August 11, 2009
While I ate my Trader Joe's frozen burrito for lunch, I read a great NY Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan, "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch". Pollan discusses the decline of cooking in the American household and how cooking shows are somewhat at fault. Prime time cooking shows are all about cooking as a spectator sport, and not about turning off the tv and getting into the kitchen. He also discusses a link between obesity rates and the time spent cooking. If the only way to get a cookie is to bake it yourself, you are less likely to eat it. So the food industry is also to blame for making all yummy, bad for you food so cheap and easily available.
In theory I am not in the norm since all the food network shows I've watched have inspired me to cook more and quite a few of our favorite recipes came from Emeril Lagasse, Guy Fieri, and Rachel Ray. There's something gratifying about accomplishing at least one major feat in the day. But now that we've added a baby into the mix, we have a lot less time and we are tending to have fewer steps in our cooking. We would love to eat healthier and even make our baby's food. But we are just so pressed for time nowadays.
Anyway, it's a good read. Enjoy.
The biggest deal for me and why I am working on becoming a vegetarian, or at least eat a lot less meat, (and my husband is too) is animal welfare. If we eat meat we try to only eat from Whole Foods or local farmer's market or Chipotle. I kind of like supporting places like the farmer's markets because I think I stand a better chance of "convincing" people to buy humanely raised meats rather than becoming a vegetarian.
The biggest thing for me right now is food intolerance and labeling. I just found out I am dairy and wheat intolerant (although I had suspected the wheat thing for a while, I found out for sure that this was really a thing recently). This has resulted in a few things:
1 - I am frustrated that a lot of restaurants don't have gluten free or dairy free menus, and many places are unable to tell me with any certainty what is in the foods they serve.
2 - I can't eat anything but salads at most fast food places (and sometimes not even that because more dressings have wheat and dairy than you'd think). Chipotle, however, is an exception. Go chipotle.
3 - Because there aren't a lot of places I can eat, I have been trying to cook more. And this actually ties in with the NY Times Magazine article a lot, because most pre-packaged foods contain something that I am not supposed to eat. When I have been cooking, it tends to be more from scratch ("real cooking"?) so I can control the ingredients. I can't trust pre-marinated meats (central market can't tell me the ingredients of their marinades), and a lot of the bottled sauces and frozen foods are out of the question.
4 - I really miss cheese.
Since our culture has moved towards eating out a lot more, and since so many people have food allergies or intolerances, it would be nice for more labeling to exist.
Regarding the other issues: I try to get organic when there isn't a huge price difference, and for fruits and veggies where it matters more from a pesticide on the food standpoint. I'd like to be a vegetarian for animal welfare issues, but in practice that would difficult considering my other diet limitations. I don't know enough about GE and about food security/safety issues to have an opinion. Is there something that I should be worried about? I have heard many differing opinions on GE, and I really don't know who to trust.
Hormones and abuse of antibiotics are my biggest concerns. Food safety is another.
For decent fast food: Can you do potatoes? Wendy's baked potato + broccoli - cheese + barbecue sauce = decent meal for almost nothing.
My biggest concern is the environmental load meat imposes; this is the chief reason I'm a vegetarian.
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I assume "So the food industry is also to blame for making all yummy, bad for you food so cheap and easily available" is tongue in cheek -- but see this old post for the astonishing figures on how much value modern agriculture has added to our lives. The typical US family spends half as much on a percentage basis -- from 20% in 1950 to under 10% now -- for food, and only 5.6% of its budget on food eaten at home. Against the striking increase in BMI, consider that the mean height has increased by an inch since 1960 and about four inches this century: there are significant but subtle improvements in health to weigh against the increase in obesity. On a national and global scale, hunger and malnutrition are now effectively political, not economic, problems.
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In that light, I'm disappointed by this author's failure to distinguish between cooking as a bourgeois leisure pasttime vs. cooking as a survival necessity with socially regressive opportunity costs.
The statement that "food companies [persuade] Americans to let them do the cooking" is silver-spooned bullshit. And worse yet:
"Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens."
To this I say thank freaking goodness: in addition to the aforementioned marginal addition to my household budget, that's 30 minutes a day -- 2.7% of my waking day, about $3500/year in opportunity cost for a median earner.
"It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story."
I assume nothing of the kind -- I think the liberation from food preparation duties is one of many factors that allowed women to enter the work force; or at the very least that the causality runs both ways.
So what are we doing with the time we save by outsourcing our food preparation to corporations and 16-year-old burger flippers? Working, commuting to work, surfing the Internet and, perhaps most curiously of all, watching other people cook on television.
"What are we doing with time formerly spent on [task that people demonstrably exchange money to avoid]? Just [things that people have always done and whose time value is profitably exchanged for the former task, which profit is spent in leisure activity: for example, one that is new and therefore suspect; and another, cherry-picked as ironic straw man]."
Re: potatoes. Yes, potatoes are fine. Unless they are french fries. French fries tend to be breaded (or in most cases, cooked in the same oil as breaded chicken tenders and the flour is absorbed that way). Barbecue sauce may not be ok, though. Some sauces are, and some aren't. I haven't specifically asked the Wendy's folks, but from my grocery store adventures, it seems about half of the bbq sauces contain wheat or dairy. Perhaps at some point I'll go to Wendy's and specifically ask -- the ingredients list isn't available on the web. Thanks for the tip, though.
