Reclaiming the Kitchen
(Page 2 of 8)
June/July 2008
By Barbara Kingsolver
Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable: Cooking and eating at home, even with quality ingredients, costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory. Shoppers who are most daunted by the high price of organics may be looking at bar codes on boutique prepared foods, not actual veg etables. A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people.
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In this country, some of our most tired and poor live in neighborhoods where groceries are sold only in gas station mini-marts. Many more of us have healthier food options than we’re currently using to our best advantage. Home-cooked, whole-ingredient cuisine will save money. It will also help trim off extra pounds.
Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and money in the neighborhood. Cooking and eating with children teaches them practical skills they can use later on to save money and stay healthy, whatever may happen in their lifetimes to the gas-fueled food industry.
Households that have lost the soul of cooking in their routines may not know what they’re missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven. The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family.
Involved in the Whole Process
Once you start cooking, a new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair. I’ve grown new veggies just to see how they taste: Jerusalem artichokes, edamame, potimarrons. We make things from scratch just to see if we can.
Many hobbies are probably rooted in the desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Karl Marx called it the antidote to alienation. Modern psychologists agree, noting that workers build better cars when they participate in the full assembly rather than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day. With modern food, our single-bolt job has become the boring act of poking the thing in our mouths, without feeling for any other stage in the process. It’s an obvious consequence, to care little about the product.
That’s reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family’s life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products. It’s the prime motivation behind our vegetable garden, our regular baking of bread, and other experiments that ultimately become household routines. Our cheese making, for example.
Meeting Ricki, aka The Cheese Queen
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