Julia Child, cooking REAL food.

Good thought provoking article in the NYT, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, by Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

Pollen is known for saying that anything our grandmothers (or great-grandmothers) wouldn’t recognize as “food” probably isn’t. So much of what we eat is processed, artificial, or very much removed from the plants and animals that humans have lived on for all of history up until now.

Just as Pollen has explored how our food is produced, and what is happening to agriculture, he explores in this article what is happening to cooking in America — in short, it is disappearing from American homes, and with that, so is our health and connection to real food.

Pollen describes how the time spent on food preparation has declined significantly over the last few decades, as corporations have focused on marketing industrial “food” that is easy to prepare. Time spent cooking is now spent on the Internet, and, at least in part, on watching food shows — where people are competing (think “Iron Chef”) and not really teaching about food or cooking. Julia Child’s cooking show was all about cooking — in real time — real food, mistakes and all (he mentions a great story about her not quite getting a potato pancake flipped on live television). From Julia Child encouraging people to cook, we now have passive game shows of cooking contestants.

We have the time to shop for real (local) food, and time to cook it. But we’ve chosen to spend our time on YouTube and cable TV instead.

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

This matters.

[O]besity 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 income. Other research supports the idea that 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 more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not…

So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And 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 process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences…

He ends with a great quote from a marketing expert (who markets processed food):

“You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”