Real Life CSA dinner: swiss chard tacos

I mentioned in last week's Real Life CSA post that I was thinking of making Rick Bayless' swiss chard tacos for dinner this week. I finally did - and got to use not only swiss chard from our garden, but the last of the CSA chard as well as the fresh garlic.

You could also use kale, collards or chard - or any green, really. I used chard because we had a lot, and it's my favorite.

This fresh garlic was great. I have never cooked with fresh garden garlic that hasn't been cured. It was actually easier to peel and work with than the cured stuff. I hope this comes up again in the CSA!

One of the parts of these tacos is a simple hot sauce, made by blistering cherry tomatoes in a dry skillet and then blending them in a food processor with some chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. I added an extra pepper, and hoo boy, was it spicy. We have some leftover, which will make a tasty hot sauce for other dishes as well. Also, observation: my stovetop REALLY needs to be cleaned.

Before you cook the chard, you cook down the garlic, onions and some red pepper flakes.

Once you add the chard, it reduces pretty quickly. I add greens in batches when I need to cook a lot, so it's easier to stir. I also kept the stems in because they are delicious and not at all chewy.

This filling, plus some hot sauce, some feta cheese (or queso fresco) and a tortilla is a delicious, easy dinner. I will be taking leftovers of it in my lunch over rice - another great way to eat Bayless taco recipes. (Try this zucchini one - it's fabulous.)

Delicious food - probably the best part of a Real Life CSA!

Mastering the Art of French Cooking dinner party

Ever since I was introduced to Julia Child, I've had an item on my bucket list - to cook an entire dinner party from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Everything from appetizers to desserts. I was able to check it off my list this month when we had a few friends over for a Christmas feast. (Excuse the poor phone photos - way too busy that day to break out the good camera.)

The first course was French onion soup (Soupe a l’Oignon Gratinee). The soup was really simple to make, though it takes awhile, since the onions cook low and slow, releasing the most amazing flavors. Once it's finished, it's topped with swiss cheese, toasted baguette and a bit of olive oil drizzle and set in the oven to brown and melt. We ate every drop.


The main course was beef stew with red wine (Boeuf a la Bourguignonne) over parsley potatoes with buttered green peas with shallots (Petits Pois Etuves au Beurre). The stew was so tender and flavorful - unlike any crock pot stew I've ever made. I don't know if it was the ingredients or the method or a combination of both, but the stew was also worth its effort. I made enough potatoes to feed an army (I overestimate how many will be needed every single time I make potatoes), but they paired well with the richness of the stew. The peas were also a hit, even with a few guests who only took the peas to be polite, but ended up really liking them. (That's always the mark of a great dish - when people who ordinarily would pass it up find it delicious.)

The French bread (Pain Francais) was something I had been wanting to make for a long time, having never made bread only from my hands before. (I've always relied on the dough hook of my mixer for kneading, the few times I've made homemade bread.) Jacking up the heat in our house that morning really helped the dough rise, since usually we keep it pretty low in the winter. I'm glad I thought to do that and followed Julia's recommendations on temperature. After hours of kneading and rising cycles, the payoff was worth the effort: crusty on the outside, soft on the inside loaves that rang hollow when you thumped them - Julia's indication that they are done. We ate all three loaves in a matter of minutes and they were so delicious in and of themselves that we didn't even need the honey butter! 

For dessert, it was a chocolate almond cake (Reine de Saba) and upside-down apple tart (Le Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin). Somehow I only took a photo of the apple tart when it was still upside down (crust on top) in the frying pan. At first I was skeptical that the cake recipe could really feed 8 people, especially when I saw that the frosting was nothing but a few tablespoons of butter and an ounce of chocolate. But it was so rich and creamy, we had leftovers - a little goes a long way. I should know by now not to doubt these recipes. I'm glad I didn't do the American thing and slather the cake in 50 pounds of icing and make 6 more layers. It was perfect the way it was. And adorable on a cake stand, too.

The apple tart was tricky, and I was nervous about burning the apples, so it was a little less caramelized than I'd like, but it worked out fine. It was also rich and very heavy on the sugar, so a little piece went very far. Perhaps that's the theme of these French recipes - a little goes a very long way. 

