WATCH, but don’t cook
WHY DO WE PREFER FOOD CULTURE MORE THAN ACTUAL COOKING, AND WHAT WILL THAT MEAN FOR THE FUTURE OF FOOD?
How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, homemeal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.”
That was written by Michael Pollan in The New York Times almost eight years ago. It was a question Pollan asked before mainstream media outlets like Eater and First We Feast started churning out content far beyond the scope of beef cubes browning; before brunch became as much about likes as it is about eggs.
No one watches shows like the everpopular YouTube phenomenon Hot Ones or listens to the Upsell Podcast because they’re looking for a recipe. We have never spent less time in the kitchen, and yet our obsession with food has never been stronger. In response, media outlets are focusing on food as entertainment rather than making vague promises to improve kitchen skills.
The unprecedented rise of food media certainly had assistance along the way. It’s more than mere coincidence that its surge in popularity happened to come at the same time as Instagram. As many of us began to gorge on this new proliferation of food media, we became self-appointed foodies — a term that is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a person with a particular interest in food; a gourmet.”
Yet for the modern foodie, a genuine passion for food has always seemed beside the point. It would appear the only supplies required are a clean phone camera lens, good lighting and — for those looking to build a following — the knowledge of a few key hashtags. You don’t need to know anything more than the name of the menu item you’re photographing to appear as though you know what you’re talking about. And even then, a simple Drake lyric or prayer hands emoji will often do.
The idea of the “celebrity chef ” had, as Pollan documented, might have been spurred some years before our social media world truly established itself, but the fact that the Internet allowed chefs and food personalities to personally cater their cooking to millions of followers on a daily basis seemed to imbue them with even more power. People like Action Bronson and Anthony Bourdain, with their combined three million followers, continue to make liking food seem cool and exciting in a way that The Food Network — for all its placating programming — has never been able to.
All of that has led us here, to a strange and mostly uncharted territory where being passionate about food and being passionate about cooking have become two very different things.
In Canada going out to a restaurant is the number one preferred activity for spending time with family and friends, according to Restaurants Canada. Yet the average Canadian spends only 38 minutes cooking on weekdays, and just 28 minutes sitting down at the dinner table, according to a 2015 cross- Canada survey of 3,000 adults commissioned by Ricardo Magazine and Leger Marketing.
Food media has grown to reflect this trend: for every blissfully unchained- toreality recipe thrown at us, we are simultaneously equipped with a seemingly endless list of tips detailing how to spend less time in the kitchen. Cooking is largely viewed as extra work that we are eager to pawn off to other people. As a result, Canada’s restaurant industry directly employs more than 1.2 million people, or 6.9 per cent of the workforce, making it the country’s fourth- largest employer, states Restaurants Canada.
The booming culinary industry, along with our endless feeds of sacrilegious food porn and celebrity chef obsession make it clear that we value cooking. Yet a disconnect persists between how much time we spend in the kitchen versus how much food media we consume.
It’s possible we simply feel unworthy; as though whatever it is we make won’t be comparable to what our food icons have stewing on our phone screens. Another factor is that the proper ingredients for recipes are often expensive. In addition to taking time to prepare, a home made meal can cost more than — thanks to the food industrial complex — dangerously cheap takeout. Or perhaps, by the time we’ve finished gorging on whatever food media has spoon fed us, we’ve simply had enough and would rather let someone else deal with the banal work of chopping and stirring.
It’s also worth noting that it often takes professional chefs multiple times to get a recipe just right — something I wish more recipes would disclose. So, good luck to the rest of us trying to assemble a “30 minute” recipe on a weeknight with nothing more than blind hope and a casserole dish. Also not helping matters is that too many “fast” recipes have clearly been written by people who have not had to clean their own kitchens in some time. I would appreciate another name for “30 minute” recipes that also take upwards of 13 mixing bowls to prepare. I’m looking at you, Jamie Oliver.
While there may be a pressing call for us to return to kitchens simply out of misplaced nostalgia for the way things used to be, my guess is that if our ancestors — forced into the kitchen out of necessity in an Uber Eats barren land — were faced with today’s proliferation of dining and takeout options they would probably opt out, too. But the fact that no one is forcing our hand into stirring and chopping is exactly why cooking at home has become so important.
In his book Cooked, Pollan writes, “To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption.” For all its tediousness, choosing to spend time in the kitchen has become its own form of quiet activism; a small but important protest against the commodification of all things, including food. As much as we might refuse it out of convenience, it is important that we set aside time and learn how to engage in this protest.
As David Foster Wallace accurately predicted in 1996, the images on our screens are only going to get prettier: “The technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money, and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.”
While DFW was speaking of death in a metaphorical sense, it’s no less dramatic to wonder what the long- term consequences — if any — will be from no longer eating food made out of love, and instead eating food made for profit.