Climbing back onto the wagon. Here's another old post from about two years that I never finished.
This past Monday I had a conversation with one of my fellow grad studs about our respective weekends. I said I hadn't done too much, just some homework and hanging out with Matt. He then looked quite proud of himself and said "Well, I made a soup!" He then proceeded to explain the details of this basic vegetable soup, ending with the reflection that it took a good couple of hours to chop everything up and cook it and clean up, but he might stick with cooking because it seems that "chicks dig it."
I suggested that he could cook on the weekends and freeze the leftovers to eat during the week, an idea that seemed to appeal to him. What I didn't tell him was that I had cooked a meal every day of the weekend, including my own soup on Sunday. I definitely don't cook full meal everyday, but cooking is such a natural part of my life that it doesn't even register to me that it would be the significant event of my weekend.
This colleague is symptomatic of the slow/whole food "revolution" that Madtown is naturally caught up in. All of us at State University were suppose to read the book by one of its prophets before he came to speak here last semester. He's the one who's repackaged the food pyramid combined with the ageless wisdom of eat food in its season.
I admit that I didn't read the book or see his speech (which was protested, btw, by the local farmers association, who feel vilified). But I had a long conversation with someone who did, which basically boiled down to processed flour is bad and you should freeze fruits and vegetables in their seasons to eat later (ie winter).
Sounds a lot like the good little Mormon housewives in my ward, who slave away all summer in their gardens. Only since they all live in student housing, they have to can their fruits and vegetables. But they make up for this lack by grinding their own flour for their home-baked whole-wheat bread.
Mormon women ahead of the curve?!
But to return to the concern of my first college, cooking and especially cooking from "scratch" takes time. And for the most part, it's women's time that it takes.
I assume, dear reader, that you know about the "second shift" of housekeeping for working women, that is that working women, particularly working mothers, still have to do the bulk of the housekeeping outside working hours. Consider that even today, the average male head of the household on average does less around the house than even the average child does. On top of that, in the early 2000s, some feminist scholars theorized that there was a new "third shift" that consisted of exercise, like going to the gym, running marathons, etc.
Now it seems to me that there is a "fourth shift" of this new hybrid of the food channel meets Al Gore. In order to be an ethical person, you have to buy certain foods and cook them in certain ways, at the cost of your wallet and time. If you don't, you don't care about your family's nutrition or the environment.
I don't remember where I was going with this. But as food every more becomes the new morality, this still seems to be an issue. Besides the burden falling to women, I see another troubling dynamic in its intersection with class. "Organic" food, home grown or not, requires precious time and money, making it a mark of (self-righteous) affluence.
Is organic food a worthy goal? Yes, but so is affordable food.
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All I know is that dark chocolate is at the top of the food pyramid, old or new, right above chips and salsa.
This post is right where we are this month. After reading _Small Wonder_ for the second time and discussing it in my book group, I realized that I had to vote for better quality food with my pocketbook. We started getting one higher quality item each year in October when the raise kicked in.
We began with organic milk, then whole wheat bread (the really good $4 kind, because my relationship to yeast is still tenuous and I don't make consistently good bread), and finally free range eggs. But the milk costs 4x as much and the bread and eggs are about twice as expensive. Now that the kids are growing and eating more and more, it was becoming prohibitively expensive.
I had just decided last month that we couldn't do it any more, which depressed me because I think it's one of the only good things we're doing as parents.
Instead we just dropped two levels on health insurance, which we weren't needing because everyone is so inexplicably healthy. We're going to use part of the saved premiums to keep buying the organic, whole grain, free range stuff.
And yes, we deserve affordable food, but the price only comes down with economies of scale. I have definitely seen it drop in the 5-6 years since we began buying milk, and now it is even sold in gallon containers. So I'm sticking with it and accepting the lost time to cook real food instead of processed corn, and we'll revisit it again when the boys start drinking a gallon of milk a day.
Then we'll buy a cow.
This hits a lot of things I've been thinking of. Good food really, does take more time, and it usually takes more time from women. I don't know, I think I have the mobius strip train of thought for labor versus food versus women working (and working where, inside, or outside the home?), because this topic is one I think of often, and have come to no complete conclusions. I make homemade bread from scratch, every week - with wheat I grind myself (well, with an electric machine, I'm not that into slow food - plus I also use a kitchen aid). And it takes time. Time I feel like is worth it, for the product. And we buy local milk and eggs and cheese, and produce and meat (when the farmer's market is open, it closed at the end of October). But they all cost more money. Money that I think is worth it, but then, that is still money. So you need both more time and more money to eat well, but where does the more money come from, if you spend all your time producing food? This year was the first year I canned, and I really liked it, while also being properly intimidated as to the effort involved. And I gardened. I loved having a garden, in fact, I love learning to grow things. I was even reading a gardening book while waiting for my Internet to load pages this morning. But gardening, that takes lots of time, and even some money, too.