My friend Anthony chose some fantastic wines to pair with the food, according to Julia's recommendations in the cookbook. Even people who aren't usually wine people were impressed - it was like the wines were made for this specific menu!

Though the meal took 13 hours from start to finish and required assistance from other people (greatly appreciated), it was worth it. I feel like even through the busy, frenzied prep (and the fact that I needed this white board to keep track of where everything was in the process), I could find the joy in cooking these recipes and realize the painstaking care that was made in writing them. 

I could hear Julia's voice in the text and knowing that the hands in the bread making photos were hers makes it all the more special - and really makes it stand out from other cookbooks of today. Ghost writers abound in today's celebrity cookbooks, so knowing that Julia wrote and developed these recipes and their specific methods was having a connection with an author of a cookbook that I haven't experienced before. And to have people linger over a meal at the table for three hours blissfully full and content? Probably just how Julia intended.


For more on my obsession with Julia, check out these posts on watching The French Chef and a book review on her biography, Dearie.

book review: Dearie: the Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz

There are many people who might not think that spending 25+ hours listening to an audiobook is a productive or enjoyable use of time. But when you commute as much as I do, you need something to pass the time and/or stave off the road rage. (Oh Parkway West, you try the soul.) The most recent book I finished is Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz. It was a fantastic use of more than 25 hours of my time. 

Julia Child's profile has been heightened in the last few years, much of that owing to the rise of cooking in the public interest and a wildly popular memoir, Julie & Julia, which chronicles one woman's project to cook all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking within one year. The movie based on the memoir also brought her to the forefront of popular culture, introducing her to a generation that didn't grow up watching her cook on public television.

I was introduced to her through that memoir. I then found myself intrigued enough to go deeper, and I picked up My Life in France, Julia's own book about, obviously, her life in France with her husband, Paul. Ironically, I read the book during my honeymoon. (Yes, we're the type of people who read books on trips, even honeymoons.) It's one of my favorite reads of all time.

Spitz's book begins at the beginning - with background on Julia's grandparents and family history. It traces her (remarkable) life in great detail, quoting from her own letters, family members and friends. (Man do I wish we were still a society that had a letter writing habit.) We're so used to hearing about how Julia liked to cook and how she introduced French food to American society. We forget that she was actually a real person and had interests outside of what she brought to our culinary history. I liked that this book really spent time explaining how Julia became the person that the country fell in love with, including the things that were important to her and the things that made her who she was - good and bad.

We have a tendency with public figures to gloss over the not-so-nice parts of their personalities, especially if their public faces are positive. I liked that this book clearly showed that Julia had character flaws, just like anyone else. She was a normal person who led an extraordinary life.

A good biography makes you want to call everyone you know and start sentences with "Did you know that...?" I wanted to do this so many times while listening to this book. Did you know Julia was a breast cancer survivor? Did you know that she had a thing for hot dogs from Costco? Did you know she was friends with James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher? Did you know the love of her life, her husband Paul, suffered from dementia in his last years and didn't know who she was? Did you know she was supposed to be on one of the planes involved in 9/11, but due to a scheduling snafu ended up staying in Boston longer?

I also think a good biography doesn't feel like a list of facts, but an engaging narrative. This book made time spent in the car fly by, partially owing to a great reading by the actress who recorded the book, but also simply because it felt like a story I was swept up in. I have a much greater appreciation for the national treasure that is Mastering the Art of French Cooking and how it stands apart from so many other cookbooks through the years. Even in her 90s, when craving french onion soup, Julia made her own recipe. No other recipe could touch it. 

Perhaps I'm drawn to Julia because of her strong feminism. Or because she was both larger than life and ordinary. Probably a lot of reasons, as she was a complex woman. But maybe at the end of the day, I love that she valued something that I do - cooking and carefully crafted, delicious food. She didn't just value the food, but the work and the skill and the time that it took to produce. Cooking is valuable and it's for everyone - an art everyone can access and enjoy.  

watching 'The French Chef' in 2013

I used to be addicted to the Food Network. I knew every chef, every show, every dish. I would even credit my beginnings in the kitchen to my exposure to it (since I didn't lift a finger in the kitchen until I lived on my own and got sick of eating microwave macaroni and cheese). The Food Network made me want to elevate my own culinary experiences to the level of "delicious" and not just "adequate." 

