozen or so dishes, no failures, and have enjoyed myself.
But--
I cook on my day off, when I have plenty of time and energy.
If I mess up the meal, no one will go hungry.
I have SO's equipment, and advice.
I have a choice; I never have to cook.
If I had to cook after work, on a tight budget, without equipment or advice, and had to do so every night, it would be a stressful and potentially difficult chore.
posted by librosegretti at 11:01 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

but saying you own a Traeger isn't the same as saying you spent Spring Break in Gstaad (which, of course, I do every year).

So you DID mean to come off as smug and classist. Whoops, my bad.
posted by MissySedai at 11:05 AM on December 8, 2014 [7 favorites]

I'm sorry muddgirl, not trying to argue, but I guess I just don't hear the same thing in Bittman's writing that you do. I totally do resonate with what you're saying about the price of failure being unacknowledged. I certainly have been there many times with recipes that promise an absurd 20-minute cooking time, and I end up an hour later with an inedible mess. A lot of these cookbook writers seem hopelessly out of touch with anyone who isn't already an experienced home cook. (Has there ever been a class action lawsuit against a cookbook author? A few of them owe me the price of some expensive cuts of meat and at least one emergency room visit.)

I know that Bittman is an ardent proponent of home cooking, so I do think he tries hard -- maybe too hard -- to make it seem more appealing. "Cooking isn't just dumping mac & cheese on a plate! It can be easy AND delicious!!" But yeah, the reason I follow his articles is because I actually have been blown away by some of the simple home dishes he posts about.

On the other hand, I think he and others doing the same sort of work stumble in that they take as given that healthy food is or should be a top priority for everyone. To repeat something I said earlier, while yes healthy food is important, for the average person there are probably five or six things that are killing you faster than unhealthy food, so it just can't always be the top priority.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 11:06 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Serious question: assuming that you can afford to buy decent prepared food, why should you cook when you don't feel like it? I feel like we've made cooking into a moral imperative, and I'm not 100% sure why.

Because when you stop cooking, you hand the keys to your survival right over to Capitalism.

I'm being flippant, but that really is to me the core of the moral imperative (and of this article, even though the author never quite makes that leap). "Cooking is a fun hobby!" is a crafty narrative that works hand in hand with "Cooking is a difficult, time-consuming, costly chore" to trick people into delegating our most basic survival activities to corporations, weakening our competence and reinforcing our dependence. If you're rich enough, you buy into the first narrative with the restaurants, the fancy gourmet stuff, the whole foodie consumption machine. If you're poor, you buy into the myth that cooking is for the privileged and opt for fast food and convenience microwave junk. Either way, you're buying into the idea that you can't feed yourself as well as corporations can.

And either way, you're losing aspects of what makes cooking such a powerful daily act. Food ties into a million different social, cultural, political and economic activities, and cooking keeps you hands-on involved. It brings you together with your family, with your community. It makes you ask questions about where the food comes from, why it costs what it costs, who is selling it to you.

My favorite example (I wrote my masters thesis on this very topic) is Alfredo sauce. Easiest thing in the world to make, 3 basic cheap ingredients, and it's done in the time it takes to boil your pasta. But if you don't know that, from the price you pay for the dish in a restaurant and the dozens of jarred/powdered sauce options in the store, it wouldn't be crazy to believe it's a fancy gourmet dish unattainable by the common of mortals. You do it at home once, and you'll never pay for it again. Can you think of anyone who might have an interest in maintaining the illusion?

Cooking every meal is often a chore, it might take longer and not taste as great, but it keeps you grounded in a way you can only achieve by "seizing the means of production".
posted by Freyja at 11:09 AM on December 8, 2014 [7 favorites]

docpops is a parody account poking fun at how people view their doctors, right? Right???
posted by insoluble uncertainty at 11:11 AM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

But do tell more about how people are lazy now, and they used to be hardworking.
posted by el io at 11:01 AM on December 8 [+] [!]

When I grew up in the 70's me and most of my friends were in households where both parents worked. It was a large metro area of a major city and it was just incredibly common, normal, that spouses worked, for income or for intellectual or other gratification reasons. I guess I'm a little surprised that this is controversial. Go watch Ben Affleck in Argo sometime, and see what an adult male meal was from McDonalds. There were three or four television networks. If you didn't do something active to pass the time there was nothing else to do for recreation. There's pretty solid research on this, showing essentially that leisure time activity has increased, but actual activity as demanded by job and day-to-day life has dropped by at least 50% for both men and women.
posted by docpops at 11:12 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Traeger grills are not toys for the wealthy. You can pick up a basic model for a few hundred bucks at Sears. Yes, out of reach for many but certainly not a price point that makes it absurd, especially given what people spend on grilling supplies. America spends billions on this single aspect of life, so I guess there are a lot of us elitists out there to skewer.

The fact that already comfortably middle-class people spend a ton of money on "grilling supplies" does not make this any less of a luxury item for people who are already living with food insecurity. I realize you are trying your best to explain what you consider to be reasonable and logical ways for people to eat more healthily but it's coming off as some of the most let them eat cake commenting I've seen in a while.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:12 AM on December 8, 2014 [29 favorites]

i don't even know what grilling supplies are, are they tongs, how do you spend a lot of money on tongs
posted by poffin boffin at 11:12 AM on December 8, 2014 [21 favorites]

Because when you stop cooking, you hand the keys to your survival right over to Capitalism.

I literally sometimes lie awake at night thinking about how once the revolution comes and we are all growing our own food and drinking raw milk out of mason jars on our communitarian farms, there will be no more Diet Coke. I do not believe I will survive the first winter.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 11:13 AM on December 8, 2014 [15 favorites]

It's not like I hate Mark Bittman. I have two of his cookbooks, and I use them a lot. I would say that in general, I'm a fan. I just feel like he takes for granted that eating should be the most important thing in my life, and sometimes it's not.

Because when you stop cooking, you hand the keys to your survival right over to Capitalism.

There is no way I can produce all or even most of my food in my 600-square-foot apartment, so the keys to my survival have already been handed over to capitalism, in the form of the grocery store, food producers, my landlord, and what have you. The idea that I can somehow opt out of capitalism by cooking seems ridiculous to me.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:13 AM on December 8, 2014 [14 favorites]

It may be similarly virtuous and useful for me to do my own taxes, but nobody's trying to sell me on the idea that that's going to be a good time.

But also, the quick/easy alternatives to doing your own taxes are generally fine to get the job done (for most people, anyway). What if TurboTax and H&R Block and all of those tax services were so inherently flawed that they almost always screwed up your taxes to some degree? Then there might be more of a push for people to do it themselves.

Similarly, if fast food were reliably healthy and nutritious, I don't think these cooking advocates would much care if you ate all your meals at McDonald's. It's the fact that they're pretty much all purveyors of garbage that's so dismaying.

I dunno, I do feel like I'm splitting hairs with this article. I'll cop to being a foodie, but I go through many days hating the very concept of food and waiting for the price of Soylent to come down. I just feel like she gets way too strident in this piece, and fails to support her straw-man-ish arguments with any examples.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 11:16 AM on December 8, 2014

it smells like pine sol, stop trying to make fizzy pine sol happen
posted by poffin boffin at 11:21 AM on December 8, 2014 [17 favorites]

Also, can I just say that I am on a paleo diet, which is why I'm eating at McDonald's three times a week. I wish I had it as easy as you guys who can just boil some pasta and pour sauce on it.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 11:21 AM on December 8, 2014

Similarly, if fast food were reliably healthy and nutritious, I don't think these cooking advocates would much care if you ate all your meals at McDonald's. It's the fact that they're pretty much all purveyors of garbage that's so dismaying.

She's not talking about fast food, though (although others in this thread are). She only mentions fast food in the context of fast food being too expensive for poor people to afford. She's talking about the modern pre-packaged food conveniences that are mostly fine but do not fit into the "simple and fresh" lifestyle that modern food writers prefer. Hamburger helper, canned vegetables out of season, etc. etc.

There is no way I can produce all or even most of my food in my 600-square-foot apartment, so the keys to my survival have already been handed over to capitalism, in the form of the grocery store, food producers, my landlord, and what have you. The idea that I can somehow opt out of capitalism by cooking seems ridiculous to me.

I wish I could find the facebook meme that says something like, "Where did people get their food before supermarkets? From their farms and their victory gardens!" Of course, before super markets people got their food from just a regular, non-super market.
posted by muddgirl at 11:22 AM on December 8, 2014

i don't even know what grilling supplies are

Propane? And propane accessories?
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:23 AM on December 8, 2014 [17 favorites]

I hate cooking. All the time I spend cooking is time I could be spending doing something else I actually want or need to do. Boiling macaroni and dumping in the Kraft cheese powder is as fancy as I get, and I can still feel the seconds of my life ticking away as I stir boiling pasta. On the rare occasions I do cook, I tend to bake things, because I can stick a pan in an oven for an hour and go away and do other things. (No I do not keep careful watch on things in the oven to judge they are properly browning or whatnot, hahahaha no)

The healthiest my diet has ever been, and the lowest adult weight I've ever had, was when I ate nothing but cereal and $2.50 microwaveable Lean Cuisines, because I was underemployed and too exhausted to experiment with food, and the stove was broken, and I didn't have a dishwasher so washing cookware as always An Ordeal, and I was too broke to buy quickly perishable things or in bulk (though NOT too poor to buy Lean Cuisines). Microwave diet dinners are high in sodium etc. but if they're all you eat, you lose weight, plus hey, vegetables!

One time I decided to get fancy and bake myself a homemade pizza, by which I mean a pre-baked pizza crust + jar of pre-made pizza sauce + store bag of shredded mozzarella + bag of sliced pepperoni. Homemade! When the oven timer went off I discovered that the parchment paper I'd used on the pizza pan (to make cleanup easier) had caught fire, in a perfect flame ring around the pizza. My first thought was "FIRE EXTINGUISHER;" my second thought was "I just spent $20 on pizza supplies and I'm out of Lean Cuisines, fuck this," and I watched the parchment fire through the oven window and hoped it would burn out before the pizza crust or the kitchen caught fire.

The crust didn't catch; the pizza was delicious and only a little ash-flavored.
posted by nicebookrack at 11:24 AM on December 8, 2014 [14 favorites]

A lot of these cookbook writers seem hopelessly out of touch with anyone who isn't already an experienced home cook.

I tend to agree with this. I mean, I LOVE cookbooks, I've been collecting them for years. But even if you're already an experienced home cook, some of them can be intimidating. (I found Charlie Trotter's first cookbook at a used bookstore, I've yet to cook anything out of it, but the pictures make me happy.)

The first cookbook I ever bought myself was the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, in paperback, in 1989. It is stained and tattered and barely holding together, but it's still my go-to, and it's still the one I recommend to friends who are trying to get a handle on the whole kitchen thing. The best part about it, aside from the simple recipes, is the section of conversion charts and substitution lists. Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking is another great option for the novice, because he explains the WHY of certain techniques, not just the HOW. You feel like a rockstar in the kitchen when you read his book and follow his advice.
posted by MissySedai at 11:25 AM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

If you didn't do something active to pass the time there was nothing else to do for recreation.

In the 80's we had books for entertainment. If the internet went away tomorrow, I'd be doing the same level of physical activity and reading a lot more dead tree material.

Seriously though, this 'people are lazy' derail is pretty insulting and frankly a lazy argument to make. Unless you want to back up your 'lazy' with actual research and citations, I'm going to call your argument lazy. Quit being lazy.
posted by el io at 11:25 AM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

Every workday (more or less) I make my own sandwich for luch with a few packaged sides and a drink. Does that count as cooking? (My sandwiches can get complicated: today it was pepper mill turkey with provolone, horseradish and mango-habanero aioli on an onion roll)
posted by jonmc at 11:29 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

(I found Charlie Trotter's first cookbook at a used bookstore, I've yet to cook anything out of it, but the pictures make me happy.)

My wife once gave me a Ferran Adrià cookbook as a gift. I was like, "I love you for believing I would even consider attempting anything in this book."
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 11:30 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Most cookbooks (and I say this as a bookstore employee) are more food porn than anything else.
posted by jonmc at 11:31 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

i don't even know what grilling supplies are

Meat stabbers
Sauce paintbrush
Prongstick
Flesh scourer
Corn pokes
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:32 AM on December 8, 2014 [23 favorites]

Propane? And propane accessories?

Hm, that would put anything related to this out of reach for anyone who does not live in a private home with a yard of some sort, then.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:33 AM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

There's pretty solid research on this, showing essentially that leisure time activity has increased, but actual activity as demanded by job and day-to-day life has dropped by at least 50% for both men and women.

And what on earth does this have to do with cooking? Or with Traeger grills?

when there are many solutions to some small, specific problem like cooking, why do we prefer some answers to others?

