I’m working up a blog post about my initial experiences on the book tour. Meanwhile, go check out my guest blog post as part of “October Unprocessed” on the excellent site Eating Rules.
The Cooking Crisis: How to Get People Off the Couch and Into the Kitchen?
This weekend, Mark Bittman wrote a terrific piece in The New York Times titled “Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?” The arguments and premise — that no matter how you measure it, home cooking is more affordable and healthy than convenience foods — essentially summarizes the message of The Kitchen Counter Cooking School which goes on sale this Thursday.
Thanks to both government subsidies for big agriculture and the commercialization of our food production, Americans spend less money on food as a percentage of their income than any other country, about 10 percent. (By comparison, we spent 25% on food in 1930; in Ethiopia, about 70% of their income goes toward food.) The “cheap factor” might be why we also waste more food than any country — about 40-plus percent — according to the excellent book American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom.
Here’s the fundamental question. If it’s cheaper and healthier to cook from scratch, why don’t more people do it? Michael Pollan noted that we collectively spend less time cooking in a piece in the Times back in 2009 (although this seems to have increased slightly in the onset of the recession.) I agree with all of Bittman’s commentary on the reasons, all of which are supported by a recent survey on the excuses people give for not cooking, which range from the notion of “time poverty,” that people don’t have time to cook, that cooking is too difficult, to their disdain for getting their kitchens dirty.
It doesn’t help that convenience foods have been engineered to be addictive and easy-to-eat (and over-eat), from its balance of the holy trinity of sugar, salt and fat to the amount of fiber it contains (or doesn’t). You want to know why cheap white bread or fast food doesn’t contain much fiber? Fiber fills you up. The less fiber a food product contains, the easier it is to eat (and purchase) more of it. All of that combined with decades of conflicted messaging from multinational food companies that cooking is not worth the effort created a confusing and complex food culture. After all, we live in a society where we’re told both they need to eat more fruits and vegetables, and that sugar-laden cereals are “part of a complete breakfast.” That kind of product engineering and bullshit marketing are among the reasons cited in a United Nations summit called for holding food and beverage companies accountable for both their products and the damage they inflict on individuals.
But one intriguing fact persists, and it’s at the heart of the new book. A main reason that 28% of people in that survey cited as their biggest obstacle to cooking? They don’t know how. You can tell people to eat steam broccoli and grilled lean proteins all you want, but if they don’t know how to steam or grill anything, than what do you expect? The glut of television shows don’t have much impact on getting people to cook, either. As one woman I met through the project in the new book said, “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve eaten Tuna Helper while watching Gordon Ramsey.”
Part of the project at the heart of the new book involved going through a group of volunteers’ kitchens to evaluate their fridges, pantries and freezers and talking to them about their relationship with food and cooking. We watched them cook a go-to meal and then offered them a series of cooking lessons with the aid of other culinary professionals. The result? Just a few simple lessons can help trigger small changes that yield big results. In one case, a volunteer cut her trips to the fast food lane from several times a week to less than twice per month. By doing so, she cut nearly 200,000 mostly empty calories over the course of a year, the equivalent of spending 550 hours on a treadmill. This is part of the reason that, as a general rule, the more people cook, the less they weigh.
Here are just a few key things I learned both from the project and subsequent research:
- Confidence: Cooks with more confidence cook more often, try more varied food choices and rely less on convenience foods. They tend to rethink value when shopping or purchasing food, often ditching bulk purchasing and boxed products. “I learned that fast food wasn’t a good value,” one project volunteer told me. “It costs less and takes less time to pack an apple and a sandwich. It just takes a little more planning.”
- Knife skills: Many inexperienced home cooks are put off by recipes due to the time they think it will take to prepare the ingredients. “Learning to use a knife changed everything,” one volunteer told me. “I don’t look at recipes anymore and think, ‘that’s too much work.’ I see ‘half a onion chopped’ and think ‘oh, that will take me under a minute.” I’m such a believe in the power of knife skills that I convinced the online cooking school Rouxbe to offer everyone on the planet a free knife skill lesson.
