Culture begins and ends on a plate. We eat to live and then we live to eat. From the earliest times to the present, food has played a key role in the bonding of families and society at large. An infant bonds with its mother while feeding. A family bonds with each other when they share food. We define hospitality with friends by inviting them to ‘break bread’.
Food played a central role in civilization itself. The day that food sharing moved beyond the immediate family was surely the beginning of a village. The day when a family produced a surplus of grain or livestock was surely the beginning of markets and commerce. Villages and markets combined and grew and the rest is, as they say, history.
The original Greek symposium was a meal at home where the host would provide entertainment or provoke serious conversations. Romans had similar traditions. Even in the Dark Ages, communal societies such as monasteries took their meals together. As civilization progressed, we advanced from eating to dinning. Indeed, dinning is the one activity which the various elite professional ‘clubs’ have in common. The act of eating became a kind of social cement where the table was used for things beyond nourishment. The wooden board around which people sat to eat became the building blocks of what we now call family and civil society.
Somewhere in recent memory, we lost touch with this very important tradition. A few years back, Hilary Clinton rationalized her dysfunctional personal life by asking; “What did you expect me to do, stay home and bake cookies?” In an attempt to defend the indefensible she sent the wrong message to stay at home parents everywhere. Still, her unfortunate use of a kitchen metaphor is fairly typical of the dismissive attitude of many women towards all things domestic.
Maybe it was the social turmoil of the 1960’s or just bong resin of feminism; nonetheless, many women have come to see cooking as demeaning or the kitchen as a place of bondage. Men and women are too busy to prepare food or eat it with each other or their children. Dinner and lunch out - was in. An entire junk food industry matured around this selfishness. Adult greed became more important than what children need.
If you are offended at this point, stop now. It gets worse.
Eating out at the places your children select is expensive (for what you get), unhealthy and irresponsible. The same can be said for buying most packaged or “instant” food. No one goes to the grave thinking they should have spent more time with prepared or fast foods. Married or unmarried, if you have children, life is no longer about you, it’s about the kids. If you can not or will not accept responsibility for your children, the rest of us get to pick up the pieces and the expense. It doesn’t take a village; it takes you. No occupation on earth is more important than parenting, feeding and caring for the next generation.
There is a body of literature on food production and food retailing where the villain is always industry or government. Rachael Carson and more recently, Margaret Visser and Michael Pollan have made significant contributions to this popular theme. Unfortunately, the critics of agribusiness or government are seldom candid enough to place blame where it belongs; on voters, on parents. Junk food is like illegal drugs; the real problem is the consumer, the user.
We elect representatives at every level in our society; from town, to county, to state to the federal governments. This very expensive overlapping if not redundant superstructure is our creation. You not only voted for the nitwits who make environmental law, but you vote again every day with every dollar you spent on junk food and processed supermarket crap. Want to know who is responsible for pollution and nutrition problems? Look in the mirror. The beauty of democracy is that sometimes we get what we want and sometimes we just get what we deserve.
The hope here is that you might take responsibility for your nutrition and that of your children. This argument has three premises; it’s cheaper, it’s healthier and it’s socially responsible to cook for and eat with your kids. This isn’t an attack on supermarkets or restaurants; it is an appeal to common sense; you have the power to control what markets sell and what restaurants serve. When your kids are young, you are in control also – at least you should be. By the time they reach their teens, all you have left is influence. If you miss these opportunities, you have wasted part of your life and damaged part of theirs.
In the first instance, you have food for thought. Secondly, what follows covers all that is necessary, from soupspoons to nutcrackers, to prepare and cook, economical and nutritious meals; breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is not a recipe book but there are recipes (use the index). It’s more about how than what; the hope is that once you have mastered some basic dishes, you will create a suite of goodies to call your own. Cooking is to science what jazz is to music.
Economics - Let’s begin with the pizza principle. Made properly, pizza can be a cheap, healthy and nutritious meal; dairy, grain and vegetables. You can make your own at home for a third of what you pay for eating out or having one delivered (see pizza recipe). The value added for home cooking is your kids get to watch and participate. Do you know the ingredients of a frozen or take-out pizza? In the ensuing pages, with numerous examples, we hope to establish beyond doubt the economy and value of home cooking.
Health - The key ingredients in packaged, fast food or take-out are: calories, fat, salt, sugar and all the additives required to stop the awful from becoming inedible. The great virtue of home cooking is that you have total control of your families’ diet and nutrition. Enough said?
Responsibility – There are four clear and constant dangers to the modern household and possibly civilization at large; the cell phone, the television, the internet and junk food. We allow the first three because they are cheaper and more convenient than tutors, baby sitters and nannies. Indeed, the advantage of the first three is that they support a kind of electronic autism where neither parent nor child has to communicate directly with the other. When we don’t dine with our kids, the loss is social. With junk food the penalties are biological; obesity and God knows what from emulsifiers, stabilizers, preservatives, coloring or additives in general.
Parents who do not dine with their children and feed them junk food should be sued for malpractice or arrested for child abuse. So let’s define junk food.
Junk food is served at almost every chain restaurant (you know who you are) at the off ramp. There are some exceptions where in addition to junk food you might also get a healthy meal; IHOP, Popeye’s and Noodles come to mind. Junk food includes almost every pizza chain. There are great pizza restaurants, they are not chains. Almost all hamburger joints serve junk, but the hamburger, done right, is still a noble American institution.
Almost all super market prepackaged or prepared foods are junk; this includes many foods that are frozen or canned. This is not to say that you can’t use these things, but you do need to read the ingredients. If the ratio of additives to foodstuffs is 5:1 or more, leave it on the shelf. Almost all snack foods and prepared deserts are crap.
This is not a rant against restaurants or markets. If you patronize the junk food purveyors, they will thrive. If you patronize quality, it will flourish. There’s no trigonometry here. In a free market, you control the menu. By all means, eat out and by all means, shop until you drop; but do both with taste and discrimination.
Are you still there? Good, let’s continue. The purpose here isn’t to make anyone feel guilty. The purpose is to rethink the synergy of cooking, eating and interacting with children and friends. The dinner table is your best early opportunity to educate and socialize your children. If we’re too busy for this, we have to ask ourselves; what are we working for and what are we doing with our lives? If adults have no answers to these questions those ‘at risk’ children should come as no surprise. At risk kids are usually the sons and daughters of clueless parents.
What follows here has three currents; a philosophy of food, a biography of the authors experience with kitchens and restaurants and a cook’s guide to simple, wholesome and thrifty meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The biographical part is what’s different from the usual food or cook book. Too often, you pick a book and wonder what qualifies this author to write about this subject. What follows contains the warp of philosophy and life experience woven with the weft of simple wholesome suggestions about food and cooking.
This is not a cook book. The recipes are for living well. The target audience is children. If you can get your kids interested in food, how it is prepared, and the value of sharing these experiences with others; you will have provided them with home schooling for life.
Next, tools of the trade….
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