Posted on 08/19/2022 5:07:17 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Apparently, it’s now both regressive and elitist to do your own cooking. Taking a hobbyish pleasure in preparing a roast is not only insulting to the lower classes who can’t access the same tools, but even worse, it’s gender normative. How dare I, a woman, have opinions about protein content in flour or how many times a chicken breast should be flipped when cooked in a saucepan? It’s so housewife of me.
When a mid-sized anonymous Twitter account made the argument on Monday, concluding that the real revolution will not be in home kitchens but in restaurants, the person behind it was promptly rebuked by thousands of Twitter users from every wing of the political mansion.
Only a handful of radicals stood publicly by the tweet author. But note that even as they publicly disavow such an extreme example, an idea that home cooking is an upper-class luxury is still held in practice by many Americans.
That is especially true when it comes to farm-food culture and the backlash against it. The days of farmers’ markets being a leftist thing seem to be over. Homesteaders, homeschoolers, and the very online right (this writer included) have united behind the cause of returning to traditional diets and forms of food preparation, such as buying your meat from a local farm, growing your own vegetables, and even rendering your own fats. This has been bashed for being elitist and impossible, never mind the fact that several of these recommendations are more economical when done well—and much closer to how our grandparents lived just two generations ago, in the Great Depression.
The suggestion, of course, is that middle- and lower-class Americans can’t afford to eat healthfully, which almost always involves eating at home, and shouldn’t be expected to. So let them eat Little Debbies.
This is reflected in politics as well as pop-culture. Think about the last campaign ad you watched. If the candidate was an old-school Republican, after engaging in slow-motion tumbling with his kids on a lush green lawn, the politician likely joined his wife in the kitchen to bake homemade cookies. If she was a Democrat, meanwhile, she probably strolled into a bodega to get something premade. Joe Biden has made much of his presidential brand off ordering at an ice cream shop. These appeals to the common man imply something not just about the voter base each party has historically targeted with such ads, but the assumption present in both: homemade is an aspirational indulgence.
And indeed, as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, compared to restaurant prices today, home cooking is a luxury. The inflationary gap between restaurants and grocery stores is now the widest it has been since the 1970s, which is why, despite labor shortages, longer wait times, and a 7.6 percent increase in prices, restaurants are faring better than grocery stores. As supermarket prices have increased 13.1 percent, and cooking your own food takes valuable time, more average Americans have found they can save money by paying someone else to do the work.
A friend of mine likes to say that every problem in the modern world can be boiled down to frozen peas. The bag of frozen peas is the epitome of our culture’s approach to food, in which efficiency, rather than health or enjoyment, is the highest good. The luxury of home cooking is not only the cost of the ingredients, which restaurants can buy in bulk and closer to the source, but also the time it takes to cook them. Our modern economy does not afford men, nor most women, the hours that good home cooking requires, since these hours must always come above and beyond those spent for pay. So instead, we eat out, or use shortcuts—frozen peas.
We should note that the people going to restaurants are solidly middle class, and they’re not just eating fast food. The Journal reports that Americans making $75,000 per year and above are choosing Chili’s over casseroles. They are eating cheap alternatives to home cooking, but they still choose a sit-down meal; this is not merely a McDonald’s drive-through phenomenon. Why does that matter? Because it suggests this decision is not about paying the lowest possible price. As long as middle-class Americans can afford to eat their dinner at a table, they will.
What is the matter with eating out more often, anyway? Taverns go back about as far as anything. But even if there weren’t differences in quality between home-cooked food and eating out—and there are—quality-of-life differences develop when the public house becomes your kitchen table. While most of us would laugh at the Twitter proposition that the real revolution is eating at Applebee's, a rejection of the home as the hub of the food economy is indeed a revolutionary idea.
“Lobster used to be what poor people ate.”
As I understand it, lobster was once the primary protein served in prisons in the state of Maine.
Literally. I'm talking chicken nuggets, french fries, pizza, breaded fish sticks, deli meats and processed cheese products. These are the fabled "hot school lunches" that are provided to our children.
When I was going to school, my mother would pack a peanut butter or tuna fish sandwich in my Partridge Family lunchbox along with a banana, apple or maybe a mini-sleeve of Fig Newtons or bag of raisins. Also a thermos of milk, that I would turn into chocolate milk if I was able to get some powder mix. School lunches back then cost us non-poor kids a couple of quarters or some such and no way was my non-poor Mom paying it!