- Fundamentals: Depending on what individuals routinely consumed, learning to prepare a few staple meals shifted their buying and eating habits. One woman used to buy a lot of frozen dinners, but she ditched them as her cooking skills improved. “I figured out that I could make 12 servings of a casserole for the same price as a couple boxes which contained four. Plus, I know what’s in it and mine tastes way better.”
Bittman is right; what we need in our society is a fundamental shift in the way that people think about cooking. As he notes, cigarette smoking used to be cool. Now, smokers tend to be treated as social pariahs. How do we make the same kind of seismic shift to get people to take back their kitchens, one meal at a time? I’ll be talking about this very topic as part of an evening program titled ”Power of Home Cooking” next week in New York City with authors Pam Anderson and Lauren Shockey at the Institute of Culinary Education on Tuesday, October 4th. If you’re in NYC and interested in this subject, I encourage you to come out!
Learn to cook at your own kitchen counter
As you’ll soon see in the new book, inspiring people to get off the couch and back into their kitchens is something I’m deeply passionate about. A recent survey reported that 28% of respondents replied they didn’t cook because they simply don’t know how. Mike and I matched some grand plans to develop an online cooking school — until I came across Rouxbe.com.
Rouxbe (pronounced roo-bee) is the web’s first-ever online cooking school and currently teaches home cooks in 180 countries. We share the same mission, namely to help you become a better and more confident cook by teaching basic to advanced cooking skills and techniques – the same things that chefs learn in a professional cooking school – so you can be free from being a slave to just recipes. (Not to mention, break any kind of reliance you’ve developed on convenience foods…)
Their site offers excellent step-by-step videos of all kinds of techniques, plus quizzes and an option for “ask-the-chef” support. I’m all in favor of creation, but sometimes, it simply doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel, especially when someone else has already invested millions to develop the same wheel and done a better job designing it than I ever could. So, I’m partnering with Rouxbe.com to provide a series of classes as an online companion to the new book. You can upgrade your cooking skills independently, on your own schedule and on any device, which truly means that your kitchen counter can become your own private cooking school.
The new Kitchen Counter Cooking School “class” will debut on October 3rd, the official publish date of the book. But, as a sneak peek, I’ve convinced Rouxbe to offer readers a free lesson. Take a look at our official Rouxbe page to learn the most critical lesson for any home cook — how to use a chef’s knife.
Filed under Cooking Classes, cooking school, culinary school
Few Good Food Links: The Rise (and Possible Fall?) of Processed Foods
So, I was perusing ”Kitchen Royalty: An illustrated tour of the top chefs (and the many products they endorse) in the food world” by Robert Klara at Adweek the Barnum-like world of brands and chefs. (Thanks to SteamyKitchen for the link.) Looking through his past articles, I also came upon this gem that corresponds perfectly with the new book: “Banquet in a Box: Frozen meals are miracles of convenience—with a dollop of denial.” A short piece, but nonetheless an insightful look at the evolution of TV dinners. When they launched, the meals promoted the technology that allowed one to avoid missing even a moment of television. Now, the same meals try to play up a dubious “farm to table” connection to not-so-delicately mask the fact that, as someone Klara quotes, “you have to nuke this sucker.”
On a completely related subject, a United Nations summit this week urged holding food companies accountable for their role in making everyone obese and unhealthy. As part of their investigation into chronic disease, the summit called for more responsible marketing of processed food to children and that trade in tobacco, alcohol and processed foods laden with fat, sugar and salt needed reform. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon noted “there is a well-documented an shameful history of certain players in industry who ignored the science — sometimes even their own research — and put public health at risk to protect their own profits.” For a bit more d context, take a look at this story by Eliza Barclay at NPR’s blog.
All this underscores something fundamental. A study released this week by Bosch (an appliance manufacturer) revealed that 28% of those surveyed admitted they simply didn’t know how to cook. Based on my research, there’s an even larger number of people who can put together a meal, but don’t feel confident in their kitchen. If you can’t cook, or you don’t cook, you leave yourself at the mercy of companies to feed you and their primary motive is profit, not your health.
A shout-out to some of the bloggers who have reviewed the new book, which happens to be about this very subject:
- Mommy’s Memorandum: ”[A]n excellent resource…humorous while offering real life, easy to implement guidance to making life healthier, more fun, cheaper and dare I say, easier.” (Book giveaway)
- A Book Lover: Brittanie wrote: “This is my favorite book I have read this entire year.”