Because these "answers" don't actually drive anyone's lifestyles. Cooking is a learned habit and people's behavior is mainly based on their prior experience plus constraints on their money and time.
posted by leopard at 11:36 AM on December 8, 2014

Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking is another great option for the novice, because he explains the WHY of certain techniques, not just the HOW. You feel like a rockstar in the kitchen when you read his book and follow his advice.

I have spent the past two years making continual, good-faith efforts at following the recipes and techniques in this book, and have a failure rate of 100%. Now, I am not a great cook by anyone's measure. But when I cook on my own/improvisation-like, or when I follow, say, my mom's baking recipes, or something off of Epicurious, my failure rate is more around 60%. There is clearly something about either Brown's writing, or his actual techniques, that is just beyond me on every possible level.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:37 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also when I "fail" at, say, a homemade marinara sauce the failure usually results in an edible, but unspectacular, dish. Perhaps a little saltier than I expected, or the wrong sausage-to-tomato ratio. Whereas when I fail at one of Alton Brown's recipes the result is typically an inedible mush or some variety of shoe leather.

Do I just not have enough teeny tiny bowls? I feel like that's the only part I skimp on, the 5000 teeny tiny bowls he uses for every dish. They aren't mentioned in the book though!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:40 AM on December 8, 2014

Pretty much every aspect of cooking is on a sliding scale:

Expense (Dirt cheap-----Profanely expensive)
Difficulty (Your 5 year old could make it-----Thomas Keller would struggle)
Required prepwork (Throw together blindly-----Plan one month in advance)
Healthiness (Will add years to your life-----Chance of heart attack goes up 20% if you so much as smell it)
Moral/Environmental Impact (Made from fungus-----Made from endangered species drowned in its own mother's tears)

The fun thing about these threads is we can each set the sliders to wherever we want, calibrate our assumptions accordingly, and proceed to argue from there.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:42 AM on December 8, 2014 [16 favorites]

Do I just not have enough teeny tiny bowls? I feel like that's the only part I skimp on, the 5000 teeny tiny bowls he uses for every dish. They aren't mentioned in the book though!

You're clearly not using kosher salt from one of those little glass things with the pop-up metal lid. That's the common denominator for all Alton Brown recipes.
posted by jbickers at 11:43 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

also Taste Enjoyment (your family will clamor for more-------this will be the key evidence in your trial at the hague)
posted by poffin boffin at 11:43 AM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

I want a board with these sliders on it that I can set before I serve each meal
posted by Ella Fynoe at 11:44 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

I don't particularly like cooking, but I do it anyway because the US food industry isn't trustworthy unless you've gathered up the various corporations' CEOs' families in a room with a bunch of angry men wielding Kalashnikovs. And even then you can never be totally sure.
posted by starbreaker at 11:46 AM on December 8, 2014

Every workday (more or less) I make my own sandwich for luch with a few packaged sides and a drink. Does that count as cooking? (My sandwiches can get complicated: today it was pepper mill turkey with provolone, horseradish and mango-habanero aioli on an onion roll)

Yes, and please save me a bite! I'll bring breath mints.

Most cookbooks (and I say this as a bookstore employee) are more food porn than anything else.

They really are these days. And that's fine for cookbook enthusiasts, but it's better for novice cooks to be pointed to the classics. Even Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking would be a good option, if the set didn't retail for about $100. I just about cried from joy when I found mine at John R. King in Detroit for $25. Julia was another one who could explain things in an accessible, reassuring way.

Our local library system has a pretty extensive collection of cookbooks, and you can even request them through the bookmobile service. I don't know if that's an option elsewhere, but it's a well loved one here.
posted by MissySedai at 11:48 AM on December 8, 2014

Because when you stop cooking, you hand the keys to your survival right over to Capitalism.

Sure, ok, I can't run a full on farm in my condo (though I'll keep killing 3-4 tomato plants every year on my balcony in my efforts to).

But take that sentence in the context of the recent Soylent hubbub, whose main appeal seems to be to silicone valley types who can spend even more time working and programming instead of cooking or even chewing. And it doesn't seem to be so outlandish.
posted by fontophilic at 11:48 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

(your family will clamor for more-------this will be the key evidence in your trial at the hague)

"Thomas Keller said it would work!" is the Foodie Nuremberg Defense.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:56 AM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

But it seems like Soylent would also be ideal for everyone agreeing with the "cooking is a chore" message of this article.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 11:56 AM on December 8, 2014

Well just because you don't like cooking doesn't mean you don't like eating tasty food.

Soylent is aimed at people who exist in the overlap between [People Who Don't Want to Cook] and [People Who Don't Want To Eat Out]. (And, I suppose, People Who Don't Want to Starve, because it is certainly true that you can go the rest of your life without eating, if you choose.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:58 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

"here is your soulcrushing nutrient slurry" is sort of like the nuclear solution for that problem, though.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:59 AM on December 8, 2014 [7 favorites]

that those 30 minute meals often take more like an hour

No see you start the onions caramelizing unattended 45 minutes beforehand which gives you plenty of time to lecture others about their choices and circumstances.
posted by almostmanda at 12:00 PM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Cooking is a chore. Presenting it as something that "only" takes 30 minutes is another way we devalue women's work.

I can't remember the last time I thought of cooking as "woman's work". Most of the men I know cook most of the meals in the family.
posted by docpops at 12:00 PM on December 8, 2014

But it seems like Soylent would also be ideal for everyone agreeing with the "cooking is a chore" message of this article.

Nah, packaged/prepared/someone else made this for me food is the solution to that. The hype around Soylent seems to be that you don't have to waste time eating it. "Eating takes too long and who cares how it tastes" is as foreign a problem to me as "but I don't want to grill anything regularly or get a pan dirty ever" seems to be to people who enjoy/tolerate cooking.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 12:02 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

It may sound kind of counterintuitive, but (although I haven't actually tried it yet) the idea of Soylent really appeals to me as a food lover. Because what it presumably does is free you from "chore" eating/cooking. What I envision is eating Soylent during the week, and eating at restaurants or doing "hobby" home cooking on the weekends. In a way I think it could reinvigorate my love for food by disengaging it from the category of things I have to deal with, and redefining it as purely an entertainment luxury.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:03 PM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

"here is your soulcrushing nutrient slurry" is sort of like the nuclear solution for that problem, though.

If you've got five minutes to spare and a few common herbs and seasonings in your cupboard you can turn that soulcrushing nutrient slurry into something the whole family will get excited about. Here's Jamie Oliver to show you how
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:04 PM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

I just feel like that anything which bears even a slight resemblance to the food used in federal prisons as a punishment is probably not a thing that is good for humans in the long term.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:05 PM on December 8, 2014

It's because they work 35 hour work weeks and if you had an extra 15-20 hours per week, you could be skinny too.

I'm too busy to eat less!
posted by Setec Astronomy at 12:05 PM on December 8, 2014

Nah, packaged/prepared/someone else made this for me food is the solution to that. The hype around Soylent seems to be that you don't have to waste time eating it, which is foreign a problem to me as "but I don't want to grill anything regularly or get a pan dirty ever" seems to be to people who enjoy/tolerate cooking.

But packaged/prepared food isn't really the solution, since it's pretty much all terrible for you. That's the problem for me at least -- if I can have the convenience of a pre-made meal but also get all of my essential nutrients (and no added garbage), that's highly appealing.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:06 PM on December 8, 2014

Propane? And propane accessories?

Hm, that would put anything related to this out of reach for anyone who does not live in a private home with a yard of some sort, then.

And even if you do live in a house with a yard, you might be in a neighborhood where it's likely to be stolen, or have a landlord with a "no grills or firepits" policy. My landlord is a gem.

I have spent the past two years making continual, good-faith efforts at following the recipes and techniques in this book, and have a failure rate of 100%. Now, I am not a great cook by anyone's measure. But when I cook on my own/improvisation-like, or when I follow, say, my mom's baking recipes, or something off of Epicurious, my failure rate is more around 60%. There is clearly something about either Brown's writing, or his actual techniques, that is just beyond me on every possible level.

Aww. Maybe he's just not your Thing? His writing style is pretty nerdy, which I find great, but maybe it's distracting to you? Maybe you'd have better luck with the Frugal Gourmet, or even Julia Child, both of whom are a little more formal in their writing? I dunno. I learned to cook via the "throw shit into a bowl, it will all work out" method that my Great-Grandma used. Except for baking, which requires a certain amount of precision, I mostly use recipes as guidelines, not absolute orders. Fiddle with the techniques and do what you have the most success with.
posted by MissySedai at 12:07 PM on December 8, 2014

(I did find these at the drugstore this morning. If that isn't proof that the culinary muse still lives, I dunno what is)
posted by jonmc at 12:07 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Basically the only reason people cook as a hobby is because we've had millions of years of evolution to make eating something enjoyable, instead of drudgery like laundry. There's a reason we like to eat, and it's the same reason we like having sex - we need to do it if we want the species to continue, and making it enjoyable is a good way to get people to keep doing it.
posted by Small Dollar at 12:08 PM on December 8, 2014

There is clearly something about either Brown's writing, or his actual techniques, that is just beyond me on every possible level.

Brown's stuff suffers from two problems, IME: a) he's not always right/has different tastes than you and b) his recipes are finicky. He does test a lot, but his recipes are personal at their root and I get the feeling, despite his best attempts at otherwise, he assumes a fair bit of knowledge as a base. He's not the best person to learn cooking 101, in my opinion. He's great if you know some of the basics, as most of what he does is riffs and new twists on existing things. But you have to know where to stand first. Gordon Ramsay's how to cook stuff is the same, for example.

You're better off with a book/video that takes a bit more time to explain the basic assumptions. The Joy of Cooking was exactly this to a generation or more of cooks. Julia Child was excellent at it. Mark Bittman, if you read him carefully, can stand in for the Joy (make the base recipe once, then, if you like the result, play with the variation he suggests---that's how to develop you intuition). James Patterson has some really excellent books that are full of photographs---each step a picture. If you're a visual learner, he can be a great resource. America's Test Kitchen/Cooks' Illustrated is ok, but it's a bit too cutesy and determinedly conventional for me.

Brown is very entertaining, but he's doing jazz, revisiting and revising themes that the viewer is already expected to know.
posted by bonehead at 12:08 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Salmon - in the northwest, you can often find it more cheaply than cuts of beef or chicken. But its real merit in terms of articles like this is that it is practically idiot proof to cook properly. Throw some salt and lemon juice on it and walk away for 10-20 minutes and it's done. Don't buy it if it isn't affordable.

That's exactly what we're trying to tell you, is that a lot of people are already not buying it because it isn't affordable. It may be cheap in the northwest, but here in New York it's about seven bucks a pound, which for me, at least, is not affordable. Also, you say "don't buy it if it isn't affordable", but only after having already lectured us all for not buying it.

Traeger grills are not toys for the wealthy. You can pick up a basic model for a few hundred bucks at Sears. Yes, out of reach for many but certainly not a price point that makes it absurd, especially given what people spend on grilling supplies.

A few hundred bucks is definitely out of reach for me, and I'm middle-class. The only grill I have is a twenty-buck thing I got at a thrift store - that's more my speed.

You keep saying that you're trying not to sound so tone-deaf, but you're still coming across like The Shaggs on a bad day.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:09 PM on December 8, 2014 [14 favorites]

I am on a paleo diet, which is why I'm eating at McDonald's three times a week.

The stuff about cooking in this thread is the same as the stuff in every cooking thread, but at least I learned something I really didn't know about prehistoric human life.
posted by escabeche at 12:11 PM on December 8, 2014 [11 favorites]

Well yeah, the concept of a nutritive slurry is admittedly kind of depressing and basically makes it official that we're living in a Darkest Timeline SF dystopia, but I think the idea behind Soylent is more positive. Basically saying, look, the mostly functional cooking and/or eating that most working people have to do during the work week sucks, either in time or health. So let's just ditch it and eat this nutritional slurry that gets the job done, so that the chore of cooking/eating can be placed at the bottom of the priority list and we can focus on other stuff. And on weekends we can go to a nice, non-garbage restaurant, or make an awesome home meal if that's our thing. I dunno, to me it sounds all right.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:13 PM on December 8, 2014

Basically the only reason people cook as a hobby is because we've had millions of years of evolution to make eating something enjoyable, instead of drudgery like laundry.

I feel like you're conflating two or three things here. Eating is a pleasure. Cooking is a chore. Wearing clean, fresh clothes is a pleasure. Laundry is a chore.
posted by muddgirl at 12:14 PM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

We diligently did the home-cooked family meal for years while our son was living with us; we even forced encouraged him to cook one meal a week for us from scratch the whole time he was a teenager. We sat at the dining room table and ate on plates with silverware and talked about current events and such.

