Not cooking

This morning before I left, I read “Out of the Kitchen, on to the Couch, Michael Pollan’s essay in the NY Times Magazine about watching cooking shows and not cooking. Now I’m obviously an outlier; I just made ice cream sandwiches from scratch (a subset of “cooking” so rarified that the food industry marketer Pollan interviews doesn’t even track its prevalence.) But what does it take to get people into the kitchen? It’s hard to write this without sounding like an arrogant elitist, but the exaggerated awe I sometimes get at Veggielution potlucks doesn’t make me proud, it makes me sad. I don’t think that cooking is rocket science. Even the patently show-off ice cream sandwiches are actually very straightforward, albeit time consuming. And everyone has the same amount of hours every day. As Pollan says:

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

I ate lunch today at Google, at Big Table, one of the 15 (17?) cafeterias in the Mountain View Googleplex. There was sushi (California rolls and a vegetarian roll with mango,) a salad bar, planked salmon with veggie sides, several Indian dishes, and an assortment of salads, plus desserts. One could certainly overeat here. In fact, since the food is free, it is very tempting to pile some of everything on to one’s plate. But the dishes are, by and large, nutritious and healthful. There were deep-fried pekoras, yes, but also grilled eggplant slices. The ingredients are local and organic whenever possible. I picked up a white peach from Twin Girls Farms; I buy their fruit at the Campbell farmers market.

How much cooking are the Googlers doing? Employees at Google can eat there for every meal during the week. I don’t know if any of the kitchens are open on Saturday or Sunday, but the mini-kitchens are certainly there, stocked with (pretty healthful) snacks. Does it matter if they don’t cook, if the food they’re eating is local and sustainable and healthy and delicious? Of course, we don’t all work at Google. But Bon Appétit does a good job at many corporate and university cafeterias. Kaiser Permanente is working to bring local produce into its foodservice. What if all school lunches were as good as Alice Waters and Ann Cooper want them to be? Would it matter if people weren’t actually cooking at home?

I can’t not cook. But I’ve met lots of people who look at cooking as the same drudgery as ironing or cleaning the bathroom. So I can back off and say, if the food is good, good for the land and the animals, good for the farmers and the workers, good for the people eating it, then it’s OK if you don’t or won’t or can’t cook it yourself. But I want you to honor the food when you eat it. I want you to eat mindfully, and with others, if possible. Not snarfing it down in the car on the way to somewhere else. Not staring at the TV.

And maybe you could give cooking a try. Just once. You might like it.