But at a certain point, I started to outgrow it. I didn't need the chefs to educate me anymore. (And I also grew dismayed at how disconnected Food Network programming is from the larger issues of food in this culture - hunger and agriculture, primarily. But that's another story.) To me, the programming all became shiny and glossy on the surface and not enough substance underneath. And really? No one's food ever looks like the dish on TV because it isn't touched by 4 stylists between the kitchen and the plate.

Julia Child's The French Chef was America's first real cooking show - like the great grandmother of what you see now on the Food Network. But they wouldn't air her show in today's lineup, unless it was in the context of a tribute or documentary on the origins of food entertainment. Why? Because it's real.

I'm listening my way through a book about Julia Child and am gathering ideas for a Mastering the Art of French Cooking themed dinner. Being on a Julia kick, I recently watched through some of the episodes of The French Chef. (Available for free on Amazon Prime, and also on DVD.) They are utterly enchanting in all their imperfection. No fancy camera angles, no lens flares or vibrant colors, even when the program started appearing in color. What you see are messes, stacks of dishes, improvisation and mistakes. She laughs at herself and tells you not to take yourself too seriously. After all, if a classically trained chef can screw up an omelette flip, we can too! I can't imagine any Food Network chef telling me to have the "courage of my convictions" in the context of eggs.

In one episode she realizes she doesn't have the right lid for the pot she's trying to cover, so she sticks something else over it with a shrug. Today's food shows would do as many takes as it required to get it right. Would you ever see Sandra Lee with a big splotch of wine on her pristine white shirt? Or the Barefoot Contessa wiping her hands on her clothes? Watching Julia is watching a reflection of me in the kitchen. (Just a 6'3" version of me in heels and an apron.)

You can also feel how genuine her happiness is when something turns out right, because it's instant and isn't rehearsed. The woman makes her own sound effects when she moves garlic through a press and into her dish. If that's not joy in cooking, I don't know what is.  (And I will henceforth exclaim "sploosha!" when I use my garlic press.) 

If you have ever had the experience of wanting to make a dish worthy of the Food Network, but are intimidated by the process, watching Julia removes that barrier. Your kitchen doesn't have to be fancy or pristine, your tools state of the art, or your chopping skills mastered. You just have to have the courage to try in the first place.

want to eat clean? 4 tips to get started

People often tell me that they are interested in eating clean for lots of reasons, but that they are having trouble actually starting or taking the first step. Sometimes they don’t even know what that first step is. To think about making a complete 180 degree change in the way you eat is overwhelming and the process can be intimidating, especially when you feel like you have a lifetime of “bad” habits to overcome and a demanding schedule. Also, there are many definitions floating out there about what constitutes “clean eating.” In my own lifestyle, I define clean eating as choosing minimally processed, whole foods (heavy on the plants), organic when possible, and staying away from heavily processed restaurant food.

Here are some simple tips if you’re interested in transitioning to clean eating, but have found yourself blocked by the idea of getting started.

1. Start small.  
While it might feel cliché to say that the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, it’s 100% truth. Look at what you are eating now. Do you have a soda addiction? Are you constantly going through the drive-thru for dinner? Do you rely on microwaveable, TV-dinner type meals? Choose just one of those areas to focus on. Reducing your consumption even by a small amount is a great first step to eliminating it all together. For most people, going cold turkey is unrealistic for long-term success. In the case of being hooked on soda, try reducing your consumption during the first week by 20%. Or stop ordering soda when you’re at a restaurant and choose water or plain tea instead. When you are comfortable at that level, keep going.

2. Have an arsenal of recipes.
You won’t be able to sustain any kind of lifestyle change if you aren’t eating things you like. Think about the foods you really enjoy and look for recipes that fit in that category. Find some go-to websites or cookbooks where you can easily locate a recipe, especially when a craving strikes. When I have a craving for Chinese takeout, I know where to look for a homemade knock-off recipe that satisfies the craving without all of the extra chemicals and added salt, sugar and fat. I print out recipes that interest me and put them in a three-ring binder that serves as my own homemade cookbook – that way I don’t have to dig around online when I really need something. We’ve also invested in some physical cookbooks that I consider our workhorses. For some clean eating resources, check out this post.