Since he's moved out, we've totally reverted to a second young adulthood ourselves and almost never bother to cook real food. Mostly I just nuke some Trader Joe's turkey meatballs and some frozen broccoli and eat it in front of the TV.
posted by octothorpe at 12:18 PM on December 8, 2014

Do people have adequate temporal resources, though? If they do, I agree, I don't see why rational people would choose to do harmful things to themselves. Something else must be going on.

I don't know why this doesn't come up more often, but the primary reason that people eat fast food even though it's unhealthy and expensive isn't that it's convenient, it's because it tastes REALLY FUCKING GOOD. Not to you foodies, I guess, but to someone whose taste buds are used to it. It's hard to go from that to grilled salmon and asparagus. That tastes like shit if you're not used to it! McDonald's et al pour millions into research to find out what combinations of ingredients are addictive. It's not unlike why people still smoke, even though it's clearly terrible for you.

Food, like sex, is never going to be a perfectly rational decision.
posted by desjardins at 12:19 PM on December 8, 2014 [23 favorites]

So what's a good cookbook when you know nothing and have no skills and are dirt poor?

I honestly would skip cookbooks altogether and read through websites like Serious Eats or The Kitchn. Even though they're not going to give you a linear cooking education like some cookbooks, I've found it much less intimidating and more rewarding to search those sites for a dish to try out, or to get the straight dope on a particular cooking technique like how to grill a steak.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:21 PM on December 8, 2014

Food, like sex, is never going to be a perfectly rational decision.

Which is why I will never apologize for humping a Quarter Pounder.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:21 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

(has sudden realization about the "special sauce")
posted by jonmc at 12:24 PM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

I agree that the moral-imperative thing is damaging. I came from the opposite view. You could hardly find a bigger Slow Food, cook at home, grow your own advocate and activist than me, but I've spent the last year research and writing about food history and that complicated matters for me - in two ways. First, I discovered that this discussion has a past and a highly gendered one. Late ninenteenth-century feminists/utopians saw the need to get women out of the kitchen in order to free them up for other activities in the economy. They came up with ideas like takeaway kitchens, communal kitchens, etc. - like, Boston Rotisseries with a social focus. For various reasons none of their schemes really took hold permanently, but it wasn't because the idea was stupid. Why do we continue to expect working people to produce meals in their own homes? It's important that meals be healthy and tasty and least-processed and make you feel good, but none of that means they must always come out of your own kitchen. I came to think that the fact that our society hasn't developed better solutions for providing meals has a lot to do with maintaining oppressive gender and class systems. Why bother, when we can stick this problem mostly on women, and if they don't like it, those who can afford to can eat out, order in, or buy expensive convenience meals.

The second way it changed me was that writing a book takes a fuck of a lot of time. Even when I had two jobs, I still found time to cook for myself and partner. But having an occupation that absorbed all my spare minutes at home in my off time was a completely different story (this might be a bit like having kids around, incidentally - it's not a project you can be "off" from). So I came to look at the time I had to spend preparing food as time taken away from what was, for me, a more important use of that time at least right now. Sometimes my partner cooked but he also works evenings so he couldn't just fill in - I still had to make a meal happen somehow. As a result I have been eating things that clash horribly with my own views of what a good diet is, but something had to be sacrificed. If we had a society serious about restructuring in a way that provided solutions for these problems, there'd be a way to have a healthy, hot, well-priced meal without me needing to take 25 minutes or 50 minutes to make it. I am still a believer in all those good things about food, and will go back to cooking (because I like it a lot) when I have more time, but it is true that daily cooking is a chore, like laundry - I like clean clothes, but laundry is work and time-consuming - not a solved problem in society.
posted by Miko at 12:24 PM on December 8, 2014 [27 favorites]

I don't know why this doesn't come up more often, but the primary reason that people eat fast food even though it's unhealthy and expensive isn't that it's convenient, it's because it tastes REALLY FUCKING GOOD.

True. Sometimes you just really have to have McDonald's, because it's McDonald's and you really want that thing. It's garbage, but it's damn tasty garbage. (Except Arby's -- who the hell eats that?) As it should be, since these corporations spend billions of dollars engineering this stuff to hit all the right pleasure centers.

Plus with things like McDonald's you were trained early and grew up eating it, which makes it our depressing modern equivalent of "mom's home cooking" comfort food.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:26 PM on December 8, 2014

My former retail overlords would looooove if they could just eliminate lunch breaks and feed us nutritional slurry instead, preferably in one of those drinking bottles that hamsters get.
posted by nicebookrack at 12:30 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

So what's a good cookbook when you know nothing and have no skills and are dirt poor?

Good and Cheap was kind of a cool project that came out this year - pretty decent-sounding recipes on a SNAP-friendly budget, free in PDF. They're mostly vegetarian but it's not hard to pan-fry a sausage link or piece of chicken to add to a lot of these things.
posted by Miko at 12:33 PM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Except Arby's -- who the hell eats that?

You shut your goddamn mouth or I will stuff it with this roast beef au jus and this apple turnover with the flaky frosting bits
posted by nicebookrack at 12:34 PM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

My wife once gave me a Ferran Adrià cookbook as a gift. I was like, "I love you for believing I would even consider attempting anything in this book."

If you don't want it I will MeMail you my address. Unless it's The Family Meal, which is sheer genius in the way it lays out whole menus, and timelines for what to prep and when, and photographing every step of a recipe. It's not a cooking 101 book, but it's not far beyond if you have a basic competency--or interest in competency--in the kitchen.

Now, I'm one of those people who think that basic cooking is a skill everyone should have. Not just in terms of health, but in terms of basic personal security; you may be able to afford prepped or restaurant meals all the time now, but who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. But--and this is an important but, and in many ways I owe this change in thinking to people here on the blue--I also recognize that lots and lots of people don't have the time or energy or financial resources to do so. And I want to be really clear about what I mean when I say basic: a casserole, the utter basics of making a simple pasta. Nothing that looks like it came out of a restaurant kitchen.

I think a lot of the problem with the 30-minute-style cooking shows is that they're coming from the same aspirational place as all the other cooking shows; they're not based in reality. Everything's still plated gorgeously, final plates are done beforehand. This is why I miss that great show, Cooking Live with Sara Moulton (late 90's on Food Network before it became Foodporn Network). Every Wednesday, she'd cook along with a viewer at home--and her timing was put together such that the home cook wasn't often more than a few minutes behind. That is what we need more of: reality-based cooking instruction. Recipes that take one pot, one pan, and no more than twenty minutes of actual hands-on-food time. Food that looks like a normal human being put it on a plate.

But along with that, we need to totally rethink how we approach cooking. I love the idea of community kitchens--banding together to buy food in bulk, people cooking for each other, that sort of thing (thanks, Miko, for pointing out how gendered the history of that is--learn something new every day--but maybe it could be done without evil?). Kids need to be taught (in school, I mean) from a very early age about home budgeting, meal planning, and basic cooking skills. (As a fringe benefit this would be a great way to make sure kids are getting fed every day without any of the stigma associated with breakfast and lunch programs. That stigma shouldn't exist but it does.) Work weeks need to be sane. Healthcare needs to be a guaranteed human right, uncoupled from employment.

I totally get (believe me) that cooking can be a chore when it's an all day every day thing. What we need to create as a society are 1) the time and energy to cook if you want to; 2) giving everyone the basic skills to do so; 3) options to take the place of 1 and 2 that are cheap like McDonalds but without the fat and general bad-for-you-if-eaten-on-a-regular-basis thing about it.

kanata, are you looking for recipes or for technique? For specific books at our budget level, they're few and far between but I'm working on writing one. A lot of Indian cuisine is based on really cheap ingredients, might be a place to start looking.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:36 PM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Dear nicebookrack,

Ew.

Best,

El Sabor Asiatico
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:36 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

So what's a good cookbook when you know nothing and have no skills and are dirt poor?

I used The Fannie Farmer cookbook as my go to for basics back in college --- it's got everything, especially all your basic classics, pancakes and cornbread and stews and soups, plus lots of tables and conversions a definitions. Looks like you can get a used hardcover for 95 cents on Amazon.

YouTube is also your friend --- if you're unclear on the difference between a diced vs minced, there's a video out there of someone showing that technique.

In general I think it's best to start off learning to cook by trying to make something that you know you like --- that way you'll have a idea of how it's supposed to turn out, which can be quite helpful. If you're on a tight budget, might be best to try and do something that's not meat centric at first --- you can buy enough flour and sugar to try several different baking recipes for less than five bucks, or rice and beans, or lentils, or spaghetti sauce. Toughest part about starting to build your pantry when you're broke though is spices --- if your grocery store has a Spanish/mexican foods aisle, they often have them cheaper there. A single bottle of spice might be enough for a dozen meals, but it'll still set you back a few bucks when you buy it at first (maybe only a buck if you get Badia or Goya brand). Try and get a couple basic ones and find new recipes that use the ones you already have at first.
posted by Diablevert at 12:36 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

use of flaky apple turnovers with molten centers against civilians has been banned by the UN since 1980
posted by poffin boffin at 12:38 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Mmm, mmmmmolten
posted by nicebookrack at 12:40 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Kids need to be taught (in school, I mean) from a very early age about home budgeting, meal planning, and basic cooking skills.

that's a good question - do they have home ec classes in schools any more? I vaguely remember something about them being done away with but can't remember why, or if it was a universal across-the-board thing or what. I know I took a home ec class in my junior high (circa 1982).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:40 PM on December 8, 2014

and then the next day when you have captain crunch for breakfast it makes the entire roof of your mouth peel off in one hideous sheet

MISTY WATERCOLOR MEMORIES
posted by poffin boffin at 12:41 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

I had them in junior high as well (90-92), but neither my niece nor my nephew did.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:42 PM on December 8, 2014

When I was at a rural high school in 2000, home ec was an available elective but not a popular one, since it didn't fill a college placement requirement like languages, music, and art.

Which says something, I think.
posted by muddgirl at 12:44 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

I think "fun" is the wrong way to frame cooking. It can be a gratifying hobby, or it can be a miserable chore, but I think there are very few people who actually have fun chopping mountains of vegetables and getting the stove adjusted just perfectly for a good simmer.

It's like a lot of other hobbies. I don't think too many people have fun fixing their cars, or weeding their gardens either. You get dirty, and tired, and you might do it wrong the first time (and nth time). And then you sit back and you're like, shit, I just spent my whole Saturday working on this thing, and I have almost nothing to show for it! So instead, you could just take your car to a mechanic, or buy all your vegetables at the farmers' market, and that's fine! Plenty of people make that choice. It'll cost more, and you won't get that nice feeling of accomplishment, but it'll be faster and easier and there's little chance of failure. If you have the time and patience/skill to do it yourself, more power to you! Plenty of people make that choice too.

I personally enjoy cooking as a hobby. In a perfect world, I'd enjoy knitting and sewing and furniture building and a dozen other hobbies just as much. But for now, I'm going to keep buying my clothes and furniture, and cooking my meals. I'm not gonna judge anybody who wants to get carry-out and write a book instead.
posted by gueneverey at 12:45 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

I took home ec in middle school in 1998, because I transferred schools and it was the only class with space. Given that it obviously wasn't popular, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's not offered anymore.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 12:45 PM on December 8, 2014

Even Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking would be a good option, if the set didn't retail for about $100. I just about cried from joy when I found mine at John R. King in Detroit for $25.

Toronto people, I saw a few shrink-wrapped copies of this at Book City (Yonge just south of St. Clair) last Monday, marked down to about $30. I didn't pick up one for myself, so there might still be a few left.
posted by maudlin at 12:46 PM on December 8, 2014

(Oh, wait -- I think it was The Way to Cook. Sorry!)
posted by maudlin at 12:47 PM on December 8, 2014

Oh hey, "Related Posts" brought up this cool post: Cooking 101.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:47 PM on December 8, 2014

This is why I miss that great show, Cooking Live with Sara Moulton

I miss almost everything about Food Network during that period, Sara chief among them.

It's not quite perfect in terms of the cook-along aspect, but folks wanting to learn basic kitchen chops could get a lot from a daytime show on ABC called "The Chew." Mario Batali is on it, and Michael Symon (Daphne Oz is on it too, but don't let that deter you), and while there is certainly some pre-staged stuff going on, there's also a lot of good solid basics of technique, and why certain things go well together, usually explained in very clear language. It also usually tries really hard to emphasize the message of, "this isn't that hard, you can do this."
posted by jbickers at 12:47 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

I really miss Justin Wilson's PBS show. I stumbled onto it when I was a college freshman just learning to cook for himself, and it seriously blew my mind that he mostly didn't bother to measure his ingredients (and that he drank his cooking wine -- shocking).
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:53 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Public high school in rural-suburban US, 1996-2000. Home Ec and Tech were mandatory, and IIRC there were also mandatory electives you had to take in those categories.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:55 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh wait, I actually have a relevant Arby's anecdote! When I was a kid Arby's had this weekly deal (and may still) that was I think 5 roast beef sandwiches for $5. So my mom (who was working full time and going to grad school at night and raising 2 kids and taking care of her disabled parents and also doing all the cooking) would go to Arby's after her night class and pick up $20 of sandwiches, bring them home, and stick 3/4 of them in the freezer. And for the next however long that was Dad's work lunch, kids' school lunch, "I'm too tired to cook" dinner. We could make homemade sandwiches, but they don't freeze well, bread goes stale in about 2 seconds in the desert, and cheap roast beef doesn't taste as good as Arby's.

