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.
Not always. Not even most of the time, especially if you have a fridge, a freezer, and/or don't mind eating leftovers.
What good home cooking dies require is information.
Teach yourselves, your kids about home economics.
It's a great investment.
I'm appalled at how many people I know are ignorant about how to shop, how to cook, how to plan a menu, good nutrition.
The info is easily available. Folks should make good use of it.
Exactly. LOL. IOW, “processed” foods should be for the elite, not the cheap.
Also, as a person with gastrointestinal issues, I’m aware there are many conditions where “processed” is the recommended type. “Pure” unfettered food causes too much trouble,
Never really that restaurants too much every now and then but I would say 95% of my eating is cooking and from scratch, of course it came easy that was a military cook when they were scorned and we’re also known as stew burners. They were two kinds of cooks... Cooks that really did cook and Cooks it were just there because they wanted to get out of their first unit and go to a school and learn a MOS.
I liked it I’ve been around industrial kitchens in high school part-time work skullery techn mostly but the old retired army Sarge took me under his wing and showed me a lot of stuff in that kitchen and it was fully outfitted, we served 600 meals a day.
Later when I joined up I looked around while I was Deck gang and saw who had the best liberty... and I noticed the Cooks had good inport and ports-of-call Libo...
Say no more... walked down to the administrative office, paperwork signed and I was out of there in 2 weeks, short-handed on cooks and boom I was off and cook school was a breeze because I knew all that stuff from my high school part-time job.
Cooking onboard ships was a hard job, it was rewarding, if you were good the crew loved you, and as I said before the Liberty was phenomenal!
So.... I don’t dine out much, in fact I’ll take a lunch if I’m going to be away running errands, because I like my cooking better than anybody’s.
Cooking from scratch is quite a bit cheaper than buying processed food or eating out.
And use the dang food pusher.
It’s there for a reason.
Especially on that brand. Which has a really, really nice, sharp blade. :-)
I took a few packages of cubes, put them in the crock pot at 7am, put the crock on 8 hours of low heat cooking, and when I got home at 7pm I had the most awesome cube meal ever.
As I said elsewhere, I'm a guy. Give me meat, maybe salt or ketchup, and a head of lettuce and peppers and I'm a happy camper. Mrs DoodleBob is more refined.
Recipes are a mistake.
Throw a pork chop in a skillet, salt and pepper until browned and crisp on the outside and you have a gourmet meal.
A rough chopped new potato lightly boiled in salty water and tossed in butter, salt and pepper is better than some cheesy potato mess IMO.
The argument seems to be that you’d be better off eating fast food every night if your mom got a job instead of being “shackled to the stove”
Agreed! Thinking what to have is horrible!
Especially when you are sort of limited with EXTREMELY picky man and child!
The Colonel’s Wife has said a number of times recently, as we’re leaving a restaurant after paying a $60-$70 tab, “We could have cooked a better meal ourselves at home for a LOT less money and been more comfortable!”
I made spaghetti with tomato sauce, topped with beef tips I grilled on the barbie, mixed up a bag Caesar salad from Sam’s Club and...Bob’s your uncle in about a half hour. Plus...got plenty of leftovers.
(Used Ragu tomato sauce because I was out of the cream sauce.)
Tonight will be grilled steaks and bakers...with a bagged salad.
Some of the best food many of us have ever tasted was from the old ladies in the 1950s.
I call it grandma cooking, there were even old women who would cook all-you-could-eat meals in their home where workmen and businessmen would sit at a huge table and pass around platters of meat and fried chicken and huge bowls of buttery mashed potatoes, gravies unknown today, and green beans with bacon that had been cooked into a meal for the gods, everything with so much flavor that it would make grown men today weep with ecstasy.
My hubby and I also never understand adding all this stuff to a kitchen. We only have so much room. Cannot have all these specialist devices that don’t all have a place to stow.
Plus, crock pots as well as other faddish items are not easy to clean. Unless you get a super-special device that ensures the actual food-holding part is separable. They all are basically hand clean, and some are not thoughtful as far as how simple or heavy it is even for hand cleaning. If you want to use it all the time you’ll be washing it all the time, and it should be simple to clean.
Anyway that’s just my opinion. YMMV.
The article actually points that out. I think the author is baffled too.
Yum!
“It’s not the actual prep and cooking that I’ve had enough of; I can enjoy that. It’s having to think about what to cook — the meal planning and shopping — that aggravates me.”
A friend of mine raising 9 children had a two week menu plan and shopping list. She shopped at Aldi once a week for the menu of the week rarely straying from her list because they were on quite a tight budget. They all knew that Tuesdays on week 1 was going to be meatloaf. It took away all of the planning work because it was already done!
We did the same as kids. Thursday was always pork chop night
I always use frozen store bought vegetables, because I don’t have a garden. Fresh bought is always shipped unripened, so they aren’t fully nutritional.
However, frozen is flash frozen upon being ripened at the farms, so they are fully ripened and a better option, imo.
ew... don’t do that to your kids
Have you read the ingredients label?
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