I had better food at the ball game.
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.
Tell me about it. I pay about $10 a loaf for fresh made sourdough at the local farmer's market here. And I pay it because it's so good. Need to finish it in two days however or it's hard as a brick.
When I retire, I'm going to learn how to bake my own bread. I will never eat the processed white bread crap from the supermarkets.
Speaking of farmer's markets, I agree with the observations of the article. In the past, farmer's markets were the province of the birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating hippie crowd. Now we are seeing a lot more regular people coming through them. The prices haven't come down though. We learned that it's better to go to the actual farms as they usually have a self-service farm stand with much more reasonable prices.
Agree. Prepping and eating at home still is less costly.
As kids we only ate out for Mothers’ Day and other special occasions. My mom cooked everything at home to save money. Eating out is/was expensive. We seldom had packaged foods. (this was the 60s and 70s)
I was eating out more last year, but WAY too costly now. My problem is I bake cookies all the time and they are too easy to eat.
Same here! Only this “elite” added marinated mushrooms on bamboo skewers to the grill along with zucchini slices. So elite!
Put your bread in the freezer. Just take a few slices out of the bag as you need it. Or just freeze half the loaf and leave out what you usually eat in a few days. I love Jewish rye bread and that’s what I do.
My mother had a weekly menu too. A meat, a vegetable and a starch. Almost never had dessert, and usually did not have any bread unless it went with the meal (hush puppies with fried fish, for example, or buns for hot dogs and hamburgers). I don’t remember having salads but I do remember a selection of raw vegetables and olives for fiber (no dressings or dips). Small servings (compared to today), and nobody wanted a second serving. Benefit: No one in the household was overweight (we also didn’t each much snack food). All my mother’s set menus were tasty too.
The writer didn't grow up in the South.
Since I went carnivore four years ago, the main food is my only food.
Tri-tip, beef shank, pork loin chops, whole chickens. Steaks when they are on sale.
home cooking
Agree I know many family’s here in Los Angeles the dinner list is
Box-o-Food Can-o-Food Micro wave = dinner check.
I always take a pass when asked over for dinner.
“”””I pay about $10 a loaf for fresh made sourdough at the local farmer’s market here. And I pay it because it’s so good. Need to finish it in two days however or it’s hard as a brick.””””
Toasted sourdough bread slices make the best hotdog bun.
“I noticed that my black renters appear to seldom, if ever, use the stove.”
Addicted to fast food or too lazy to cook? That’s sad. Much cheaper and healthier to make a roast.
Just learn the basic cooking skills and have fun making your own variations on the fly. Learn to master the cast iron skillet and a dutch oven and you have endless possibilities.
One of my favorite things to cook in a dutch oven is whole chicken over sweet potato. Just cut a sweet potato (leaving skin on) in thick slices and coat both sides with olive oil, salt and pepper. Line the bottom of your dutch oven with them and put on stovetop over medium heat for about 7 minutes (without turning over the sweet potato slices). Meanwhile, you have your oven pre-heating to 450 degrees.
After the 7 minutes, put the whole chicken on top, cover and place in 450 degree oven for one hour. After the hour, remove top cover and cook about another half hour to get everything nicely browned.
Comes out perfect every time. The sweet potato slices are drenched with chicken juices and you have a nice char on the bottom of the slices. As for chicken, place on cutting board and the meat literally falls right off the bones with a knife and fork.
Utter simplicity and the prep time is minimal.
I see generational differences, not so much income differences. My Boomer parents cook at home mostly and eat out rarely. I’m Gen X and cook at home 75% of the time (but often Blue Apron as I like cooking but hate shopping). My Gen Y son cooks at home 50% of the time, and my 3 Gen Z kids cook at home only 25% of the time. They have little $$ but are context to waste a lot of it on DoorDash.
Wife and I share cooking duties and eat out twice a week. This seems to be unusual among most people within 30 miles of Manhattan. What is very annoying about the city itself are all the morons who live on Uber Eats or Grub Hub and getting their dinner served cold at twice the price. Don’t get me started on the electric bikes that these delivery guys often drive on the sidewalk - wait what were we talking about again?
Really? Do only lefties go to farmer’s markets south of the Mason Dixon line?
Nope....I well remember going to the local farmer’s market when I was a kid. Loved running around barefoot in the dirt while mom got fresh veggies.
I noticed that, too.
Good points, which is why I do maybe 80% of my cooking in cast iron skillets.
Well seasoned cast iron cleans easily with a little hot water and a chainmail scrubber. Wipe it clean with a dry cloth, a few drops of olive oil, and it's ready for the next time.
“As long as middle-class Americans can afford to eat their dinner at a table, they will.”
Now we know the origin of the obesity, heart disease and cancer epidemics.
As if we didn’t already.
I eat 1 of 50 meals out.
Home cooking is the ONLY healthy way to live.
I had better food at the ball game.
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