And this was in a family that was comfortably middle-class enough to have a standalone freezer to store frozen sandwiches (and vegetables).
posted by nicebookrack at 12:55 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Cooking is always much more enjoyable if you narrate yourself in your best Julia Child voice, especially if you're a guy. Peeling vegetables and washing pots is a lot less tedious if you manage to crack yourself up at least once. (Wine helps, too.)
posted by xedrik at 1:03 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Freezer cooking and meal swaps have completely changed the way our family - and 3 other families that participate with us - view the "chore" of cooking. We're now able to have more variety at lower cost and overall effort and have deepened our friendships and inter-dependency. As a bonus the annual holiday cookie swap is pure magic.
posted by SoFlo1 at 1:25 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

I learned to be fairly comfortable and confident in a kitchen from my mother, and I'm grateful to her for that.

It's still amazing how many skills I picked up by watching Food Network 10+ years ago. Planing an onion - Ma never taught me that one, but it's possible I never wanted to learn, either (hated onions for years).

I try to cook on a regular basis on weekends, even if it's only one single-pan dish that I'll eat over the course of a week. Since reading "The Glass Cage" I'm more aware of deskilling than ever.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 1:30 PM on December 8, 2014

One thing I don't see discussed often is how much eating as a family requires compromise, and how frustrating it can be. There are at least fifteen meals that I LOVE that I can no longer make because I'm temporarily living with two family members who have no interest in eating any of them. (I mean, I could, obviously, but I don't actually want to make a full meal that repels the other people in my house and then watch them make a completely separate meal.)

My mother used to do this, too-- she preferred to eat mostly vegetarian (taste, not ethics), but she had to make meals substantial enough for the rest of the family, so she mostly just made what other people wanted and she ate side dishes. Allergies, preferences, time restraints-- when you have to take other people into account, it can be surprisingly limiting. It is one of the "chore"-iest parts of cooking, for me. When I still lived alone, cooking was usually fun.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:31 PM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

One thing I don't see discussed often is how much eating as a family requires compromise, and how frustrating it can be.

Oh hell yeah. When I hear people suggesting easy salmon recipes I sigh deeply because it just isn't going to happen in my house.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 1:32 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Brown is very entertaining, but he's doing jazz, revisiting and revising themes that the viewer is already expected to know.

This feels like you're describing anyone but Alton Brown, and is truly baffling to me. Good Eats is (or at least to me, was) the very definition of the perfect "Cooking 101".

I grew up in a household where outside of holidays, most of the cooking was very basic, and didn't really involve the kids. By the time I reached college, probably the only thing I could cook that wasn't in the microwave was pancakes, boxed pasta, and scrambled eggs.

In college, though, my eyes were opened by Food Network -- first, by the original, dubbed Iron Chef, but much more importantly, by Good Eats in its first run. I basically went from knowing nothing about cooking, to being today a pretty damned good cook, from a mix of about 50% Good Eats, 25% Molto Mario, and 25% a smattering of other Food Network shows from back when they actually cooked (even the original 30 Minute Meals, prior to Rachel Ray becoming a catchphrase-spouting megastar).

I dunno. Maybe it was because I watched these shows from when they started. Maybe the later seasons of Good Eats assumed too much. For me, though, I cannot begin to describe how formative it was for me, as a show that didn't just tell me what to do, but why I was doing it, and how I could apply that knowledge beyond the scope of just the recipe in question.

(I will grant you one thing, though: Alton's tastes aren't always in keeping with others. I swear, every one of his recipes that involves onion, I end up using half or less than he does, despite being someone who does like onion)
posted by tocts at 1:45 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

I took home ec in middle school in 1998, because I transferred schools and it was the only class with space. Given that it obviously wasn't popular, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's not offered anymore.

Yeah, home ec should be mandatory. High school kids should have the assignment of cooking 1 meal a week for their families at home during the course. The meals should get more sophisticated (although not time consuming to prepare) as the semester goes on. It should include other stupid/essential household things as well - using a plunger on a toilet, etc. How many kids enter college without basic skills, and have no idea how to cook for themselves (even basic meals)? Homework should also involve shopping on a budget.

I took home-ec, but didn't leave with basic home-ec skills, and feel a bit cheated (It was elective when I was a kid, and I think I just went to be near girls (the class was 80% girls)).
posted by el io at 1:47 PM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

I was too broke to buy quickly perishable things or in bulk

I wish I could remember what I was watching recently, but I was lightly heartened that it wasn't completely one of those Earnest White People Will Teach The Poors How To Eat segments. It was actually going pretty well in terms of acknowledging the time cost of both acquisition and preparation, and availability, and transportation, and had a pretty good reasonable tone, and then all of a sudden the Earnest White Person said something like "steering them away from prepackaged food and frozen vegetables" (emphasis mine) and then I was too busy having apoplexy and that's why I can't remember what I was watching.

I realize that in an ideal world we'd all eat spinach straight from the ground without using our hands, and use the grit to polish our teeth, but I consider frozen vegetables a modern fucking miracle of science and technology, and literally the thing that puts plain vegetables into the reach of many, many people who don't have the time, money, space, or risk margin for fresh. It was so astonishingly wrong that the woman might as well have just started quacking and farting and running around in circles.

I wish that there was a television program that was The Frugal Gourmet except without the baggage. I learned all my basics from that show, and its absolute no-frillsness with no shame was the reason I was able to cook for myself as a poor college student.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:51 PM on December 8, 2014 [25 favorites]

Alton Brown's show is great for learning the basics and the why behind cooking, but I am a pretty decent cook and some of his recipes have not turned out well for me. Not sure why that happens. His cheddar cheese grits? Awesome. Orange cake recipe? Terrible both times I tried it.
posted by misskaz at 1:54 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

"steering them away from prepackaged food and frozen vegetables"

Unless someone plans to steer me toward an extra $100 a month, I'm going to keep eating frozen vegetables, thanks.
posted by Frowner at 1:55 PM on December 8, 2014 [13 favorites]

Yeah, home ec should be mandatory. High school kids should have the assignment of cooking 1 meal a week for their families at home during the course. The meals should get more sophisticated (although not time consuming to prepare) as the semester goes on. It should include other stupid/essential household things as well - using a plunger on a toilet, etc.

This. 1000 times this. And budgeting, and balancing a checkbook, and HEY LISTEN CLOSELY, CREDIT CARDS ARE NOT FREE MONEY OKAY. Heck, call it Basic Adult Life skills. How to act in a job interview. How to shine your shoes. How to give a good handshake. How to split a restaurant check.
posted by xedrik at 1:56 PM on December 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Surprising yet true: Frozen/canned produce is just as nutritious as fresh produce!
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 1:56 PM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

And often superior in flavour, too. Without flash-freezing you'd never have edible corn or peas out of season, for example.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:59 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Heck, call it Basic Adult Life skills.

It's too bad the idea of finishing schools are so gendered and outdated for anyone who is not in line for a title, because so many people could benefit from a "here's how to behave in the real world" semester or two; obviously they would have to be updated and streamlined away from Correct Forms Of Address For Minor Royalty 101 towards Your Mom Isn't Going To Do Your Laundry Forever, Asshole and similar.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:00 PM on December 8, 2014 [11 favorites]

Cooking is always much more enjoyable if you narrate yourself in your best Julia Child Swedish Chef voice

FTFY
posted by desjardins at 2:08 PM on December 8, 2014 [11 favorites]

Surprising yet true: Frozen/canned produce is just as nutritious as fresh produce!

Hell, I usually end up freezing a lot of the produce I get myself, especially if my CSA has been going into overdrive with one vegetable in particular (there was a point this summer when every week I was getting like six ears of corn, and lately I've been getting like five pounds of carrots every other week along with two pounds of sweet potatoes and giant butternut squashes and it's like, I think I'm pretty much set for beta-carotene, thanks.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:09 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

I used to drive a friend on the line nuts because I'd mutter to myself while cooking, not infrequently a la Swedish Chef.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:09 PM on December 8, 2014

Cooking is always much more enjoyable if you narrate yourself in your best Julia Child Swedish Chef voice

That is closer to what's actually going through my mind while trying to cook a semi-edible dinner.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 2:10 PM on December 8, 2014

Michael Pollan, for one, does not oppose frozen food because it's not nutritious, per se. He opposes it because transporting food is bad for the environment and leads to unsustainable farming practices. (cite)

This is where I start to get a queasy, as someone with low "eating competence" - not only do I need to learn to choose foods that are healthy for me, I have to choose foods that are healthy for the whole planet. That's a lot of stress to put on an already-stressful situation.
posted by muddgirl at 2:10 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

I took home ec in high school (because I got kicked out of some class for being an asshole and I guess home ec was the only class that would take me). I liked it because it was me and a bunch of cute girls, but I pretty much learned nothing applicable to everyday cooking. It was all 1950s style super fussy and precise cooking, not the improvisational and flexible kind of cooking that makes sense to me and can be done between getting home from work and dinnertime. So while I think is is something schools should offer, I wouldn't put all my eggs in that basket for actually teaching people how to cook on a daily basis.

I really, really enjoy doing car maintenance, and yet I'm not offended that there's not a vast cultural narrative that everyone should be changing their own oil, it's so much cheaper and more efficient, and the reason that poor people can't get to work on time is that they simply don't know how enjoyable it is to own and care for their own car.

I love working on vehicles for fun, but there is nothing more stressful than trying to get a repair done on your car on a Sunday before the parts place closes, knowing that there is a good chance you won't get it done so you'll be screwed Monday morning. All kinds of things are fun as hobbies but suck when they are chores.

If we had a society serious about restructuring in a way that provided solutions for these problems, there'd be a way to have a healthy, hot, well-priced meal without me needing to take 25 minutes or 50 minutes to make it.

No kidding. I'm lucky that there is a grocery store just a few blocks away, but their deli has the worst, most amazingly unhealthy foodstuffs on earth. It's like a mad scientist decided to produce the absolute worst food for you -- deep fried potatoes that are then coated in batter and refried, and chimichangas dripping with orange grease from the off-brand cheese product inside. Maybe no one would buy better premade options, but it doesn't appear to even be something they have thought to test at that store.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:20 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

This. 1000 times this. And budgeting, and balancing a checkbook, and HEY LISTEN CLOSELY, CREDIT CARDS ARE NOT FREE MONEY OKAY. Heck, call it Basic Adult Life skills. How to act in a job interview. How to shine your shoes. How to give a good handshake. How to split a restaurant check.

There would be arguments over curriculum (in this thread, even!). Who needs to shine shoes? Checkbooks don't exist anymore (or aren't useful - most bill-paying isn't via checks).

But holy hell, I've interviewed university co-ops that can't give a good bullshit answer to 'why do you want this job'? Dude, that's a fucking SOFTBALL, I'm not allowed to consider you for the position if you can't even feign some enthusiasm during the interview. If you can't feign enthusiasm during the interview, how are you going to feign enthusiasm during your actual job? Sheesh!
posted by el io at 2:22 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Unless someone plans to steer me toward an extra $100 a month, I'm going to keep eating frozen vegetables, thanks.

Why, spend it all on your new grill?
posted by standardasparagus at 3:09 PM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

I cook because I love good meals and I'm poor.

I love cooking for the same reason I love doing the dishes, or hanging my laundry out on the line, or changing the oil on my truck, or weeding my garden, or hemming my pants—I cultivate a love for everything I need to do on a regular basis, so I live in love with my life instead of continually frustrated by it and thinking of some better thing that's just out of reach.

I cook with dried beans and frozen vegetables, basic staples, the five mother sauces (and the Asian parallels), and an ingenuity borne out of need, and my meals kick ass. Plus, humble meals take no time at all and are still perfectly delovely.
posted by sonascope at 3:24 PM on December 8, 2014 [15 favorites]

My favorite vegetable bar none is frozen lima beans, steamed and then finished with a dash of salt (and, okay, a pat of butter if available). They're delicious and filling.

Many people in this thread talk about not having time to cook, or having higher priority demands on their limited time. I do get that, especially when kids are involved. I would just like to say that, for me, cooking is a way to decompress from the day. Yes, a meal is expected at the end of the hour, but, again for me, that hour is "me time." There's something about food preparation that's relaxing and magical and totally divorced from the cares and frustrations of the day.