3. Stock your pantry, including your freezer.
We’ve all had nights where your best laid plans for dinner fall through. Maybe you get home from work late or you sat in traffic for an hour and can’t deal with the idea of cooking. If you keep your pantry stocked with basic items, you can throw together an incredibly quick meal. When you make a great chili or soup in the crock pot, freeze half of it for those nights when your plans just don’t work out. It will take you less time to reheat frozen chili than it will to swing through a drive-thru or call for takeout. (Your stomach AND wallet will thank you.)

4. Don’t beat yourself up. 
You can’t go from a diet heavy in processed foods and junk to a clean, wholesome diet overnight. Your body almost has to detox from the things it comes to rely on and that it craves. Even when you’re committed, you’re going to have areas that aren’t perfect or that are harder to give up than you thought. Just accept that there will be bumps in the road from the get-go and let them just be bumps – not off-ramps.

If you’re eating clean, what got you motivated to start? How have you kept with it?

Julia's kitchen

We recently visited friends in Virginia, and while doing some things in D.C., we stopped in to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. In particular, we wanted to see Julia Child's kitchen. I've seen it before, but it's so special, I could see it again and again and notice something new every time. This time I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was part of a larger exhibit called FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000.

We didn't have much time to spend there since the museum was about to close, but I managed to make it through most of it. (Mark got mesmerized by a video of Julia Child cooking a lobster and didn't make it through the whole exhibit. I don't really blame him. She was quite the character.)

The exhibit started off by talking about how the last half of the 20th century was an incredibly transformative time for food in America - not only what we eat, but how we get our food, how we eat it, and what it means culturally.  

The centerpiece of the exhibit was a large table where people could sit and talk. There were discs of information on the table that functioned like lazy susans and were conversation starters.  

 I was really excited to come across an old copy of Mother Earth News in a display about progressive food movements. I'm a subscriber today to the same magazine!
  

The entire exhibit was fascinating, and also was beautifully designed. I wanted to read every caption (and dream of making it back there before the exhibit closes).

Of course the real highlight of the exhibit is Julia Child's kitchen, which is a reconstruction of her own home kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Paul Child, her husband, had the counters specially designed to accommodate her height, and created the pegboards that held her pans, complete with outlines.

I've always been a fan of Julia - I've read a lot of books on her life, as well as her own books. One year I was Julia for Halloween (albeit a 4'11" version of her). During our first visit to the Smithsonian exhibit, Mark noticed the saint hanging on the pegboard with her cookware. 

He did some research and found out it was Saint Pascal Baylon, one of the patron saints of cooks. So as a gift, he had this made for me to hang in our kitchen. (The photo is terrible and doesn't do it justice.)

If you take joy in cooking like I do or you enjoy eating foreign foods, you probably owe some of that to Julia Child's legacy. She made cooking outside of the box accessible to Americans with an infectious enthusiasm. She encouraged people to be fearless in the kitchen and try things they would never have considered. 

Check out episodes of "The French Chef" if you get the chance. In a world with glorified cooking shows that make everything seem glamorous and easy in the kitchen and food stylists manipulating meals to make your mouth water, it's gratifying to watch Julia drop things on the floor and make a royal mess. I especially enjoy the episode where she flops a giant fish onto her counter. 

Make it a point to see this exhibit when you're in the D.C. area!

Book Review: Cooked by Michael Pollan

As one of, if not THE, best food writers out there today, Michael Pollan's works get more publicity than many other writers today. His newest book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is no exception. It's been featured everywhere, and I've seen interviews with Pollan all over TV and heard them on the radio. As a fan of his writing, I would have read this book anyway (and even had it preordered and got a signed bookplate). But after reading it, I am even more convinced that others should too, even if food writing isn't your usual reading fare. 

Let me first state that I wholeheartedly disagree with any reviews out there that suggest that Pollan is sexist or advocating a return of women to the kitchen as opposed to men. I'm convinced those people were looking for page hits and never actually finished the book (which is rather long, clocking in at almost 450 pages). He does point out that for much of history, the work of cooking was divided along gender lines, and when women entered the workforce, the amount of cooking done in the home was in general reduced. That is obviously true. But nowhere does he advocate that women are responsible for the destruction of American food culture or suggest that women should be cooking by virtue of their sex alone. (Trust me, had their been any whiff of sexism in this book, I would have detected it. I didn't get a graduate certificate in women's and gender studies for nothing.) So if you come across a review that even suggests it - stop reading the review and pick up the book instead.