- Urban Farm Junkie: Loved the introduction in this well-thought review by Christina Dudley on a farmer’s market blog; she compares the guilty items people keep in their cupboards to the TV dating game show “Baggage” hosted by Jerry Springer.
- Thrifty Nifty Mommy: “This book is a stirring, practical and humorous book that shows how boosting your self-confidence in the kitchen can make your entire life easier, cheaper, healthier and more fun. It has the potential, along with programs like First Lady Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move Campaign,’ to really change America ’s relationship with food and positively affect the obesity rates in the U.S.” (Book giveaway, deadline Oct. 3rd)
ConAgra’s Failed Con Begs the Question: Are Food Bloggers ‘Professionals’?
As many people who regularly read food blogs know, ConAgra pulled a tragically ill-conceived public relations stunt recently. As The New York Times reported, the company lured food bloggers into an exclusive underground dining event and then fed them frozen three meat and cheese lasagna as they filmed their reactions. In fairness, I think they were going for that old “We’ve replaced the usual coffee they serve here with Folgers” approach, thoroughly mocked by the “Saturday Night Live” skit above.
What’s curious to me was ConAgra’s audience. I’m certain that Ketchum, the normally hip-to-it agency involved, would not have tried such a stunt with established journalists from other media. Imagine a narrator saying, “Let’s watch Barry Estabrook inhale the heady tomato flavor. Oh, wait, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jonathan Gold is taking a bite! Let’s watch!” Or, “So Michael Ruhlman, you’ve been duped into eating commercial pepperoni. Pretty good, huh?” You think so? No, me neither. So frankly, I don’t blame the bloggers for their reaction. They called the company on it. Loudly, and with conviction.
Mom Confessionals referred to the whole thing as a “SHAM!” Chubby Chinese Girl wrote “What I don’t understand is who’s genius idea was to bring in bloggers into this…Feeding me free food doesn’t automatically equate to great review. I’ll always keep it honest for myself and my readers, otherwise there’s no point to all this. I do advertising by day, thank you very much, at night, blogging is a passion and hobby. I won’t promote products I won’t eat myself. Either, they were too confident about their products or just didn’t believe in our palates and tastebuds.”
Over at FoodMayhem.com, Lon Binder wrote an open letter to the chef involved in the stunt, George Duran, essentially calling him a feckless hack who should surrender his chef’s toque. (Binder also had the above video embedded on his site which is how I found it.) Prior to being served the dinner, the hosts had “guided” conversation around the importance of fresh ingredients, which then shifted into how intensely some members of the group disdained processed food. After that conversation, ConAgra fed them this:
semolina [enriched with niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid], egg white), seasoned cooked beef and pork (beef and pork, seasoning [flavorings, salt, spices, dextrose], tomato paste, salt, soybean oil), ricotta cheese (pasteurized whey, milk, cream), mozzarella cheese (part-skim mozzarella cheese [pasteurized milk, whey protein concentrate, cultures, salt, enzymes]), contains 2% or less of: parmesan and Romano (made from cow’s milk) cheeses (part-skim milk, cheese culture, salt, enzymes, cellulose powder [prevents caking]), garlic (in citric acid), carrots, celery, seasoning (salt, dextrose, sugar, spice, spice extractives [including paprika, soy lecithin], disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate [flavor enhancer], tricalcium phosphate and soybean oil), onion, sugar, heavy whipping cream, salt, bread crumb (wheat flour, sugar, yeast, soybean oil, salt), spices (includes oregano and basil), modified food starch, dried egg whites.
Compare that to ingredients in a fairly standard lasagna recipe:
ground beef, Italian sausage, tomatoes, lasagna noodles, onion, carrots, celery, olive oil, ricotta cheese, Parmesan cheese, mozzarella cheese, eggs, garlic, oregano, basil, kosher salt, pepper
Wrote Binder on FoodMayhem: “Let’s consider a more personal hypothetical: George, how would you feel if invited to my home, fed chicken cordon bleu, and then afterwards informed that we had secretly stuffed the cavity with entrails of rats found in the street, cleansed using various chemicals from the utility closet, such as bleach (also food safe in small quantities).”