(True confessions, once I'm home, I'm generally in for the evening, so I'm perhaps speaking from a position of privilege, to which I would contend in my own defense that I've spent my entire adult life working to arrange my life to be this way and have been lucky enough to succeed in that.)

I've also learned from my SO the benefits of kitchen management. It takes ten minutes, I now know, to turn the unused remains of a loaf of bread to crumbs for freezing (at least if one has a food processor), always handy for breading a pork chop or topping a casserole. Once a roasted chicken has been laid to waste, toss the carcass into a freezer bag, and in a month or two there are enough to make a rich pot of stock for stews, soups, sauces, whatever.

I'm much less of an enthusiast about menu planning and shopping, which I find more of a chore. I can only say that I do those things so that when I walk into the kitchen I know that I have what I need.

This thread has been a wonderful, sobering and enlightening read, for which I am thankful. As so often happens on MeFi, the conversation has turned out to be much more educational than the linked article.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 3:34 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Plus, humble meals take no time at all and are still perfectly delovely.

I don't disagree with you, but I feel compelled to point out that for that meal you need:
(1) A clean bowl
(2) A clean fork
(3) Eggs
(4) A refrigerator (in the US at least, where eggs or egg substitutes must be refrigerated)
(5) A clean pan
(6) Butter
(7) Gas or electricity service on a stove, or room for a hot plate
(8) Spices (because variety is important to good cooking)

My parents, for example, don't have a stove, so all their cooking is in the microwave or on a hot plate. The hot plate is not easy to clean so more often than not it's dirty come meal time. This turns a 2-minute omelet into much closer to, say, the 5 minutes it takes to nuke a frozen dinner.
posted by muddgirl at 3:38 PM on December 8, 2014

(5) A clean pan

One does not wash a well seasoned pan. One wipes it gently clean with a napkin stolen from a fast food restaurant and dabbed in butter and puts it on a hook. Twenty-seven years ago, I saved up to buy my little anodized aluminum wok and I have not let the demon soap near it more than a few times since.
posted by sonascope at 4:04 PM on December 8, 2014

Cooking for one is incredibly lonely.

I've lived alone in a small apartment in a small town for twenty-six years, with a few short interludes of gentleman callers here and there, and I find cooking in solitude to be more lovely than lonely. My kitchen is five by nine feet, with no countertops at all, and barring the occasional presence of a frisky otter looking over my shoulder, I'm not at all lonely while cooking, and I get a delicious home-cooked meal morning and night that is exactly what I want. Pure luxury.
posted by sonascope at 4:09 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

That doesn't really work for stainless steel or copper, sonascope.

Count me in with the 'cooking for one is lonely' brigade. it's why I eat so much toast.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:11 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Things you don't have to listen to when you're cooking for one:

"I don't like [fresh cruciferous vegetable!]"
"[Delicious sauce] is weird!"
"This [mildly seasoned dish] is too spicy!"
"I'm not eating [tasty but unfamiliar thing]!"
"Why can't we have [boring cheap processed crap] instead of [adventurous new homecooked recipe]?"

Cooking for one is fucking awesome.
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:13 PM on December 8, 2014 [13 favorites]

That doesn't really work for stainless steel or copper, sonascope.

Well, but that's because they don't take a season. My two All-Clad clone saucepans have to get the full scrub after a bout with Escoffier, but it's usually just a soak and a scruff 'round with a homemade bamboo scrubber. I cook almost everything but soups in my utterly disreputable looking carbon steel wok, my little anodized mini wok, and my French spring steel crepe pan, all of which are, for all intents and purposes, unwashable.
posted by sonascope at 4:18 PM on December 8, 2014

For an indifferent cook:

"The broccoli is supposed to be green after cooking, not white"
"Is this sauce supposed to to taste metallic?"
"...I'm just not that hungry I guess. No, it's not too bland..."
"Can't we have [adventurous new homecooked recipe] instead of grilled cheese sandwiches again?"

Yeah, I'm on the side of preferring to cook alone, so I can enjoy my tasteless mush in peace.

(Also, for the record, I know how to clean a seasoned pot and/or pan. My workhorse pot is a cast iron dutch oven. I don't know how I gave the impression that I don't.)
posted by muddgirl at 4:19 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Plus, humble meals take no time at all yt and are still perfectly delovely.

You have to flip an omelet with confidence. That was a lovely flip. I don't have a gorgeous seasoned wok like that, but I use a cheap teflon omelet pan & add a large dab of butter between the bottom of the omelet and the pan just before the flip & that lubricates it.

You just have to be sure you're going to flip it well, & go for it -- if you lose confidence in your flip, bam, eggs all over the stove.

The egg is an amazing thing, really. So much you can do with it. for example, I made 2 spinach quiches last night, using a couple prefab frozen pie crusts, and we're having it for leftovers tonight. Eggs are good cheap protein, they keep reasonably well in the fridge, and they are a lovely oblate spheroid in shape.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:25 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Cooking for one? Crockpot, a bag of chicken legs from Walmart ($8 for 10lbs), bag of frozen vegetables and rice if you aren't low-carbing it to throw in near the end. 8 hours or 4 hours, your choice.

Because when you stop cooking, you hand the keys to your survival right over to Capitalism.

There's some truth in this, I think. There are a lot of recipes and cooking techniques that derive from traditions among poor people. But:

1. We don't have extended families living together, mostly - so there's nobody to cook all day

2. We don't have single-earner nuclear families anymore - so there's nobody to cook all day

3. We work harder and longer hours, for the same pay.

There is something to be said for having independence-enabling skills like cooking, mechanics, home repair etc. You can't fix a modern car - too many computers. I don't know many people who can work on their own house the way I can - but I work for a homebuilder. I don't think you can blame people on the individual level, people work with what they have. The ongoing phenomenon where people "give up" skills, abilities, and responsibilities to faceless mega-conglomerates and/or the state, whether to enable them to be better consumers or simply because they have no choice, is one to mourn.

If they do, I agree, I don't see why rational people would choose to do harmful things to themselves. Something else must be going on.

What's going on is people aren't rational. Behavioral economists have pretty much empirically demolished the notion that people behave rationally and IIRC there's some neuroscience behind it to the effect that abstract reasoning powers are high-effort and only really sustainable for a few hours a day in the best of circumstances. So just jettison the notion of "rational people" and it will all make sense.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 4:37 PM on December 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

Kanata I suggest as a start you look into cookbooks centered around one-pot meals and slow-cooker/crockpot recipes. For the latter your margin of error is on the order of hours, not minutes and it's really hard to otherwise screw them up or get them wrong.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 4:48 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Don't kick yourself there. Eggs are finicky and take time and practice to master. mrbigmuscles is right... look at slowcooker meals (if you don't have a slow cooker, you get the same effect by putting a pot in a 175-200F oven and stirring from time to time) and one-pot-wonders. Lots of margin for error, and even if something doesn't come out quite right it's going to be pretty hard to render it inedible.

Soups might also be a good thing to start looking at. Basic formula for vegetable soups: cook _______ in stock, a little bit more than you need to just cover the vegetables. Puree. Done! Get the hang of that and you can start getting fancy.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:54 PM on December 8, 2014

kanata - I used to be the same way (still am, a little bit). Unfortunately most of it is just practice. I used to buy a bunch of cookbooks and cooking magazines, but they never really helped me.

Ironically what helped was being forced into a situation where MuddDude was recovering from cancer treatment, couldn't cook, but needed to consume like 3000 calories, mostly protein, a day. I made this chicken with pan sauce recipe, served over pasta made to package directions, like, 15 times. By the end you get the hang of it, plus you don't have to worry about ingredients, since it takes the same ingredients every time. Since I basically ate the same thing every day anyway (hunk of cheese on crackers, maybe some pepperoni slices), I didn't mind the lack of variety.

(Also, I don't think there's anything wrong with just eating "ingredients.")
posted by muddgirl at 4:55 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Traeger's are crock-pots for the 1%.
posted by docpops at 5:01 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

I like cooking but on many days do find it more a like a chore. When I became single again I started to just eat the same thing for several days in a row which meant just cooking one day and reheating and sometimes some really basics cooking of a component on the others.

For a while I honestly felt like I was cheating and doing it wrong. I realized that what is really just class cultural idea that meals should be different (especially dinner) everyday had become ingrained and it felt weird to be perfectly fine and content eating this way. When finances became tight it causes me way less stress as well.

I've since moved back with my parents and my mother cooks most days now. I'm grateful and it's nice to have more variety of meals again but sometimes I wish I could go back to this simple way of cooking and eating that I had fallen into. My Mom is okay with leftovers but the thought of having the same thing (even if it's yummy!) three days in a row is just totally foreign and wrong to her.
posted by Jalliah at 5:05 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Someone above mentioned how things were a little different in Asia. The time in my life I was healthiest and skinniest was when I was working in a company in Japan for a year. It was a pretty old-school corporation, so they had a company dorm that people lived in until they could afford their own place/got married. You paid a (very small - it was heavily subsidized by the company) sum every month and you could get breakfast and dinner at the dorm kitchen/cafeteria (with a resident cook + assistants) every weekday. They had two choices at dinner, listed all the nutritional information for each, and you could fill up on unlimited soup or rice if you still felt hungry. There was a cafeteria at work too for lunch, and you could choose from an even bigger selection - ramen today, stirfry plus a bowl of rice the next day, etc., again with all the nutritional info listed. Everything was super cheap because they could buy in bulk, stuff was pretty tasty most of the time, and it was probably pretty healthy because the company had no vested interest in making you fat or addicted to the food.

I'd love to be able to have some system like that here in North America. Cooking for one is not only lonely, it can be really inefficient - I could buy a giant bag of carrots for way cheaper than just one carrot, but they'll never get eaten in time. Even in Japan, though, when people moved out of the dorm and had their own places, they moved to the same home cooking/takeout model as here. I don't know a good way to implement this without that sort of centralized control, which obviously has its own problems. Some sort of community kitchen, maybe? I feel like it could be tough to keep it as consistent and as efficient, but it would surely be worth a try.
posted by daelin at 5:11 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Jalliah, I do the same thing. Shop and cook on Sunday and then eat the same thing 4 days in a row. Learned this from a friend who has Asperger's. It's just so much easier this way - come home and reheat a good home-cooked meal in the microwave.
posted by jenh526 at 5:16 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Hey if you can make chili, you already know all of the basic skills for making any kind of stew. So you're winning there!

I get flummoxed at the idea of looking at things in a grocery store and seeing meals out of it.

Yeah, the whole shopping thing really only works out if you walk in with a plan. Have you seen this? That's nearly a month's worth of food for a single person (and you could easily substitute some things in and out to make it cheaper and allow for breakfasts and lunches as well).
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:16 PM on December 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

It's been proven that most dead people ate food previously. Food will kill ya, folks! Which is why I stick to Mickey D's.
posted by telstar at 5:28 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's too bad the idea of finishing schools are so gendered and outdated for anyone who is not in line for a title, because so many people could benefit from a "here's how to behave in the real world" semester or two; obviously they would have to be updated and streamlined away from Correct Forms Of Address For Minor Royalty 101 towards Your Mom Isn't Going To Do Your Laundry Forever, Asshole and similar.

The thing is that I think for many people it's not just ignorance but also some quasi-intentional signaling going on... if you're a dude in academia or tech, giving the impression of proud incompetence in domestic/interpersonal affairs can make you seem more like a Serious Intellectual/Engineer. Plus it can sometimes also get you out of having to do that work at all, because either people just lower their expectations of you, or the slack gets taken up by the rest of your family (and/or your workplace if you are a fancy tech person). Of course as people have discussed extensively in other threads here, women don't seem to get the same latitude to invoke this script.
posted by en forme de poire at 5:52 PM on December 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

Cooking for one can be awesome, if you approach it as a project to eat exactly what you want to eat, without compromise. When I cook only for myself, I eat insanely spicy pasta with raw, undressed salad. No joke, it's great. A single meal of that would probably cause my wife to age 10 years, though. So, we just eat normal food for the rest of the time.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:58 PM on December 8, 2014

The crockpot thing is incomprehensible to me, it requires you doing something in the morning before work, I already have enough things to do in the morning before work, like remember to put on pants and to actually leave the house. I'd prolly put my house keys in the crockpot and the chicken legs in my pocket and then just lay facedown in the hallway weeping.
posted by poffin boffin at 6:15 PM on December 8, 2014 [19 favorites]

The last time we had a thread like this, I said some things that got taken out of context (or I fluffed them), and I've actually been thinking that this thread comes closer to getting at what I was trying to get at.

I cook. I like cooking, I've always been comfortable with it. I like cooking for one, mostly because I get to make things exactly how I want and I can eat it all, and go back for second if I want, and if we're talking about jambalaya or pasta carbonara then that is a good thing.