And I like slow food, I like slow life. I feel like my mantra is the slow life movement. But at the same time, I don't want to become so slow that I turn back to Ma Ingalls, where I spend every waking minute prepping food or some other basic survival necessity, like clothing. I like free time, and reading, and when my last child is the age of a preschooler, I am going back to school, and getting a master's degree, and maybe even a Ph.d. if I become insane, and forget what watching Avram prepare for his comprehensives is like (he's taking them in a month.) And that will happen come hell or high water or microwave dinners and hot lunches from school. Because the thought of my major occupation (once my children are all school age) being cleaning my house, and then spending all other moments preparing food, makes me want to tear my hair out.
I often remind Avram that once I'm back in school, and then hopefully teaching part time, that we'll have to share in the household duties, moreso than we do now. Now, Avram loves to cook, and will clean upon request, but I do far more around the house than he does, which of course makes sense, as one part of being a homemaker is cleaning. But I am not going to have a second shift, if it kills me. He's okay with this, of course (see previous sentence). But my Mom worked, and she was also the one over the household chores and food. She assigned them all out - we kids all cooked one day a week, and chores were likewise, but still - she was the one in charge, I think ultimately because she cared more.
Anyway, obviously this post has touched a real chord with me - I wish I had answers. Mostly, I think it's great to eat slow food, and we do so most of the time, but that does take more time and money (but not compared to eating out - that's much more money still). But I also don't want to spend my life with only one activity, that of food preparation. Maybe I'll discover a hidden well of energy in my mid thirties, and suddenly be able to cook and clean and teach and parent a large family, all while still sleeping eight hours a night.
Cooking is such a pain! First I have to plan the meals, and they are supposed to be affordable, healthy, and appetizing to the entire family. Then I have to do the stupid grocery shopping with all the tantrumy kids in tow. Then I have to prepare the food while the kids scream. And it's one of those eternal jobs that never ends. I hate it.
It is amazing to think that your colleague was so excited about having made soup and you were thinking, "OK, I do this all the time and not just for entertainment." I loved, "Food Channel meets Al Gore" as an apt description of the current climate where food choices and labels have taken on a religious quality.
To be honest I find that I do have developed some snooty food preferences, e.g., I like Lehi Mills white wheat best - more protein and easier to digest than the red wheat. I also think that Land of Lakes Brown eggs from vegetarian chickens taste so much better if I am just eating an egg, but I never use them for in cooking as they are too expensive. BTW chickens are not really vegetarian as I have seen them eat insects.
But the "organic" thing is a bit laughable, and that comes from one who spent her youth planting seeds in a manure-laden garden, hoeing weeds on hot summer days as we used no herbicides, helping weekly with the irrigating and lastly helping in the harvest and preservation of the many vegetable and fruits. We were organic before it was chic and didn't even know it. I buy organic now only if it is the cheaper offering and am not at all conflicted about the non-organic. I actually resent the "organic" label and do not trust it anyway. My theory is that all offerings are basically healthy and anyway the e- coli outbreaks are from organic offerings.
I used to judge the success of my week's cooking by the amount of garbage in the can - i.e., how much packaging was being thrown away. Cooking from scratch as much as possible had become my goal. Not only was it cheaper, but in the end it was safer as you just can't trust what people are putting in the food.
Very interesting and thought provoking post.
I can honestly say that der Meister and I share these "shifts," with him taking much of the cooking shift while I chauffeur the kids around. Your colleague's praise of his soup reminds me of a book I read a few years ago. The protagonist—a grown and educated woman doubled as a detective in this story—spent about two pages first explaining how she had made herself an omelet (because she was famished and all she had was eggs, tomatoes, and mushrooms, poor thing), then being amazed at herself for actually making said omelet! (with exclamation points and all) I chortled in disbelief (isn't she supposed to be solving a disappearance/murder?) and all I could think was how I learned how to scramble eggs when I was about 11 and there was no such rejoicing. That and the thought that I just could not relate to such lives.
And lots of things come to mind with "organic," but Aunt Madam's comments about that are better.
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