The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (4 page)

I couldn't stop thinking about that afternoon. I was certain I had overwhelmed her with information. She seemed like a smart woman and a good mom, but when we talked about cooking, she was discouraged, frustrated, and convinced that shortcuts remained the only path she had the time or skill to navigate.

“I don't mind boxed mashed potatoes” was not the sort of comment that crept into my usual conversations. As a food writer, I'd slipped into what I call “the foodie bubble,” a magical place where everyone talks about ramps,
¹
perfect local peaches, and smoked duck prosciutto. People casually name-drop obscure chefs and discuss how many recipes they've tried from
The French Laundry
Cookbook
. Don't get me wrong: Life is
great
in the bubble. It's just that most people don't reside there. Normal people live and shop in the center aisles of the grocery store, just like the woman I met. That afternoon, I decided it was time to abandon the bubble.

 

I stumbled upon a TV interview with English chef Jamie Oliver a few days later in which he talked about why the United Kingdom had been gripped by an onset of obesity. “The thing, I think, is that as people stop cooking, they get less healthy, yeah? People are going by the chippie
²
to pick up dinner, but chips
³
aren't dinner.” Without realizing it, Jamie got animated, even upset, his adorable East London accent growing even more pronounced. “If there was one thing that I could do, one thing that I could change, it would be to get people to just realize that cooking isn't that tough. It's a walk.”

His words rang in my head. The woman and her cart of boxed food . . . the idea that cooking is too difficult . . . the refrain from the woman in Paris about knife skills. Ever the reporter, I started to conduct research on how they all related. Several studies back up Jamie's assertions that the less a person cooks real food, the more they rely on processed or convenience foods, whether at home or in the fast-food line, and the more weight-related health problems they experience. To a large extent, the more you cook, the less you weigh.

What intrigued me was that the woman I met felt that she
was
cooking. To her, opening a box and doing something with it was creating a meal. I disagree. Yet neither of us is right or wrong. Researchers can't even seem to agree on the definition of
cooking.
While a lot of food writers bemoan the loss of home cooking, I found surprisingly little research into the matter. Sure, various studies examined the amount of time people spend cooking, such as one led by a Harvard team that found people spend about twenty-seven minutes a day preparing food, about half the time spent in the 1960s.

“There's this notion that there is some kind of decline in cooking and that people aren't doing it anymore. But that's not so clear. It's just that there are so many other choices on what they can do to get food,” said Dr. Amy Trubek of the University of Vermont, a food historian and researcher who has spent more than a decade studying how people cook. “People aspire to cook what they believe is good, healthy food. But then they find the food environment very complex. There's also a strong sense of ‘time poverty' in the American culture, this sense that you don't have time. Cooking is a thing many people perceive they don't have time to do.” She equated it with going to the gym. “Everyone knows that you should exercise, so they say that they will go five days a week, but when it comes down to it, they don't.”

The woman in the supermarket lacked confidence and skill when it came to cooking. She wasn't sure how to turn whole foods into dinner, and as a result, she found her choices were limited. But that's the issue. If you can't cook, you put yourself at the mercy of companies whose interests are overwhelmingly financial.

Frances Short, the author of
Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life,
says that while consumers may want to eat healthy and even actively seek out this information, it doesn't have much effect if they can't act on it. “Advice to, say, grill or steam food can only be followed if you know how to grill or steam,” Short noted.

Trubek told me that what I probably gave to the woman in the supermarket was awareness, a good start. “But awareness is no good unless you have repetition associated with it. That's how knowledge becomes practice and practice becomes habit.”

One reason that Julia Child made such a formidable impact was her unique ability to inspire people to get off their couches and go into their kitchens. While viewers watched her make
potage parmentier,
they often took a crucial step—they made it themselves. They searched out leeks, chopped potatoes, and maybe even crafted their own chicken stock. But somewhere along the line, people stopped getting off the couch. Cooking turned into a spectator sport. While Julia demonstrated how to fillet a fish or wrestle the bones out of a roast, most modern cooking shows fall into what industry experts refer to as “dump and stir” shows or reality-based competitions such as
Iron Chef
. While some viewers may follow along, even executives for the network admit that they focus more on entertainment and less on instruction.

“I watch Wimbledon but it has no relationship to my ability as a tennis player,” Trubek said. “It's beautiful and aesthetic, but practice is the only thing that is going to help my backhand.”

Back in the 1960s, Julia battled the idea that adding some ingredients to a box or heating something up somehow constituted cooking. Mike's late mother, pressed for time while working the night shift as a telephone operator on a military base, relied heavily on convenience foods. In fact, when we first married, he waxed so fond about something called Noodles Romanoff that in my dizzy honeymoon state, I spent three full days trying to track down either a box or a recipe for it. It turns out Betty Crocker ceased selling Noodles Romanoff in May 1994. I'm sure it's a coincidence, but that's the same month the FDA required manufacturers to include nutritional labels on food products. (I ended my quest when I learned that faithful replication of Noodles Romanoff required a portion of an orange flavoring packet from Kraft macaroni and cheese and commercial powdered mayonnaise.)