But I don't like cooking in the sense that chopping vegetables is, like, fun. I like cooking because I take a sense of pride in the finished product - "hot damn this is delicious jambalaya - and who made it? OH, YEAH, ME. How awesome is that?" I also take pride in figuring out how to improvise dishes - "oh, sweet, I bet I could totally hack some pozole just by mixing a can of hominy with a little of that frozen leftover carnitas I made" or "hey, I think I have just enough of that pie dough for a mini pot pie that can use up the turkey, all I need is a carrot, sweet".

That sense of pride feels fucking awesome. But it was also learned. I had to learn how to make all of this. And what I found, too, is that a lot of dishes that I always had thought were fancy weren't actually all that hard - once I tried. But I had the benefit of some experience in a kitchen first that gave me the confidence TO try.

And that's the problem I have with the cooking/not cooking thing - not with the people who can't try, not the people who don't want to, not even with the people who want to try but don't. Where I have the problem is with the marketers who spot that ambivalence towards learning to cook so many people have and widening it to sell them something that's crappy. My problem is with the trait society has to see someone who's on the cusp of wanting to cook but being intimidated or tired, and instead of saying "you know, let's increase people's wages so they can afford meat now and then," or "you know, maybe let's offer some simple cooking classes in every high school so people can make some basic meals by the time they're adults and can build on that basic comfort," we live in a society who sees someone like that and has marketers who rush in and say, "oh, no, you don't want to try cooking because it's too complicated/risky/difficult/etc., don't bother trying, just buy this box instead." And so the people who sort of want to try but are afraid it's too hard get discouraged from even trying.

My beef is there, because I want everyone to experience that kind of "holy shit I made this" and "hot damn this is all for me" feeling, but there are forces in the world that disagree with me on that point.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:35 PM on December 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Correction - I want everyone who WANTS to experience that kind of pride to be able to do so. There are those who just plain don't feel like they wanna, and that's cool and perfectly valid. I'm more sympathetic with the person who always wanted to be able to cook but never learned how and sometimes wants to, but gets told "oh it's so hard though, here, just get this mix/takeout meal/can instead, and don't worry your little head" and so they get scared off. I wanna tell Madison Avenue or whoeve "can't we encourage the people who DO want to try?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:50 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Don't get me wrong, I love cooking and find it really relaxing to look at lovely vegetables and smell nice spices and handle things capably, especially at the end of a day when I I didn't do anything really concrete. When I have the time, I cook most every night and love finding creative ways to jazz up the usual round, making ambitioous Sunday suppers, etc. Cooking when you have plenty of time and plenty of choice of what you'll make feels pretty nice. It's cooking when you know you really need to be doing something else, or when you have to squeeze it into a 20 minute window, or when you are forced into limited ingredients that dont work well together, that make me feel it is a stress and it is time-consuming. It's just this year, that's been more often than not the case. And I know, I know, that it only takes 20 minutes to make a great meal from whole foods, and I have a whole repertoire of them, but when I should be doing something else for 20 minutes, hummus and crackers, or a frozen pizza, looks like a brilliant idea.
posted by Miko at 6:53 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Count me in with the 'cooking for one is lonely' brigade. it's why I eat so much toast.

You can do so much with toast, though! Smash some avocado onto it, or some applesauce, or melt a little cheese on it. Yum!
posted by MissySedai at 6:55 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

I love cooking. I enjoy it as physical, creative act.

But cooking is also a pain in the ass. Yes, when I have time to devote to it, it's wonderful and amazing. I even love chopping the vegetables, cooking everything just so. But when I just want to eat? Who has time for that?

I am not a Rachael Ray fan, and a lot of the stuff she made often seemed ... questionable ... but I don't hate the 30 minute meals concept (although I think for most people, those would take longer). She allowed short cuts -- use those canned beans! Use that jar of pasta sauce! And I think that made things more accessible to a lot of people (Sarah Moulton was brought up earlier in the thread, and her Weeknight Meals is also great in the "make this on Sunday and then use it this way on Monday and this other way on Tuesday" way).

But I am into the idea that cooking is a chore, like anything else. You have to wash your dishes. You have to do your laundry. You have to clean your bathroom. You have to make food for yourself. It doesn't always need to be great (if I cook spaghetti and heat up some jarred sauce, I win! Or, if you make some boxed mac and cheese and mix some spinach and sriracha in, that totally counts!). I guess I don't see it as an all or nothing thing (like you have to pick between making an entire meal from scratch or a Stoffer's lasagna). You can do a bit here and take a short cut there. I think that's realistic.

But you aren't going to stop me from buying some of those Newman's Own pizzas because they're cheap and delicious.
posted by darksong at 6:57 PM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

I recently took a job in NY even as I still own and visit in VA. My basement apartment doesn't have a lot as far as the kitchen goes and I don't want to buy supplies that I'm only going to be using for the next six months or so (when I get a more permanent place).

Luckily, I'm allowed to pay and eat at the cafeteria of the prep school I work at. $2.55 for breakfast and $4.65 for dinner or lunch is nice enough for a somewhat varied meal that changes every day. I really wish that there were more of these cafeterias that were open that weren't affiliated to institutions. I would even support paying a flat fee that kept costs down and ensured someone that for that month, they had an easy access to food that changes every month that isn't terrible for you, and that you couldn't easily make yourself if you didn't have a kitchen.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 6:58 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

The crockpot thing is incomprehensible to me, it requires you doing something in the morning before work, I already have enough things to do in the morning before work, like remember to put on pants and to actually leave the house. I'd prolly put my house keys in the crockpot and the chicken legs in my pocket and then just lay facedown in the hallway weeping.

Oh, lovey, no. Don't get yourself all in an uproar in the morning! I can't function in the mornings until I've had at least one cup of coffee, I don't do crockpot prep in the mornings.

My crockpot is very nearly as old as I am - it's one of the first models with a removable crock, and was made in 1974. The removable crock is the best thing ever. Throw everything in the night before. Stick the crock in the fridge. Leave yourself a note/make a cellphone alert so you remember to stick the crock in the heating unit and turn it on before you leave for work. When you drag your tired and brain-fried self back in the door 8 or 10 or 12 hours later, you will have something delicious waiting for you.
posted by MissySedai at 7:05 PM on December 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

I don't see it as an all or nothing thing

I kind of do. It makes me kind of sad, because it adds to the stress. Like, if I'm using processed stuff like box mac, I feel I'm failing myself out the gate. I know what I'd rather be eating and how good it would be to cook and to eat, and how much better it would be for me. So I'm cognizant of the gap between what I'd like to do, and what I can do at this moment, and that gap alone is stressful.
posted by Miko at 7:05 PM on December 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm actually a pretty good cook of both normal stuff and sometimes ambitious dishes but at this time in my life, I just don't like to do it. I do cook about once or twice during the weekends for my wife but mostly pretty simple stuff like simmering frozen chicken breasts in jared curry sauce with some veggies. Mostly we just eat frozen stuffs or eat out. Obviously I'm showing my privilege here but time is more important to us than money and neither of like to spend our time cooking.

We get invited to pot-lucks occasionally and we're always stressed out and panicked the day before because we have to figure out how to cook something that other people will eat.
posted by octothorpe at 7:19 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

My cooking experience:

Find a couple of dishes that you really like. Then learn how to make them. Make them a lot. Get better. Figure out what you could improve each time you make a dish (by improve, I mean make it more to your liking).

I start off reading a single recipe of something I want to make. Then I try that recipe. Maybe a couple of times, with only minor variation. Then I read a dozen or so variants of the recipe, perhaps going on youtube to find videos of it. Dish by dish, my selection of dishes increases. I'm thrilled because every dish is one I love.

Pizza. Burritos (+salsa). Quesadillas (this is almost cheating, but saute some veggies, add some fresh salsa). Refried beans (I need to get this going in the slow cooker, this will save me time, I work too hard at this). Souffles (mini ones, in small ramekins - has a reputation for being hard, but I've never failed - chocolate and savory). Fried egg (holy shit this is hard). Scrambled eggs (easy, but some technique is involved, quick as hell too). Hash browns (working on this, I have a very specific ideal hash browns, mostly I see awful ones online).

Mexican food is kind of awesome - a bunch of basic ingredients (salsa, refried beans, etc) and a ton of ways to combine them.

I feel the same way EmpressCallipygos feels - the feeling after successfully making something you love is wonderful - holy shit, i made that!

Five years ago I was afraid of cooking, now I love it.
posted by el io at 7:29 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yep, I also came here to say...Bittman? Who constantly acknowledges that cooking can be a chore and wrote a zillion newspaper columns that were essentially minimal-ingredient dinner hacks? Whose latest book is "How to Cook Everything Fast"? Sure, he writes about some more formal/involved techniques, but the backbone of his career has rested on his accessibility.
posted by desuetude at 10:19 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

docpops: Salmon - in the northwest, you can often find it more cheaply than cuts of beef or chicken.

Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope. There is no way you can drop a deuce like that and just walk away from it like you aren't obligated to leave the address of wherever it is you're getting fairytale-cheap salmon from.

I can count the number of times I've seen salmon on sale in Seattle for less than $7/lb on one hand -- and that includes in the Manager's Special area. Salmon is a special occasion protein in my household specifically because it's expensive as balls despite the Evergreen state being famous for it.

When your budget isn't The Moon, and chicken breasts are $3-4/lb, and you're feeding a firefighter who has to maintain a certain level of fitness, it's no contest. And if you really want fresh fish? Rockfish or (god forbid) tilapia is way cheaper.

I have never been this wound up about salmon before in my life.
posted by Snacks at 12:06 AM on December 9, 2014 [9 favorites]

You can buy salmon 'off the street' for ~5 bucks a pound, sometimes less.
But never in the supermarkets, and sure as shit never at Safeway - the shittiest grocery store.
I hate Safeway because their CEO campaigned hard against extending unemployment benefits - his rationale is that totally hard up people will work harder to find work. As if parents with no jobs and money to buy groceries at his chain will suddenly 'see the light'. This person doesn't deserve our dollars.
posted by Pudhoho at 1:01 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

The thought of buying salmon "off the street" sounds disturbing like the "mysterious trunk cookies" scenario.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:41 AM on December 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

I grew up buying my fish on the street. The street in question was the fish guy's truck, which he parked along the highway in the next town over. If you live in an area without enough people for a proper fishmonger's, but with a lot of fishing going on, it makes sense! (And that being said... no, said fish truck dude would not have salmon cheaper than beef. Even the salmon factory seconds from the salmon factory aren't cheaper than beef.)

but also some quasi-intentional signaling going on... if you're a dude in academia or tech, giving the impression of proud incompetence in domestic/interpersonal affairs can make you seem more like a Serious Intellectual/Engineer

This works the other way around, too -- if you're female and in an engineering-type field, it can be the kiss of death to bring in cookies or otherwise let it be known that you have any level of competence at traditionally female tasks. I think it's as much because spending time on things like cooking is seen as "wasting" time that could be spent working, or marketing to clients, or doing Serious Hobbies That Are Worthy like kayaking or running triathlons. (I'm sure there's a certain amount of variation between workplaces on this, though. I was in a technical field as an undergrad, but my cooking skills were valued, since we did field camps and had to prepare our own food, and being able to turn leftover bread heels into croutons was a useful trick.)

Also, mark me down as someone else who has had mixed results with Alton Brown's recipes. His baked fresh tomato pasta sauce turned out... well, it was edible, but the sauce I make from canned tomatoes in 10 minutes is way better. Nowadays I watch the show for the technique but use someone else's recipe.
posted by pie ninja at 5:37 AM on December 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

My own personal bugbear here is how often recipes LIE about how long steps take. Veg chopping speeds of individuals etc. notwithstanding, recipe after recipe says "soften the onion, about a minute" or "saute the onion to caramelised, ten minutes" IT IS TOTAL BULLSHIT.

Ahem.

Also as we mentioned tomato sauce I'm compelled to plug Marcella's, the greatest and simplest. Seriously everyone make this sauce.
posted by ominous_paws at 5:46 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Fish off the street is not a thing in New England. The closest you get is 'fish off the docks,' where you have to go right to the dock, but you can get lobster and stuff for cheap that way. The rest of fish retailing is too regulated; most boats are locked into wholesale agreements out the gate and there's very little small-scale independent fish retailing. A small amount, but not a lot.

You can get a nice price break buying fresh seafood right from fishermen, but in New England this is not really a solution for people living on a budget who don't already know a fisherman. I am very jealous about $5 pound salmon, though. In summer we can often find lobster at $5/lb, but I really don't like lobster. Salmon, on the other hand...
posted by Miko at 5:48 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

all of a sudden the Earnest White Person said something like "steering them away from prepackaged food and frozen vegetables" (emphasis mine) and then I was too busy having apoplexy and that's why I can't remember what I was watching.

