Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (28 page)

“We’ve had a hundred years of
packaged foods,” Balzer told me, “and now we’re going to have a
hundred years of packaged meals.” Already today, 80 percent of the cost of food
eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say, to industrial
cooking and packaging and marketing. More than half the money we spend to eat goes to
food prepared outside the home. Balzer himself is unsentimental about this development;
in fact, he looks forward to the next frontier in the industrial revolution of
dinner.

“We’re all looking for someone
else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Take-out
from the
supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the
drive-through supermarket.” In the end, women did succeed in getting men into the
kitchen, just not their husbands. No, they’ve ended up instead with the men who
run General Mills and Kraft, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.

The whole question of time begins to look a
little different when you consider what we’re doing with the half hour a day that
the food industry has so generously granted us. Longer hours at work are part of the
answer. Another is more time spent in the car, on longer commutes. We’re also
spending more time shopping—for take-out food, among other things. (We forget how much
time it can take simply to avoid cooking: all that time spent driving to restaurants or
waiting for our orders, none of which gets counted as “food preparation.”)
But much of the half hour saved by not cooking is being spent in front of screens:
watching television (nearly thirty-five hours a week on average), surfing the Web (about
thirteen hours a week), and playing games on our smart phones. During the last few
decades, we have somehow managed to find nearly two more hours in our busy lives to
devote to the computer each day. In a day that still has exactly twenty-four hours in
it, where in the world did we find all
that
time?

Well, we’ve gotten much better at
multitasking, a phenomenon that makes this whole business of measuring how we budget our
time much trickier. Multitasking also counts against cooking as an acceptable use of our
time, since it is harder to check e-mail while chopping onions than it is to, say, eat
while shopping online. And yet what’s to keep us from looking at this
“problem” as one of the great virtues of cooking?

One multitasking activity that has increased
substantially as
cooking has declined is a new human behavior called
“secondary eating.” When asked what Americans are doing with the time that
industrial food preparation has freed up, Karen S. Hamrick, an economist at the USDA,
said, “People spend more time eating. Eating while they’re watching TV;
eating while driving; eating while getting dressed; eating while they’re doing
almost everything else.” A USDA study that Hamrick wrote found that Americans are
now spending seventy-eight minutes a day engaged in secondary eating and drinking—that
is, eating or drinking while doing something else.
^*
This is now more time than they
spend engaged in “primary eating”—aka meals. Who would ever have predicted
that cooking less would actually lead us to eat more? But that is precisely what has
happened.

The rise in “secondary eating”
points up one of the subtler ways that
not
cooking might be deleterious to our
health. There is good reason to believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to
corporations and sixteen-year-old burger flippers has taken a toll on our physical and
psychological well-being. But the reason is not simply because corporations and
fast-food franchises cook poorly, true as that is. Rather, it’s because the time
that people used to spend cooking had a substantial, invisible, and generally positive
effect on the way that they and their families ate.

That at least is the conclusion of some
intriguing recent research
on the links between time spent cooking and
dietary health. A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler
^*
found that most of the increase in obesity in America over the last several decades
could be explained by the rise of food preparation outside the home. Mass production has
driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of purchase price but, perhaps
even more important, in the amount of time required to obtain them.

Consider the french fry. Fried potatoes did
not become the most popular “vegetable” in America until the food industry
relieved us of the considerable time, effort, and mess required to prepare them
ourselves. Similarly, the mass production of cream-filled cakes, fried chicken wings and
taquitos, exotically flavored chips and dips, or cheesy puffs of refined flour has
transformed all these hard-to-make-at-home foods into the sort of everyday fare we can
pick up at the gas station on a whim for less than a dollar. And the fact that we no
longer have to plan or even wait to enjoy these foods, as we surely would if we were
making them ourselves, makes us that much more likely to indulge impulsively.