We live in a world where experts and the government preach that we should all eat leafy green vegetables, but then we're bombarded with messages that sugar-laden cereals are part of a “nutritious breakfast,” and commercials present Subway sandwiches as the holy grail to weight loss. TV cooking show host Sandra Lee cheerfully suggests that “gravy is too hard to make, so just buy jars of gravy” and advises viewers to buy jars of garlic because “mincing garlic just takes too long.”

To be fair, I think her voice is just one in a cathedral-worthy chorus shilling the idea that convenience is the
most
important asset when it comes to eating. No wonder we've forgotten that the most essential thing we do is to feed ourselves and the people we care about. When I saw the stuff the woman had in her basket, it struck me as
antinourishment
.

Consider the ingredient list for a brand-name box of a pasta Parmesan side dish. The goal of the product, a company spokesperson told me, is to approximate the flavor of pasta tossed with a bit of Parmesan cheese and olive oil. In order to do it, they used the following:

That's twenty-seven ingredients, mostly chemicals, in place of three real items. To make this palatable, it's loaded with corn and so much monosodium glutamate
⁵
and cholesterol-agitating palm oil
⁶
that they had to list all three at least twice. All this to simulate the flavor of three ingredients: pasta, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese.

I believe that everyone has it within them to boil pasta, add olive oil, and grate a little fresh Parmesan cheese over it. I believe that anyone can learn to chop up garlic in less than a minute. So how do companies get consumers to buy a box filled with chemicals, dehydrated milk, and pasta fused with deeply fattening oils so that it will cook two minutes faster? Or to buy products that are little more than dressed-up military rations? They do this by convincing people that making pasta tossed with some olive oil and cheese falls beyond their culinary grasp.

Decades of savvy marketing conspired to make the woman I met at the supermarket believe that a simple cream sauce fell outside her abilities, and who could blame her?

“As a culture, there's a lack of balancing cost as opposed to actual value,” Trubek said. “We surrender our best interests for the sake of seeming convenience. By failing to understand what's involved in certain kinds of basic food preparations, American consumers have been duped.”

 

All of this thinking converged when I stumbled on the show
What Not to Wear
on cable TV one night. The immaculately coiffed host and hostess went through the weekly guest's wardrobe, critiqued her normal choices, and then tutored her on what to wear. That week, they transformed a frumpy housewife into a smartly turned-out woman with a chic haircut with particularly striking blond highlights. They visited her two months later to see if she'd stuck to her new look. She had, plus she'd lost her “last ten pounds” and radiated enthusiasm. “You just gave me a push, the confidence I needed to make the changes that I knew I should make for myself. I feel proud of myself.”

I bolted upright on the couch.

Armed with a yellow notepad, I interrupted Mike in the other room as he worked on a kitchen redesign for one of our rental apartments.

“I have this crazy idea . . .” I started.

“Oh, no. Not another one,” he joked. He put his pencil down. “You hungry?”

We talked as I sat on a stool while he made dinner, his specialty, chicken and vegetable Thai curry with brown rice. I gave him the rundown.

“I want to try to understand what could motivate people to cook more often. I want to give people different cooking lessons and see which of the things they learn might stick with them.” But before we started, I told him, I needed to educate myself on what people had to work with at home and get a sense of the choices they had already made. So I would go into homes and look into fridges, freezers, and cupboards—the culinary equivalent of auditing their closets. “I'll have them make a dish they usually make, so I can see how they cook. Then I'll put together some lessons around the skills I think they're missing. Afterward, we'll follow up and see how they're doing.” He poured the coconut milk into the curry. “Well, what do you think?”

“Exactly where are you going to find people willing to let a stranger come into their house?” Mike asked.

“Well, I don't know. I haven't figured that part out yet. I thought of this just now.”

The smells of coconut and curry filled the kitchen, now so quiet that I could hear the metal spoon dinging around the bottom of the wok as he stirred.

“Our kitchen is too small for lessons,” he said, concentrating on his dish. “What about the commercial kitchen your friend Ace is using?”

“So you think it's a good idea?” I asked, relieved.

“Well, it's an admirable notion, anyway. You can't force people to cook differently. It's like that old joke, How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“One,” I answered. “But the lightbulb has to
want
to change.”

“Exactly. If you approach this as a way to encourage people and give them a few skills, maybe it could motivate them. But remember that everyone's life is different and complicated, and people are smart enough to know if they are willing to change.” I nodded. He handed me a bowl of red curry chicken and brown rice. “Now eat.”

As part of my author duties, I was scheduled to be a guest on a longrunning local radio show hosted by Seattle celebrity chefs Tom Douglas and Thierry Rautureau. I've known both since my days as a restaurant critic in the 1990s. The owner of a group of popular restaurants and an
Iron Chef America
winner, Tom balances the titles of culinary icon and astute businessman, yet for all his success he's remarkably down-to-earth. Thierry reminds me of my chefs in France. He started as a classic apprentice in French restaurants at age fourteen and worked his way up. He now owns the impeccable French restaurants Rover's and Luc, plus hosted a radio segment on NPR called
What's in the Fridge?
Listeners called in and described ingredients in their pantries and refrigerators, and he'd coach them on the possibilities. They both have won the James Beard award for Best Chef in the Northwest, plus seemingly every other culinary award possible. If that's not enough, they've both appeared on
Top Chef
.
⁷