Pollan divides the book into four sections that cover the four fundamental transformations that humans use to cook food and breaks it down by explaining particular foods in those categories. Fire (traditional barbecue), Water (braises), Air (bread) and Earth (fermented foods, alcohol) are all discussed at length, with the history of the processes and their development, how they are practiced today and what makes them unique. He also tries his own hand at the processes and describes those experiences.

Mark and I are both avid cooks. One of us makes dinner every night, even though it takes up precious time. We believe in the benefits of home cooked meals and feel they are better for our bodies nutritionally and we take joy in their preparation as well. To be honest, much of the reason I cook when I come home exhausted from a long day of work is because I don't want corporations doing it for me. I refuse to give up that independence and that connection to my food by relying on fast food or easy fix processed dinners in a box. We save money by cooking. And my food tastes better than most anything you can buy in the store. (Ask the people who smell the leftovers I heat up at work. I've seen more than a few raised eyebrows when they ask what's being heated up and I say oh, just rigatoni with my husband's homemade Sunday gravy. Yep, my husband cooks.)

So I didn't really pick up this book to be convinced that cooking is important. I've already been on that train for awhile. But it made me think about cooking in new ways and to appreciate more the value of it on a cultural level. The benefits of cooking are manifold, that much is clear. Not only does it set us apart from animals, but it bring us together in community. In a world that's forever multi-tasking, always having to accomplish more in less time, cooking makes you stop and develop the art of unitasking. That's right - just doing one thing. Chopping onions. Feeding a sourdough starter. Roasting meat over a cook fire. Pollan's descriptions of the benefits of these individual ways of cooking are poetic.

For those of us who work in an industry where we don't really produce anything tangible (and for that matter, sometimes, meaningful), cooking gives us the opportunity to make something with our own hands. I like that cooking doesn't involve typing. Pollan says it best here:

I doubt it's a coincidence that interest in all kinds of DIY pursuits has intensified at the precise historical moment when we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours in front of screens - senseless, or nearly so. At a time when four of our five senses and the whole right side of our brains must be feeling sorely underemployed, these kinds of projects offer the best kind of respite. They're antidotes to our abstraction. (p.407, emphasis mine)

For me, cooking is grounding. It connects me to my family and to the earth. It gives me immense pride to spend time cooking and create something infinitely more than the sum of its parts. In a world filled with noise, the swoosh of the knife coming down through onions followed by those same onions sizzling in a pan is calming. 

Is cooking a chore for some people? Yes. I recognize not everyone is going to get philosophical or wax poetic about the sounds coming from a pan when they are spending an hour prepping and cooking a braise. But chores are what they are because they are necessary. We find ways to make them less cumbersome or take less time because we know we need to do things like clean our toilets and wash our clothes. And how much more important is a chore tied to the nourishment we give our bodies? The answer is infinitely.

reduce your food waste (and your budget!)

When I talk to family and friends about changing their food lifestyles and trying to go unprocessed, healthy and chemical-free, most people are in agreement that it's a good idea. But when that good idea needs to be worked into an already tight budget, what do you do? There are many answers to that question, but one that Next Gen House has really been committed to lately is not wasting food. 

A study from less than a year ago by the National Resources Defense Council found that Americans threw out 25% of food and beverages purchased, amounting to $1300-$2200 worth of food per year for a family of four. In a country (and a world) where children go hungry every night, it is appalling that we are wasting this much food, as well as the natural resources that are used to produce that food such as water, oil, gas, land, etc. But even if you don't try to reduce your food waste for altruistic reasons, it's good for your budget.

How many times have you opened your pantry or freezer and seen a ton of food on the shelf and thought, there's nothing to eat in here! How many times have you thrown out leftovers because you didn't feel like eating them or because they got shoved to the back of the fridge and became a science experiment? What do you do to reduce the amount of food waste you create? Here are a few of the things we do at Next Gen House to reduce food waste.