This isn’t the first frozen food faux pas involving bloggers. At the BlogherFood conference a couple of years ago in San Francisco, Rocco Dispirito tried to sell the crowd of online food writers on frozen pasta dinners with the zeal of the ShamWow guy to what the L.A. Times referred to as a “tough room.” As Jen wrote in Use Real Butter: “People, I just made puff pastry from scratch and they were serving me frozen, mushy pasta. That doesn’t jive. We had our angry/semi-humored tweets, but I think the feeling I came away with was that of being insulted…”As Sarah Fidelibus notes on Poynter.org, “Whether it’s for a blog or an established print magazine, food writing is a genre whose participants frequently find themselves treated as public relations’ conduits for events and products, rather than as journalists who inform the public.” So, companies, here’s what you need to do. Treat food bloggers and writers like you would any other journalists or opinion columnists in the media. In other words, like culinary professionals.Yes, it’s a different game and many bloggers exist who will readily shill for your canned beef ravioli or your prepackaged mixes for any bit of extra traffic to their ad network. But a wide enough swath of bloggers take their work seriously that it isn’t worth pissing them all off by treating them as lesser professionals. As Chubby Chinese Girl noted above, her blog might be viewed as a hobby, but to suggest that because she’s not drawing a paycheck from a media company for her work means that her passion, energy and time can therefore be bought off by a free dinner is insulting. In fact, when you’re doing it for free, the one thing you’ve got is your reputation.
In an excellent article on The Huffington Post, writer Jamie Schler of Life’s a Feast detailed about her experiences at the International Food Bloggers Conference in New Orleans. (In a disclosure moment, she and I shared some grits at breakfast one morning, and I’ll be speaking at the next IFBC conference in Santa Monica.) After initial trepidation after watching the food blogging phenomenon unfold from her perch in France, she left the weekend with a new-found respect for the community. ”The line between amateur and professional began to thin and grow hazy, creating a formidable dilemma: what role do food bloggers play? Are they the new journalists?” she asked.
It’s a intriguing question. “What’s funny is that most bloggers argue with me when I suggest that they are journalists,” food writing expert Dianne Jacob told Fidelibus of Poynter.org; she has previously made the pitch on her own blog Will Write for Food.
It strikes me as an issue of semantics. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines a journalist: “a writer who aims at a mass audience.” Here’s how it defines journalism: ”the collection and editing of news and information for presentation through the media.” But with blogs, your mileage will vary in how well the term “journalist” applies. Personal voice defines most blogs, and traditional journalism seeks to strip that out. (I was nearly 30 before using the word “I” in a story.)
But the label “blogger” is problematic in that it’s too generalized. I have a very talented friend in San Francisco who debates whether to call himself a “writer” because he’s not sure if he warrants the title since he writes “only on a blog.” I say bullshit. If Ernest Hemingway were around, he’d be all over Twitter. Charles Dickens would most certainly blog. I challenge anyone to suggest neither of them are writers. I’ve long been an advocate of the policy that if you do the verb, you can call yourself the noun. If you write, you’re a writer. If you take photos, you’re a photographer.
Why shouldn’t some bloggers self-assign their own titles if they feel undefined by the more general term? If you’re diligent about research, reporting and ethics, I see no reason why you can’t call yourself an independent journalist. If you primarily write about food, perhaps publish original recipes that you prudently test, you do your research, live up to ethical guidelines, treat other writers with respect and take your work seriously, I’ve got no qualms about saying you’re a culinary professional. By definition, “professional” means “relating to, or connected with a profession.” While everyone would prefer a paycheck for what they do, that you’re not getting one shouldn’t automatically put you in some lower caste.
Neither the James Beard Awards nor the IACP Bert Greene journalism awards make any distinction about the medium stories appear in anymore; whether a story appeared in a newspaper or in a magazine or on a blog, they’re judged the same.
It’s about time the rest of the media world — and companies like Ketchum and ConAgra — to do the same.
It’s about time the rest of the media world — and companies like Ketchum and ConAgra — to do the same.
Filed under food blogs, food writing, in the media, What's in the box?
