site.openhandstore.org Blog

Back in the Saddle

August 7, 2009 on 3:32 pm | In Main Category | No Comments

Well, it has been far too long since our last posting here but fittingly, we return with more pearls of wisdom from our favorite food writer, Michal Pollan. Pollan is back with another unique insight into America’s peculiar food culture. Pivoting off the release of the new movie, “Julie & Julia” Pollan offers up his take on the state of cooking in America’s kitchen. And it looks like we should qualify that as  “cooking:”

I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.” Balzer has been studying American eating habits since 1978; the NPD Group, the firm he works for, collects data from a pool of 2,000 food diaries to track American eating habits. Years ago Balzer noticed that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had grown so broad as to be meaningless, so the firm tightened up the meaning of “to cook” at least slightly to capture what was really going on in American kitchens. To cook from scratch, they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires some degree of “assembly of elements.” So microwaving a pizza doesn’t count as cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does. Under this dispensation, you’re also cooking when you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty. (Currently the most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich; the No. 1 accompanying beverage is a soda.)

It’s an interesting article and it picks up on many themes familiar to Pollan readers including the creeping normalization of processed foods in American food culture and our outright alienation from the act of cooking. Read the whole story, here.

Posted by: Dan