1. Plan Your Meals
We sit down once a week to plan out each meal for the next week. This enables us to make only one trip to the store per week, which also saves us gas and time (and our sanity - have you tried to go to the grocery store during rush hour around here?). More importantly, we know exactly what we need for the week and can enter the store with a list and avoid wasting money on impulse items. 

2. Keep a Running Pantry/Freezer List
In an effort to really get a grip on our food budget, we spent an afternoon doing an inventory of our chest freezer, our regular freezer, our canning cabinets/shelves and our pantry and entered that information into a shared Google spreadsheet. That way we always know what staples we have on hand, and also what we need to use up. This is especially important for us because we buy our meat in bulk and use the chest freezer for storage. When we make our meal plan for the week, we check to see what we have on hand and try to plan meals mostly around items on hand.

3. Make Things You Want to Eat
This sounds so simple as to be stupid, but you will be much more likely to eat your leftovers if they are actually edible and appetizing. We've made an effort to have a large rotating list of recipes that we know re-heat well. Having good food makes it easier to resist the temptation to eat out at lunch and waste the leftovers.

4. Be Aware of Food's Shelf Life
Though sell by and use by dates can be helpful guides for items purchased at the grocery store, they are not hard and fast rules. Especially if you are eating whole, unprocessed foods, your food will "tell you" when it isn't good. Fuzzy, colored mold will show up, or it will smell bad. Sniff your milk and take a sip before you throw it out just because it's the use by date. If it smells and tastes fine, it IS fine. We try to alert each other when we notice something is coming down the final stretch of its life span so we can use it first. Rotate things that are closer to their expiration to the front of your fridge. Store items like potatoes and onions in cool, dark areas or in brown paper bags to prevent spoilage and lengthen their life spans.

5. Compost

We have two compost areas in our back yard, plus a few bins leftover from our first foray into composting. We also have four waste reclamation machines called chickens, who eat vegetable and fruit scraps and then produce waste/compost for our piles. It's easy to start composting in your back yard, even if you don't have a lot of room. (I'll be showing you how we do it soon!) When you have some wilty lettuce or limp carrots that aren't appetizing anymore, you can at least reclaim the nutrients from them by composting them.

Taking these steps has helped us reduce our grocery budget, and it really does feel good to not be chucking food into the trash constantly.

What do you do to reduce food waste in your house?

I don't need a food savior, thanks very much

I’ve been reading the advance reviews that have come out about Michael Pollan’s latest book, Cooked, as I wait for my copy to show up at my door. I was curious to read a review that Pollan himself tweeted out on Tuesday, done by The Center for Consumer Freedom. Judging from a cursory glance through their website, they seem more like the Center to Advance the Interests of Industrial Agriculture, so I’m not surprised they are not fans of the work of Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and the like. (I think I qualify as one of their “food radicals” though. You know, because I don’t like pesticides in my produce and antibiotics in my meat.)

I haven’t read the book yet (though I am hoping to start it this week). But I was struck by a few of the arguments (read: utter nonsense) that this group was making which are not dependent on me having read the book for analysis. Here are a few of their statements, and my take on them.

Like his previous efforts, the book calls hard-working Americans to more hard work in the kitchen, because Pollan believes that slaving over a cutting board is better for our souls or our health than allowing industry to help ease the load.

 

I would consider myself a hard-working American. I work 45 hours a week in corporate America and commute for an additional 12 or so. And I do think that it’s true that cooking and food preparation can sometimes be hard work. (A 12-hour day of tomato canning can be brutal on your feet, no doubt.) But I have yet to recall the last time I slaved over a cutting board. Unless you work in a kitchen for a living, I doubt that most Americans who cook would consider themselves to be slaving over their cutting boards. Cooking is time intensive, which I’ll discuss in a bit, but is it work that the average hard-working American can manage? Most assuredly, yes.

I haven’t read Pollan’s supposed argument for cooking being good for the soul yet, so I can’t say how much I agree or disagree. But I can tell you that I’ve never heard anyone claim that eating a bag of Doritos or heating up a frozen Lean Cuisine was good for their soul. (On the contrary, 10 years ago in my diet food days, frozen diet lasagna was pretty much the antithesis of being good for my soul.)