Made me think of this 60 Minutes piece on Alice Waters from a few years ago, because I had a similar reaction at the time. I think Lesley Stahl may have been putting words in her mouth in this instance re: frozen veg, and the segment was certainly produced in a way to make Waters look elitist, but it's clear that she has some pretty out of whack assumptions about the ability of people to easily buy or grow their own fresh ingredients (she seems to think everyone lives in California or a similar climate). It was her assertion that "some people" choose to buy Nikes instead of "nourishing themselves" that really made me want to throw a shoe at the TV, though.
posted by theory at 6:01 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I have been present for the buying crabs and shrimp ought of people's trunks on the Gulf Coast, though.

Yeah, I'm in an organization with which Alice Waters is closely identified, and she's both an inspiration and a liability. She has done a lot of good with her edible schoolyard model which has been replicated across the country and brought tens of thousands of kids by now into contact with fresh food and gardening, so that's great. And her influence on changes in American cuisine is undeniable. At the same time, she's got that "this is easy for me, why not you?" stance that, though largely unintentional, rankles because she so frequently fails to acknowledge her privilege. Because of that, she's polarizing, which isn't awesome for the food system reform movement in general. At the same time, she's a true believer and a lot of her principles are things I would want for everybody. In the end, she's not a perfect icon but I try to take what I like from her and leave the rest.
posted by Miko at 6:06 AM on December 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

...oh, and I think her choice of "Nikes" was terrible. Her larger point was that people with disposable income find the money for branded consumer goods, so they could likely find the money for better food, so it's a question of priorities; but she picked something with a history of being racially tinged, which is unpleasantly revealing, and it ended up taking away from her point and making her look biased and out of touch. Which she probably is, in her understanding of how most people live and what they have to contend with. Had she said something like "flat screen TVs" or some other luxury item it would have read differently. But she didn't.
posted by Miko at 6:29 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Fish off the street is not a thing in New England.

It definitely was when I lived in upstate New York. You aren't buying from the fisherman (like you do on the docks); it's some dude with a refrigerated truck who buys wholesale and then drives a scheduled route, so you know that he comes to your town on Wednesday and Friday or whatever. I wonder if the slightly more inland parts of New England have these kinds of fish trucks? It's not super cheap (unlike buying directly from the boat can be) but it's fresher than what you find at the grocery store.

Even the salmon factory seconds from the salmon factory aren't cheaper than beef

I took this as a joke, but when I was googling to see what wholesale prices were like this year I discovered that indeed you can buy salmon seconds.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:41 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Had she said something like "flat screen TVs" or some other luxury item it would have read differently.

To further derail, can we quit having folks (don't mean to pick on you Miko, 'everyone' does it) refer to 'flat screen TVs' as if they were luxury items that only the upper class can afford? Look, you really can't buy anything but a flat screen tv anymore. Hell, curved TV's are *more expensive* these days (curved flat screen TVs, mind you). You really can't buy CRTs anymore, so they are all flat. Sub 200$ wallmart TV screens are flat.

/derail.
posted by el io at 6:42 AM on December 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

I wonder if the slightly more inland parts of New England have these kinds of fish trucks?

Haven't seen that, no. In recent years some vendors are selling at the farmers' markets inland, because again, they can sell for a premium there. Mostly, the market is dominated by wholesalers out of Boston who do restaurant and grocery supply and air freight.
posted by Miko at 6:45 AM on December 9, 2014

I don't have a TV right now, and when I did it was an old one I got for free that weighed like 75 pounds, so I can certainly see calling a flat screen a luxury. When I buy a new TV it will be a flat screen and will be a luxury. Any TV, especially a new one, is a luxury in my book. $200 is a lot of money. Others may have different priorities, but I think that's the point.
posted by Miko at 6:46 AM on December 9, 2014

I believe the point was that "owns a flat-screen TV" is one of the conservative talking points for the poors being responsible for not climbing out of their own poverty, the same way that "Nikes" are racially-coded.
posted by Uniformitarianism Now! at 6:54 AM on December 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Perhaps so; I was unaware of that use by conservatives and I am not conservative. Sorry if I am participating in a meme that's been used to push poor people down. I guess I still think it's a luxury, though. Not that people shouldn't have one but it's a discretionary expense.
posted by Miko at 6:56 AM on December 9, 2014

Like, until I became homeless I owned a flat-screen plasma TV. It was a ten-year-old hand-me-down from well-off relatives who had just purchased a new one. I gave it to my friends who also had never owned a flat-screen TV. So now they own a giant luxury TV, albeit one that is not HDMI-compatible.
posted by Uniformitarianism Now! at 6:59 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I have definitely seen (and bought from) fish trucks in rural New England, like Dip Flash has in upstate NY. They are not a thing in the Boston area for whatever reason.

And yeah, salmon seconds are totally a real thing. Not a joke, although they sound like they should be!
posted by pie ninja at 7:02 AM on December 9, 2014

Anecdata on fish:

I grew up in inland New England, frequently visited Cape Cod, and now live in Brooklyn. Where I grew up there MIGHT have been an old-school fishmonger, as in "a guy with a shop where you can see all the fish out on ice", but he probably was the next town over and we only got fish - when we had it - at the supermarket. In my visits to Cape Cod, there were a lot more of those fishmongers, as well as people buying off the dock, but a lot of other people just did what we did and caught it themselves.

There are way more fishmongers in New York, as well as guys with stalls at farmers' markets, CSA-type arrangements, and people who fish off the side of the FDR Drive into the East River.

In all those cases except the DIY ones, fish was still always hella-expensive.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:04 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yes, the community-supported fishery thing is becoming an option in my area as well. But again... not cheap. The Cape Ann operation looks like they charge $120 for eight weekly deliveries of one pound of filet, or $208 for eight weekly deliveries of two pounds of filet. Cheaper (and I'm sure fresher!) than Whole Foods, but not exactly pocket change, esp. as you pay upfront.
posted by pie ninja at 7:10 AM on December 9, 2014

The one table-style fish vendor I have heard (outside farmer's markets) of is in Northampton.

Pin Ninja, you must live near me. Yeah, the Cape Ann CSF is not cheap, and, what's more, they tend to have only one variety of fish most of the time. So, extremely monotonous. Yes, good quality, but it's not an option designed for lower-income people. It definitely aims to reach the same middle- and upper-income brackets that CSAs do. THe measure is designed more to support the ongoing operations of the fisheries than to provide cheap fish options.
posted by Miko at 7:18 AM on December 9, 2014

w/r/t TV: sure, I mean it's possible to have a TV. If I got one on FreeCycle now I'd stand a n OK chance of getting a flat screen (most of the TV postings now specificy "NOT a flat screen" for this reason. Waters was basically pointing out, though, that if you have $100 (or whatever) and you can choose to buy what you want with it because it doesn't need to go to a pressing necessity, what you choose represents a value calculation that you've done. I don't want to defend her much, though. I do have problems with that whole structural discussion and to me it's not progressive to make the end consumer pick up the cost of the lousy food system we have created - I would rather see policy and systemic shifts than pushing it all on the individual behavior of people who (for whatever reason) may not give food as high a priority...as this thread kind of connects to.

Ultimately I don't want to go to far down the road of the poor shibboleth - like, are you poor if you have this, are you poor if you have that. I get that conservatives want to define the poor in terms of concrete assets that way - I remember Colbert making fun of Fox News doing the jaw drop on poor people having the gall to have refrigerators: 'How could they be poor?!'Even poor people can have luxuries, after all. Poverty is tricky to define and everyone is eager to judge; to me the defining characteristic is more financially forced choices than open options.
posted by Miko at 7:26 AM on December 9, 2014

What the fuck is a Traeger grill? Oh, that looks like a smoker. I got a char-king from my wife as a birthday present like 15 years ago... it's the same profile smoker as a traeger, only it was like $149 at Wal-Mart. Traeger looks like the BMW of grills. Which reminds me of a joke. What's the difference between a BMW and a Porcupine? On a porcupine, the pricks are on the outside.

That kosher salt thingy that Alton uses? In the first season, before he started selling his own knock-off? Yeah, it's a parmesan cheese serving dish from William Sonoma. I don't know if they still sell them, I got mine like 15 years ago. A lot happened 15 years ago, for me. I got married. The woman I married had three kids. So for a long time, I cooked for a family of five. Every damn day. But I like cooking, in fact, I like it a lot.

My love affair for cooking started when I was just a kid, because my mom was a rotten cook, but my grandma? On my dad's side? Sublime. A true southern country-girl cook. So, I knew there was better stuff out there. I can remember when I first started cooking. It was simple stuff at first, like browning hamburger and then dumping a can of SpaghttiO's in the skillet, or Big John's Baked Beans. I haven't seen a can of Big John's in decades. It had another, smaller can of "fixins" taped to the top . Do they still make that stuff?

Anyway, this was when I was like 8 or 9. I was also master of the English Muffin pizza, made with Pizza Quick Sauce and shredded mozzarella. Do they still make Pizza Quick Sauce?

Fast-forward to when I was first living on my own, in a tiny, one-room apartment in the Highlands and I mastered my first real dish; pasta carbonara. Sometimes with fake-sea-legs crab mixed in with the bacon. I got fat eating the shit out of that stuff. I know they still make sea legs. During this time I had a couple of restaurant jobs; I worked as a cook at Both Pasquales (it's gone now) and Charlie's Pizzeria, home of the peanut-butter pizza (no shit) and a local punk rock hangout. It was next door to Jack Fry's, on Bardstown Road, but it's gone now to.

Fast forward again to when I moved from Kentucky to New York. I had a co-worker who noticed I had an affinity for cooking, and he also had a background in restaurants, so he took it upon himself to teach me some stuff, and we would spend weekends drinking and cooking fancy-assed french stuff. Then he moved back to Louisville. Then I got married and started reading a lot of Jim Harrison and John Thorne. I can never keep it straight, what Brillat-Savarin said; Is it "Eat to live, Don't live to eat?" Or is it "Live to eat, Don't eat to live?" I like Harrison better, though, he said: "Eat or Die." Now, what was I talking about?

Oh. Traeger? C'mon. That's confirmed upscale yuppie bullshit. Real cooks use a Weber. Just like they suggest in Cooks Illustrated. And not a gas grill, but real charcoal. And not those Kingsford Briquets, but for-real lump charcoal, from Wegmans.
posted by valkane at 7:27 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I just grabbed Cape Ann as a representative example for pricing purposes.

I don't particularly want to get sucked (further) into an argument about whether seafood trucks exist in MA or New England so I will leave that alone.

Regardless of whether fish trucks are or are not present in any given area: Fish is expensive unless you catch it yourself. It seems like everyone but docpops is in agreement on that point.
posted by pie ninja at 7:41 AM on December 9, 2014

A quick recipe for the toast brigade:

Count me in with the 'cooking for one is lonely' brigade. it's why I eat so much toast.

I got this out of one of my cookbooks and it quickly joined my heavy rotation, and you can totally make it in a toaster oven, even. In fact, let's assume you are.

Take two slices of bread and lay 'em side-by-side on that baking-sheet thing they give you with a toaster oven. Then you need:

a quarter cup of grated cheese (whatever kind you want)
an egg
a dab of mustard
a sprinkle of salt and pepper (or cayenne if you have it, if not no big)

Beat the egg, and mix in the cheese, mustard, and salt/pepper/whatever. Spread that on the bread. Set the toaster oven to "bake" at 350 for about 15 minutes, and stick the bread in.

That's it. Kinda like grilled cheese, which is the best sandwich ever, but you didn't need to use your stove.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:46 AM on December 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

If this thread turns into a recipe sharing thread where everyone drops their cheap, easy, delicious recipes...

I'll give this thread a hug.
posted by el io at 8:15 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I didn't want to start a derail about Alice Waters or flatscreens and I'm not accusing her of deliberately using such racially-coded language. I know she's played a big part in changing how Americans think about food for the better over the past 40 years and I'm fully behind efforts to help people have easier access to good food and the knowledge to prepare it well.

But Waters was (perhaps unintentionally) expressing a version of the common attitude in the US that poor people don't know what's best for themselves and they're incapable of managing their finances, their time, or their lives properly. This belief is easily expanded into arguments that poor and low-income people are undeserving of taxpayer-funded services.

Poverty is the fundamental issue at the heart of so many problems related to health, nutrition, and education. The notion that people are choosing to buy frivolous things instead of cooking proper meals for themselves and their families -- which especially rankles coming from someone we've seen living a life of incredible privilege -- belies a certain cluelessness on the part of Waters and remains a big blind spot for a lot of people in the movement she represents.
posted by theory at 8:23 AM on December 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

If this thread turns into a recipe sharing thread where everyone drops their cheap, easy, delicious recipes... I'll give this thread a hug.

My go-to "peasant dish" is any sort of pasta (usually elbows or angel hair), cooked until almost done, then sauted in butter and soy sauce. It's one-pan - put water in a skillet and cook the pasta, drain and put in a pat of butter, then put the pasta back in. At the last minute, after it's browned just the tiniest bit, hit it with soy sauce and black pepper.

