Daria Can Cook – and so can you!

A few days ago, Michael Ruhlman posted a blog entry that caught my eye. Entitled “America: Too Stupid to Cook,” it argued that we’re constantly being sold the message that cooking is too complicated for our tiny, spastic modern brains.

This post resonated with me because I’ve been intrigued in the dumbing-down of American cooking since I took a college class on suburban American culture in the 1950s. In the class we read Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven, which is a fascinating account of how American views of food and cooking shifted dramatically during the middle of the century. Shapiro’s detective work shows that it took a great deal of advertising muscle and money to convince the average American cook that in fact she needed corporate help in the kitchen. Food companies had been churning out massive amounts of prepackaged convenience food for soldiers during WWII, and when the war ended, they found themselves faced with factories and technologies that no longer had an audience. This is when they began touting freeze dried foods and boxed mixes, which didn’t catch on for a surprisingly long time. It seems that having been used to real food, Americans couldn’t get behind the tastes and textures of mass-produced mush.

In time, however, advertising wizards managed to convince home cooks that they desperately needed to cut down the amount of time they spent in the kitchen. This trend has simply picked up speed since then, to the point that we have “cooks” like Sandra Lee convincing us that an acceptable dessert can consist of Walmart cookies on top of a sheet cake from a box (I swear I saw her make this once. I almost died).

[source]

And now, Caitlin Flanagan has tried to make the case that whole food adherents like Alice Waters are in fact misguided snobs. [Flanagan is very thoroughly rebutted, I believe, on Civil Eats] Flanagan seems to believe that the only measure of the good life is financial success, which of course means an absence of physical labor and no interaction with the farms which feed us. Don’t rising obesity levels and ecological disasters show us that this supposed good life is rotten at the core?

How is it that farming and cooking, once the humblest of humble activities, have come to be associated with leisure and intellectual snobbery?

What do you think? Are we told too often that cooking is hard? Are we too far separated from our food sources?  Obviously I think so. When I was younger I thought that most food was too complicated to make at home and had to come from factories. I didn’t learn until I went to college that you could make whipped cream from scratch, for instance. Advertising at its finest!

Related posts:

1. Too stupid…or just too busy?