Health Matters

– Get Cooking Life is not too short to cook from scratch, says VERNE MAREE. But it is certainly too short to eat bad food.

Get into the kitchen and cook, urges American food writer and philosopher Michael Pollan in Cooked, his latest and perhaps most brilliant bestseller. It may be the the most important thing that you as an ordinary person can do to improve your and your family’s health and wellbeing, connect better with your children, reform the food system, achieve a greater degree of self-sufficiency – and even acquire a deeper understanding of the natural world and our role in it.

Out of balance

To his credit, Pollan is not trying to bully women back into the kitchen; and he fairly acknowledges that the demise of cooking from scratch has helped liberate women from the drudgery of housework. Instead, he says: “Cooking is too important to be left to any one generation or member of the family; men and children need to be in the kitchen, too, and not just for reasons of fairness and equity, but because they have so much to gain by being there.”

Britain’s most famous French chef, Michel Roux, would agree with him. According to him, children are not learning to cook and eat properly, and that’s because their parents are failing to teach them. Their reliance on supermarket convenience foods is partly to blame, he says.

No doubt I’m biased towards this book: Though she worked full-time, my own mother cooked a lovely, healthy meal from scratch every night of my childhood – and she taught me to do the same.

The Cooking Paradox

In his introduction to Cooked, headed “Why Cook?”, Pollan highlights what he calls the Cooking Paradox: The less time people devote to cooking – and Americans spend an average of only 27 minutes per day, only half what they spent in the midsixties – the more time they spend thinking about cooking, reading about cooking and watching other people cooking. In fact, most people spend more time watching cooking programmes than they do in their own kitchens.

The reason for this, he postulates, is that there are things about cooking that people really miss. After all, anthropologists like Claude Lévi Strauss have identified cooking as “a defining human activity” – no other species cooks its food. It should be no surprise, then, that watching Masterchef or Cupcake Wars strikes a deep emotional chord in those of us who have “handed over the preparation of most of our meals to the food industry”.

The Temptation

I picked up Pollan’s remarkable Cooked at Kinokuniya, just before leaving to spend three months on a boat on the river Thames, in England. The timing was serendipitous: Supermarket ready meals are not a big thing in Singapore, but they are in the UK; my devotion to cooking from scratch was going to be tested.

Our Dutch- style barge has a full kitchen, and I’ve had great fun shopping at the local supermarkets – not only are they bursting with fabulous British and European fresh produce and other ingredients, but everything is so much cheaper than in Singapore.

But I was also genuinely impressed by the range of ready meals, either chilled or frozen. Not just the pizza, lasagne or cottage pie I remembered, but gourmetlike Western meals and representations of just about any ethnic cuisine you can think of.

It seems that each of the chains sells a version of the “Indian Meal for 2”: Tesco’s, for example, is a 1.5kg package of chicken tikka plus chicken korma, complete with onion bhajis, pilau rice and naan, and goes for around £6 – less than S$12 at the current post-brexit exchange rate. I had to try it.

The Disillusionment

Though the stuff smelt pretty enticing to begin with, the various tastes, flavours and textures simply did not live up to the promise of the colourful packaging. Life is too short to eat bad food; and so it was that I stocked my new pantry with ghee, whole spices, masala and the rest from wonderful Waitrose, and went straight back to cooking my own favourite veg curry from scratch. (Cue husband Roy, breathing a noisy sigh of relief.)

Plenty has been written about what’s wrong with ready meals, including a recent article by the British Dr Richard Hoffman. Apart from generally high levels of calories, salt, sugar and bad fats, he notes, there’s a lot else that you might not find on the label. Just for starters: • Nutrients lost to mass-production cooking processes. Remember, vitamin contents listed on labels refers to what was in the raw ingredients, not in the final product. Substitution of unhealthy ingredients for healthy ones – rapeseed oil in pizzas and hummus, for example, instead of the olive oil traditionally used; another example is cheap black olives, nutritionally depleted by the addition of ferrous gluconate (for colour stabilising). Carcinogens (cancer-promoting compounds) in meats roasted or grilled at high temperatures; AGES (advanced glycation end-products) in stuff like chicken nuggets and kebabs, linked to diabetes and dementia. When you cook for yourself, on the other hand, you know exactly what’s going into your mouth; you can choose the best ingredients you can afford, and you can prepare them so as to retain or even enhance their goodness.

Not Your Problem?

Though Pollan writes mainly about Americans, the decline in cooking is a global problem – and Singapore is no exception. Supermarket ready meals are not at issue here; what is, is that most Singaporeans can’t cook. In a 2014 survey, though 93 percent described themselves as “passionate about food”, 65 percent admitted to having “limited” or “disastrous” cooking skills. The solution, of course, is to rely on delicious, cheap hawker fare with dubious nutritional content.

Most expats love the local food, too – after all, what’s not to love about roti prata with curry gravy, creamy-spicy laksa and Old Chang Kee’s chilli crab puffs? – and indulge in it frequently. And, for many families who do eat home-cooked meals, those meals are often prepared by a live-in helper.

Cooking is no longer mandatory, as Pollan points out; it has become elective. The time saved by not having to cook could go towards following our careers and pursuing our dreams. There’s no doubt that cooking from scratch takes a lot of time, planning, energy and creativity.

But as far as I’m concerned, it’s well worth the effort, and one of the best possible legacies you can hand down to your children. No pressure, then!