One more city folk thing that just makes me shake my head and say “there, but for the grace of God, go I”.
I think I’m at 84qts of canning put up so far this summer. Cucumber pickles, beet pickles, dilly beans, salsa, spaghetti sauce, and tomato juice. I’m working up another batch of salsa right now. I’ll do some okra pickles in the next week or so. Sauerkraut has been fermenting for a month and should be ready for transfer to jars. Mrs. Augie has made 30+qts of lacto-fermented cucumber pickles this summer.
I added ~100lbs of winter squash to the bushel of potatoes that went into the root cellar last month. Put half a beef in the freezer every spring. November will put three or four whitetail deer in the freezer.
I built a small greenhouse off the side of my potting shed last spring. With that I should be able to have fresh tomatoes and potherbs well into winter. Also added a low tunnel to the garden space which will provide fresh greens all winter long.
Mrs. Augie and I raised four kids on home cooking while managing demanding professional careers. Eating out was a treat and only done once or twice a month. Even while we lived in town I managed to tuck some nice veggies into the postage stamp sized yard.
When I see people say they don’t have time to cook it makes me wonder if they’re stupid, or just plain lazy.
When I was a kid in the 60s, we’d drive out from Portland into the farm country around there and get a station wagon load of fruits and vegetables from the roadside stands and/or U-pick places. What didn’t get eaten fresh was canned.
That’s not an option around here (southern Arizona). We do a little container gardening, but it’s tough to keep stuff alive in the summers.
I can cook a steak and microwave a baked potato in about 10 minutes. And it will cost less than getting a fast-food burger of uncertain contents and origin.
Last night we made some pulled chicken in the instant pot, using four pounds of chicken thighs ( @ 99 cents per pound ).
Some we mixed with sauce and had over pasta. The rest we put in the freezer in baggies. We can defrost quickly and mix with bbq sauce on a roll, or whatever.
AND obviously racist. Cooking at home is white supremacy. Any “minority” who cooks at home has had their mind colonized by whiteness. Equity demands kids of color need to eat doritos and little debbie cakes for their meals because Shaniqua can not be expected to assemble the ingredients and cook at home.
beef barley soup
oh man my late mom made that it was da best
Crockpots are great for pulled pork, chili and soups.
I’d rather have a slice of good bread & butter than a dessert.
My faves: Polish rye with the corn flour bottom, real Italian, pumpernickel, hard rolls.
I stock up when I visit family in Jersey - there are still some great local bakeries there.
I cut the beef into small cubes....not like the chunks in stew. It’s become one of my favorites. Store soups are way too salty.
My “super-special” crock pot with removeable crock was $18. The hand cleaning may take about 5 minutes total.
It does take a bit of storage room.
The biggest problem I have is that it’s 6 or 7 quart and my Mother taught me that, whatever the pan size, you MUST fill it to almost overflowing.
Like you said, just my opinion.
When I was broke, my kids had plenty of food to eat because I cooked and baked everything from scratch.
If convenience food were cheaper, I would’ve bought convenience food to save money.
But, back then, butter and eggs were affordable. Only a few years ago.
Upon rereading my last comment I realized it may sound a little snarky. It was not meant that way.
Come fall, my dad would pick the field tomatoes on a farm that had fallen for $1 a bushel and mom would can 250 qts.. We always had a snack....stewed tomatoes.
That’s exactly the way to do it. That way it has no preservatives, is flavored exactly the way you like. It’s also a great way to take advantage of meats on sale,
I could never figure out why my pot roast never tasted like my Grandmothers. Then I figured it out, she always put it in the oven before we went to church and when we came home hours later the house smelled great and the roast melted in your mouth. I bought a cheap roast, stuck it in a slow oven surrounded by veggies, and many hours later...there it was....Grandmas pot roast. I had been using mid price roasts and standard roasting time and temp. Not the same
Definitely snarky....LOL
“You see where that egg came from?”
I’m gonna eat it!
My mom was big on stewed tomatoes, too. I hate the slimy things to this day.
That’s what I would think. You throw everything in a pot…not sure I want a steak and veggies and potatoes all like that. That would be like shepherd’s pie.
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