Everything Flip said, except I like meat too much to go vegetarian. Plus there's the whole growing up on a dairy farm thing that makes it just seem wrong to avoid cow products.
I like the concept of locally grown foods, but don't know enough to know for sure that they're environmentally better (I just assume so, since they require less shipping). It troubles me when they cost more, though; they shouldn't have the shipping charges, so are they just really inefficient? Or are they gouging me?
I also hate the way the word "sustainable" is used with food. From what I've seen, "sustainable" agriculture is unsustainable, except amongst rich people without any real food worries like Americans. Agricultural advances save lives, going back to medieval practices would kill people.
The local food thing annoys me to a very great end, unless it is tied with moving to places where the ground is fertile and water is plentiful. Locally grown (non-cattle) food in Texas, when you factor in the water usage, the amount of driving around your damn tractor to till the clay, fertilizer, and probably the imported topsoil, is going to be more environomentally harsh than just shipping it in from California or the Midwest, especially once you factor in the fact that crop yields are vastly higher in those places.
Only you never see local food advocates talk about any of this, nor do they talk about local crop yields or anything. They just harp on local food because it has to be shipped cross country, without addressing why this happens.
Wow! great thoughts by all.
I think enough of you here are familiar with my work so I won't dwell on it too much (unless anyone wants to know specifics) - I'll just say my primary concern is animal welfare.
Regarding allergies/labeling - for me it hasn't been that much of a problem, though I don't have sensitivities to wheat/soy - however being vegan can be rough when eating out (but not in DC, thankfully). I do cook most of my meals and rarely eat out. Recently, I've been trying to cook using as little refined/packaged products as possible. Many of my meals are very basic (influenced by macrobiotic meals - not by the principles) - even got to the point where I make my own dressings and bake my own bread.
I'm with you (nanocindy) on the GE and safety/security issues - I know enough to know that I'm not knowledgeable on the subject. Though antibiotic resistance seems dangerous (possibly influenced by feeding antibiotics to farm animals) AND GE/monocrop culture feels awkward.
flip - yes concerns of environmental impacts are growing - in fact, some of my colleagues published a few years ago on this topic
re: local - I feel the same way, I like the concept and enjoy the farmers markets around here, but haven't really looked into the lifecycle analysis and impact of local v. industrial (with shipping). though I feel a bit better about putting money directly in the pockets of local farmers.
I do wonder - why now? In the past few years, it seems that these issues have skyrocketed, along with the books/documentaries on the subject.
They've skyrocketed cuz it's the Age of Aquarius man ;)
I've been a veg for over a decade now, but am seriously considering buying a house with enough land to raise my own cow. I still love meat, but I wonder how my body will react to it after all this time =)
Something else I would love to look into would be some kind of cooking co-op. I guess McDonald's qualifies as one, but i'm thinking something more along the lines of fresh, conscious, madewithlove grub. I like to cook sometimes, but every night is a drag honestly.
Wow! So many responses. I guess everyone likes to talk about food!
I actually had never thought about the eating local concept too much. I figured it was like the eating what's in season mentality, where you try to make up most of your diet from what's in season (local) and then splurge to get whatever else you need. That's better on the planet and your wallet. And actually, that makes me wonder...for the first time this year we started a garden: 3 tomato plants, 2 bell pepper plants, lots of chilies, basil, mint, green onions. I was surprised by how much water these plants need and since I am not really that concerned with my water bill, I probably end up wasting a lot more water. So far we've gotten a lot of cherry tomato (maybe 40), 1 big tomato, lots of chillies, and 1 bell pepper. The green onions have shown no promise and I'm afraid of picking basil because I might kill it. It seems to me that buying the veggies might be a little bit more time and cost efficient, but having your own garden is the cool thing to do nowadays. But it could just be me and my inability to grow stuff. Perhaps this is a good analogy for the buy local movement?
mrflip, I definitely think it's great that we are now spending a lot less time and money on food, but I wonder at what cost. I am sure that subjecting animals and slaughter house workers to inhumane conditions has something to do with the low cost of food. As does the quality of the food and the need to add a ton of salt and sugar to make food palatable after it's been frozen for 3 months. And I'm not sure we can yet say that the increase in obesity is acceptable considering the improvements in health we are gaining from the availability and cheapness of food. I think it's still too early to tell.
And as far as blaming the food industry for obesity, well, I guess I was ready to find someone to blame. Maybe it's more of an education and self control thing. But at the same time, it will be a lot cheaper for me to go to Taco Bell and fill up for lunch than to go to the grocery store and buy a container of yogurt, a banana, and a granola bar.
For more like this: Foodpolitics at the Faster Times, as edited by my cousin Hannah!
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Wow! Two great food posts in just a few days, molecular gastronomy and now this.
Food issues are basically my job now, so I'm hypersensitive to the issue, but I'm wondering what's on the radar for others: local, organic, veg/vegan, food security/safety, animal welfare, GE, hormones, water issues, environmental (GHG)? Any? All? Others?
Being in a bubble, I'd love to know thoughts/concerns any of you have.
posted by pablo at 10:59AM CST on August 12