I’m teaching the cooking classes at Rancho La Puerta this week. Last night at dinner one of the guests asked me if I thought that cooking good food (by which she meant healthy food) was a dying art.
“Yes!” I replied, taking the bait immediately. “When I was a kid, and up until a couple of decades ago, everyone ate real food, and it was poor people who kept gardens and cooked for themselves. Now food has become elitist.Cooking is a hobby for the rich, like keeping race horses. Most people are scared to cook.They think it’s too hard, or that they’ll be judged against Top Chef.”
“Or, God help them, Rachel Ray.”
In 2010 you can look at food as business – mighty big business,too – or food as fashion, to distract us and flog packaged food / lifestyle crap. And lagging behind more and more, food as life.
This is slowly killing us. Worse, if younger people don’t learn to cook for themselves, we will forever lose traditions and knowledge that have been learned and handed down for hundreds of generations. If we don’t grow and cook for ourselves, it will all be gone, and your health and that of your grandchildren will be at the mercy of corporate food. We’ll be helpless in the grip of Pepsico and Monsanto and ADM.
The way to be healthy is to have control over your food supply and how it is prepared.
One of the reasons I love Mexican food so much is that it has remained relative unchanged for thousands of years, and it is one of the healthiest cuisines you can eat. Driving through Baja you see many little homes with a patch planted with corn and chiles and tomatoes, a couple of chickens scratching away.
I write about Mexican food now, but bear with me while I take a trip back to another world, barely 40 years ago.
Philip Rundle, my great-grandfather, on his farm in 1890 or so.
I grew up in the 1960s and 70s in a little farm town in southern Ontario. Goderich was settled in the 1820s by Scots and English – the kind of people who fished the North Sea in winter in tiny skin boats because they had to eat; the kind of people who had grown oats on rocks for thousands of years before relocating to the relatively benign, fertile lands of the Great Lakes. They worked hard and had very little in the way of material goods – an old car, a little house – but they were incredibly healthy. Men and women and children alike were whip thin, strong as iron and when they didn’t die accidently, lived a long time. Even the drunks took decades to kill themselves, unless they passed out and froze to death, or fell in the lake and drowned,or drove a car into a tree.
Poor people kept gardens then; rich people did not. So nearly every yard had a garden and a couple of fruit trees. Our mothers and grandmothers and aunts made pickles and relishes and canned fruit and vegetables from those gardens, and became famous for their apple butter or raspberry jam. All summer long and into the fall we ate corn and beans and tomatoes and little lettuces, raspberries and strawberries. We dug potatoes and shelled peas and of course complained that there was nothing to eat. Kids ran from yard to yard and down to the riverbanks, into the woods. We fished and tobogganed and roller-skated and complained that there was nothing to do.
Mothers cooked and families ate together, usually 3 meals a day. Eating out was an extravagance, so you bought cheap meat and vegetables and cooked it yourself. The butcher slaughtered cows and pigs and chickens he bought from the local farms, cut up the meat himself with bandsaw and long scimitar knife, and sold it from a wood-floored shop that smelled of blood and wood shavings. The butcher would leave his wooden block in the back to serve you in his bloody apron, chatting you up so you didn’t notice his thumb on the scale. (Butchers were always terrible flirts.) The little corner grocery stores sold milk and cheese, dusty root vegetables, rice and macaroni and canned food; they smelled of coffee and cabbages. The baker gotup every morning at 3 am to bake bread in a coal-fired break oven built in 1840. His shop was painted in sanitary white and smelled like heaven, of burnt sugar and yeast and the golden crusted bread they cut to order on an ancient slicer that clattered and vibrated like a ship’s engine.
There was no fast food– an A&W drive-through 60 miles away was the closest thing we had. We had 2 Greek restaurants that served ‘Canadian’ food, a Chinese restaurant and a couple of counter diners that served breakfast and lunch to the miners — openfaced hot turkey sandwiches and the like. When you did have a dinner out, you went to the town hotel – always called the Duke or the Queen’s or some such name – where there would be a dimly lit bar where men drank pitchers of beer and smoked while they watched the hockey game, and another room for ‘Ladies & Escorts’.
The hotels hired farm wives to staff their kitchens, and those women could cook. From scratch, mind you. Many became well-known for their food and the local cognoscenti would follow them to wherever they were that year. The food was never fancy. Corn chowder, split pea soup, chicken and noodle (made with real chicken and fresh egg noodles.) Braised pork ribs. Baked beans.Smothered pork chops. Roast beef -always well done — with mashed potatoes and gravy. Perch filets breaded and fried, with new potatoes and fresh peas. Roast chicken and dumplings. Pie — oh lord, the pies. The ice cream and cheddar cheese were made by local dairies. (In the 50′s my uncle delivered fresh milk for Andrew Dairy in a horse-drawn cart; the horse knew the route. The milk came in those glass bottles with a tulip-shaped cream collector on top.)
This wasn’t 1850.This was how it was in my town in 1969, 1975, 1980. Only a generation ago, almost all our food was fresh, local, seasonal, mostly organic and mostly home-cooked.
And it’s all gone. That’s how fast it happens. No more family farms, no more summer gardens, no more local meat and dairy. Now its factory hog farms and GMO soybeans, patented corn, polluted ground water, super-stores, fast food.
My point is that none of this was elaborate, fancy or exotic food. Women were just as busy then. They had large families and homes to keep, laundry, the church to tend and clothes to mend. What they cooked was fast and simple and good – and cheap.
The poor today are even poorer. They don’t have any choices. They don’t plant gardens, like their grandparents do. In their neighborhoods are only fast food outlets and convenience stores that don’t sell fresh food.
As for cooking, we’ve been told for so long by processed food merchants and fast food pushers that ‘cooking is hard and inconvenient’ that we almost believe it. People actually don’t believe they have the skills and time to even make something simple for themselves. People think that food has to have a recipe, be fancy, be elaborate. They watch food on TV as entertainment and eat a frozen pizza.
Why do we work so hard and get so little ? What are we working to hard to pay for? Who was richer?