Pollan’s “solution” to the non-problem of people occasionally eating out is raising taxes on restaurant food, since in the Church of Foodieism not cooking is a sin.

 

Pollan was just interviewed in New York Magazine and mentions in the interview that he eats out several times a week. So I’m not sure where the idea of Pollan vilifying people for eating out comes from. Eating out can be a great joy. Our family loves to eat out when we can, particularly at local, non-chain restaurants that support our community’s economy and agriculture. But there’s a difference between eating out as a special meal to be enjoyed and eating all of your meals outside the home and on the go.

I’d venture to guess that what Pollan would say was not such a great thing is the eating-out habit of one of my regular customers when I worked at McDonalds in college – the one who complained that her son already had 4 of the same Happy Meal toy. (As the toys were cycled out on a weekly basis, that’s a few too many Happy Meals for your kid in a 7-day span, lady.) I don’t think the Center for Consumer Freedom is leaving any room for common sense here.

There’s nothing wrong with home cooking and quite a lot to be said for it, but ultimately it takes time and effort that some people simply don’t have or would rather spend on other things. Punishing restaurant eating would unfairly target low-income people who work physically demanding jobs over long hours.

 

The authors of this review argue that some people would like to spend their time on other things besides cooking. I understand that. I have a lot of friends who don’t share my love of cooking and think of it more as a chore than a joy. Those friends are also by and large clean eaters. They don’t resort to processed garbage foods, but they do have simplified diets. You can still eat healthy food in your home if you don’t like to cook. Also, cooking doesn’t have to be a grand production. And you don’t have to do it every single day. (Hello, Crock Pot. Nice to meet you.)

I have personally known people who truly work 80 hours per week to support their families and are juggling keeping a roof over their children’s heads and food in their bellies. These are the people who can truly say that they don’t have the time for cooking meals at home. But the majority of people who say they “don’t have time” to cook have a lot of other things going on in their lives that they could live without. You don’t have time to spend 25 minutes cooking a meal, but you have time to keep up with six TV shows per week? Or 3 hours a week to spend at the golf course? Don’t even get me started on how much time people waste on Facebook. The average “hard-working” American’s TV consumption alone makes this “people are just too busy” argument a complete fraud. We are too busy for the things we don’t prioritize.

I’ve been guilty myself of falling into the “I’m too busy” trap. But when I look back at my week, how did I spend my time? In five years, it won’t matter if I missed an episode of my favorite TV show to cook dinner. But the healthy lifestyle I prioritize now will pay off over five years. Less illness, better physical fitness, and let’s face it – a healthier family.

A close cousin of the “I’m too busy” trap is the “It’s too expensive” trap. It’s obvious that healthy food costs more in our society than unhealthy food. But Americans who do not go to bed hungry at night in general already eat too much food. And those who say they can’t afford organic produce or to buy from a farmer’s market? I’d be willing to bet at least a fair share have smart phones, data plans, cable or satellite TV service, laptops, SUVs or time shares. We pay for what we prioritize.

The authors cite low-income workers as being unfairly targeted, but the answer to low-income individuals getting healthy food is not processed corn by-products in shiny packages. It’s better wages and food prices that reflect the actual cost of production. In this country we think we’re lucky if we can get health benefits for our family for under $500 a month, but we balk at paying $1 extra per pound for produce that wasn’t sprayed with carcinogens. (Not to mention the fact that the worker who got sprayed with the same carcinogen probably has no health insurance, but that’s another essay entirely.)

I also felt like the tone of this essay was incredibly patronizing. As if they were trying to hold my hand and tell me that the quality of my life would be so much better if I’d just entrust my food to the industry’s hands – that they could lift a burden I begrudgingly carry around. Be my food savior, if you will.

I would say that anyone who has eaten a meal at the Next Gen House knows that we have no use for a food savior. We consider the time and effort we put into food preparation and cultivation in our house to be worth the other things we sacrifice. We don’t have cable, but we subscribe to a CSA. We can’t do everything we want to do in life, and that’s okay. We chose to spend last Saturday canning jelly instead of doing any number of things you could do with a free, beautiful weather Saturday. But cooking for our family and for others when they are guests in our home or need a meal is a priority, no matter how much time and effort it takes. If that makes me a food radical, get me a bumper sticker.