You can also add in whatever you happen to have around - frozen peas work great, or any sort of veg you have around. Today's leftovers benefited from a few stray pieces of bacon that were in the fridge.
posted by jbickers at 8:31 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

If this thread turns into a recipe sharing thread where everyone drops their cheap, easy, delicious recipes...

These aren't absolute bed-rock cheap, but since we talked about toast earlier:

This is what I call bachelorette chow.

• Slice of multi-grain bread
• Half an avocado
• zest of one lemon
• juice of half a lemon
• can of sardines
• bit of parsley
• salt and pepper

In a small bowl mix the lemon zest, lemon juice, parsley and salt and pepper. Open your can of sardines. Tip the oil from the can into the bowl. You're doing the vinaigrette procedure here. So a slow dribble of the oil into the acid while whisking. Taste for seasoning, then add the fish. You'll want to break the fish into filets, and you can remove the spine if you like. Let that sit and marinate.

Toast your bread. Prep your avocado. When the toast is done, pour a bit of the vinaigrette onto the toast. Smash the avocado onto the bread. Top with the fish.

Now onto dessert toast:

• Slice of multi-grain bread
• soft cheese: cream cheese, ricotta, yogurt cheese, goat cheese
• Dried fruit: apricots, figs, blueberries, prunes, raisins
• olive oil
• black pepper
• honey

Toast your bread. Top with cheese. Salt and pepper the cheese. Top with fruit. Drizzle with honey. Finish with a bit of olive oil and crack of black pepper.
posted by fontophilic at 8:51 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Empress, that sounds almost like Welsh Rarebit with some egg added. And sounds delicious.

I'm a big fan of spicy black beans and rice. I also like pasta, any shape, with a can of white/cannelini beans, a can of diced tomato, and some torn-up kale, chard, or spinach wilted in. The total ingredient cost is about $4.99 at my grocery (not including the olive oil and garlic which I keep on hand, but that needs factoring in if you don't have it) and if you make the whole box of pasta, it's dinner for one plus several lunches. Adding sausage to this is also delicious.

Poverty is the fundamental issue at the heart of so many problems related to health, nutrition, and education.

I couldn't agree more heartily and ultimately, critiquing any single choice just distracts from this larger matter.
posted by Miko at 8:54 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I cook for a family of three on a strict budget that is made infinitely easier by self-sourced meat. Making my own meat is a huge luxury/privilege. Because of my skill set, background, an old rifle made in 1927 and $2 in ammo, I can feed my family protein for a year. Not everyone can do that and protein is expensive.

But salmon . . . salmon is usually off the menu because of the expense in TX. But this year brought a windfall of salmon to our freezer.
So we maximize the usage we can get out of it.
The only thing thrown away from a filet are the scales and the bones. The skin gets turned into chips. Salt and peppered and baked in strips until crisp. The kid and I eat it. We get weird looks from everyone. But it's calories. And it tastes like fish bacon!
posted by Seamus at 8:55 AM on December 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

THANK YOU! You are THE best!
posted by Seamus at 9:02 AM on December 9, 2014

Empress, that sounds almost like Welsh Rarebit with some egg added. And sounds delicious.

I did get it out of a cookbook by Darina Allen, so there's a British Isles tie-in.

And if we're talking recipe-sharing, here's a couple more:

* This serves one, and is butt-easy. You can even make this to use up leftover rice from Chinese takeout. You need:

A cup of cooked rice
a clove of garlic, or garlic salt or powdered garlic if you roll that way instead
A couple handfuls of baby spinach, or swiss chard or some other kind of tender leafy green like that
Butter, olive oil and parmaesan cheese

Preheat your oven to 350 and get a small baking dish ready. Slice or chop or just generally make-small the garlic. Drizzle a little olive oil in a skillet, and when that's hot toss in the garlic. After a minute toss in the spinach (or whatever) and stir that around until it wilts. Then toss in a pat of butter and the rice, and stir all that up until it's heated through.

Then dump that into the baking dish, dot the top with more butter and sprinkle on parmaesan cheese. Bake that for 15 minutes. Done.

* This is more of a cooking tip than anything else -

Now, hear me out. Everyone gives kale a bad rap, but if you get a smallish bunch and cook it as soon as you get home, chop it up good and just keep it in your fridge, you are set with a vital component to throw together a few really easy meals. Case in point:

a) One night, I mashed a single potato, stirred in a little of the kale, spread that in a baking dish and put grated cheese on top. Voila - colcannon. I had dinner.

b) Another night, I took a handful of these fantastic baby meatballs I found in the freezer section of my supermarket, threw them into a couple cups of chicken broth, threw in a little of the kale, and heated that up. Voila - Italian wedding soup. That and a piece of bread and I had dinner.

Basically, you can use pre-cooked kale to spontaneously whip up things like that. Throw it in soups or stir it into other things. I'm actually going to use some tonight to throw together this fish stew I've made in the past - a can of clams, about half a can of white beans, some kale and a little extra broth.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:13 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

This is the most bizarrely classist thread I've seen in recent memory on Metafilter.

Er, you're the one being classist here actually.

And hey if we're doing recipes:

This is filling and delicious. It's basically chana masala but I make no claims to authenticity. You'll need:

1 medium onion hacked to bits (no need to be fancy)
1 16oz can diced or crushed tomatoes (or you can use fresh if you want, no bigs)
2 cloves garlic, hacked
2 cans chickpeas, drained
whatever kind of curry powder works for you; garam masala; or curry goop; Patak is a decent brand and cheap. Say two tablespoons for powder, maybe three if you're using a goop or paste.
salt/pepper to taste
olive oil or butter

Turn a burner to medium heat, add your olive oil or butter. When it's hot (if butter, right after it stops foaming, if olive oil when it starts shimmering), toss in the onions and stir 'em about until translucent. Add the garlic and your curry powder/garam masala/goop. Cook for a couple minutes. Add the tomatoes and chickpeas, turn the heat down, and leave it alone for about 1/2 hour. Stir occasionally. Have a taste, adjust the salt/pepper levels, and enjoy. Cooking longer won't hurt it, and you can just drop the whole assemblage in a slow cooker for several hours if you like. Slight outlay for spices, but all other ingredients should cost maybe $5 and will provide lunch/dinner for a couple days. If you get bored of it, throw it all in a blender--maybe with some extra raw garlic--and call it hummus. You could also add coconut milk when simmering for extra noms.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:29 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I paid for the equivalent of tiffin lunches for about a year (on and off over a few years, being a year total).

It was crazy expensive. Like $10 a meal. And I had to eat the same things over and over again (hence the on off and switching providers). But the relief of not having think beyond pick up bag, fridge contents, eat contents, put out empty bag ... worth $10 a meal for a while.

Other times I get really into being able to cook OMAC style. I'm cooking a gallon of soup, why not 30 gallons and then we all get good soup? If I hit lottery, I'd love to put together a place on the corner where I can get people good meals in bulk with a good meal at a good price. Other places have these "dinner clubs" where you stop in and pick up dinner made in bulk and you take a turn co-oping in to contribute. That would be something rocking to have the time/ability/energy todo and not just for us "rich" middle class peeps.
posted by Buttons Bellbottom at 9:37 AM on December 9, 2014

If this thread turns into a recipe sharing thread where everyone drops their cheap, easy, delicious recipes... I'll give this thread a hug.

You either need a crockpot for this one, or the relaxed enough attitude to leave a covered pot in the oven at 200 degrees all day. (I suppose you can do it up quick-like, too, but it doesn't give the flavors enough time to mellow, IMO.)

-- 1 pound of whatever cheap meat* you have occupying the back of the freezer, cut into small pieces. (I recently used venison that a neighbor gave me. OMG, so good.)
-- 1 can of garbanzo beans, drained
-- 1 can sliced olives, drained. (I like black, some like green. Either is fine.)
-- 1 can diced tomatoes, in their juice.
-- 1 small eggplant, peeled and diced. (Also shockingly delicious with the peel on.)
-- 1 small onion, peeled and diced. (I love red onions, any onion will do.)
-- 2 potatoes, scrubbed and diced.
-- 2 carrots, scrubbed and diced.
-- 2 cups of tomato juice, stock, or water.
-- Salt and pepper to taste.
-- Harissa, sambal oelek, sriracha, or other pepper paste/sauce to taste.

*If you don't eat meat, sub in a pound of other root veggies, or a pound of seitan.

Dump it all into your crockpot or dutch oven. Stir the hell out of it. Taste the liquid and adjust the seasoning to your liking. Cover. 6 hours on low in the crockpot, or at 200 in the oven. Serves 4, if you're my family. Freezes well!
posted by MissySedai at 9:39 AM on December 9, 2014

it's some dude with a refrigerated truck who buys wholesale and then drives a scheduled route

I am sad it is not some shifty character with a trenchcoat full of fish.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:47 AM on December 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

metafilter: sad it is not some shifty character with a trenchcoat full of fish
posted by el io at 9:51 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Docpops, please give it a rest. You've hit the point in the conversation where you are going to persuade no one of anything. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 10:21 AM on December 9, 2014

I did basically that last night but with fermented black bean paste instead. Delicious.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:27 AM on December 9, 2014

Reposting my beloved Nigella Lawson's Spaghetti with Marmite recipe sans exasperation (which is how I prefer it).
posted by Kitteh at 10:48 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

(for those playing at home, I am a time traveler who responded to Kitteh's comment before she posted it)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:55 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's OK man, you wanna fill a trenchcoat with black bean paste, nobody's judging.
posted by ominous_paws at 11:26 AM on December 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

Way upstream kanata asked for cookbooks useful to someone with little experience and money, and I wanted to mention Budget Bytes, which I've found to be a solid (and free!) source of reliable, affordable recipes with good clear step-by-step directions. (Plus lots of photos, so you know what things should look like at various stages of preparation.)

Also, apropos of nothing, I cast another vote in favor of cooking a big pot of something on the weekend and then eating from it all week. My go-to is what I call "people chow" -- a version of the nutrient slurry referenced earlier -- which is based on a Bittman recipe for Lentils and Rice with or without Pork, and which of course can also be made with or without chicken, sausage, smoked turkey, tofu, various and sundry vegetables, etc. etc.
posted by Kat Allison at 12:36 PM on December 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

I don't know why this doesn't come up more often, but the primary reason that people eat fast food even though it's unhealthy and expensive isn't that it's convenient, it's because it tastes REALLY FUCKING GOOD. Not to you foodies, I guess, but to someone whose taste buds are used to it. It's hard to go from that to grilled salmon and asparagus. [...] It's not unlike why people still smoke, even though it's clearly terrible for you.

Yeah, I think this bears repeating.

People—foodies, mostly—put a lot of effort into decrying McDonalds and other forms of fast or prepackaged food (largely, I suspect, for reasons that have as much to do with class consciousness as culinary preference), and although I am willing to accept that there are some people out there who honestly just don't like it, I think we'd do better if we straight-up admitted that, for most people, junk food tastes awesome. It's the closest thing to crack you can buy on the open market besides coffee and tobacco, and also the only one we market directly to children.

I had to stop eating fast food, not because I don't like fast food, but because I know that it only takes one goddamn order of McD's fries and suddenly it's all I'll be thinking about for weeks afterwards. Everything else tastes bland when you stack it up next to food items where the salt content is measured in fucking grams. It can take a while, and a lot of willpower to keep yourself out of that drive-thru, while your palate resets itself to the point where you can eat minimally-salted kale chips and legitimately think "wow, this is pretty tasty".
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:16 PM on December 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

for most people, junk food tastes awesome. It's the closest thing to crack you can buy on the open market besides coffee and tobacco, and also the only one we market directly to children.

That's definitely true for some people. About a month ago I was getting lunch at a McDonalds and a dude at the next table was eating his way through nine sandwiches of some kind and looking really happy about it (he may have started with more, but he had nine on his tray when I sat down). But almost everyone I know (running from day laborers up through one percenters) eats fast food for the exact same reasons I do -- it's fast, cheap, predictable, and tastes ok -- without it being something of tremendous pleasure.

It is only in comments online (here and Reddit in particular) that I hear people talking about how much they love fast food. My guess is that people overall like it (because it is sweet, salty, cheap, etc) but a lot fewer people really love it in the ways these descriptions suggest. (I do however completely agree that the fast food industry targets children very carefully and probably with life-long consequences; I'd love to see that aspect in particular be much more regulated.)

And Miko is completely correct that the continued shaming focus on poor people's individual choices (such as eating fast food instead of steaming artisanal kale) lacks any of the usefulness of discussing how our food systems work. To the extent that these are problems needing to be solved, they will be solved with regulations, changes in the subsidy system, and/or reductions in inequality, not in shaming of people who are making difficult decisions with limited resources.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:28 AM on December 10, 2014 [3 favorites]