Economics teaches that when the cost of
something goes down, consumption of it goes up. But cost is measured not only in money;
it can be measured in time, too. Cutler and his colleagues make a strong case that the
decline in the “time cost” of food has had a substantial effect on our
eating. Since the 1970s, we’re consuming five hundred more calories a day, and
most of them consist of precisely the sort of foods (like snacks and convenience foods)
that are typically cooked outside the home. The study found that when we don’t
have to cook meals ourselves we eat more of them. As the amount of time Americans spend
cooking has dropped by half, the number of
meals Americans eat in a
day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added roughly half a meal’s worth of food
to our daily intake, most of it in the form of secondary eating.

Cutler and his colleagues surveyed cooking
patterns across several cultures and discovered that obesity rates are inversely
correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation
devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount
of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in
the labor force or even income. Other research supports the idea that home cooking is a
better predictor of a healthful diet than social class. A 1992 study in the
Journal
of the American Dietetic Association
found that poor women who routinely cooked
were likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not.
^*
A
2012
Public Health Nutrition
study of the elderly in Taiwan found a strong
correlation between regular cooking and superior health and longevity.
^†

So time spent cooking matters—a lot. Which,
when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations cook for
us, they’re bound to skimp on quality ingredients and go heavy on the sugar, fat,
and salt. These are three tastes we’ve been hardwired by natural selection to
favor; they also happen to be dirt cheap and to do a good job masking the shortcomings
of processed foods. Industrial cookery also increases the range of the tastes and
cuisines available to us; we may not know how to cook Indian or Moroccan or Thai, but
Trader Joe’s does. Although such variety might seem like a good thing, as Cutler
suggests (and any buffet table proves), the wider the choice of food, the more of it we
will consume. And then there is dessert: If
you make special-occasion
foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and
work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the cooking
process, serve as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and
we’re struggling to deal with the consequences.

The question is, can we ever go back? Once
it has been dismantled, can a culture of everyday cooking (and “primary
eating”) be rebuilt? Because it’s hard to imagine ever reforming the
American way of eating unless millions of us—women and men both—are willing to make
cooking and eating meals a part of daily life. The path to a healthier diet of fresh,
unprocessed food (not to mention to a revitalized local food economy) passes right
through the home kitchen.

If this strikes you as an appealing idea,
you might not want to call Harry Balzer to discuss it.

“Not going to happen,” he told
me. “Why? Because we’re basically cheap and lazy, and the skills are already
lost. Who is going to teach the next generation how to cook?”

Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer
insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he
finds it in the survey data he has spent the last three decades poring over. But for a
brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different
reality. This took a little doing. Most of his clients, who include many of the big
chain restaurants and food manufacturers, profit handsomely from the decline of cooking
in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself clearly
recognizes what industrial cookery has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world,
we might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has
done to our health.

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less?
I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want—just as long as
you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

Toward the end of my year of cooking with
Samin, I began braising and stewing solo, regularly devoting my Sunday afternoons to
cooking various pot dishes on my own. The idea was to make a couple of dinners at a time
and freeze them to eat during the week: my own home-meal replacements, homemade.
Weeknights, it’s often hard to find more than a half hour or so to fix dinner, so
I decided to put in a few hours on the weekend, when I would feel less rushed. I also
borrowed a couple of minor mass-production techniques from the food industry: I figured
that if I was going to chop onions for a mirepoix or soffritto, why not chop enough for
two or three dishes? That way, I’d only have to wash the pans, knives, and cutting
boards once. Making pot dishes in this way has proved to be the single most practical
and sustainable skill—both in terms of money and time spent to eat well—I acquired in my
cooking education.

Sundays without Samin have become a pastime
I look forward to most weekends. Isaac usually keeps me company, bringing his laptop
down to the kitchen so he can do his homework while I chop and sauté, season and stir.
Sometimes he’ll wander over to the pot on the stove with a tasting spoon, and
offer some unsolicited seasoning advice. But mostly we work in parallel, both of us
absorbed in our respective tasks, with occasional breaks for conversation. I’ve
learned that the very best time to talk to a teenager is while doing something else, and
our hours at the kitchen island, during what is his last year at home, have become some
of the easiest, sweetest times we’ve had together. I believe he feels the same
way. One Sunday, Isaac answered the phone while I stirred a sugo; we were planning to
make some fresh pasta together a little later in the day. It was my parents on the
line.