Did you hear the one about the promotion of home cooking as being “elitist” and “unrealistic”? I did, and it really got me to some hardcore head scratching.
The noise began last week with the publication of Amanda Marcotte’s piece in Slate entitled “The Tyranny of the Home-Cooked Family Dinner,” highlighting the findings of three North Carolina State University sociologists who concluded — on the basis of interviews with moms with widely diverse backgrounds — that “the emphasis on home cooking ignores the time pressures, financial constraints, and feeding challenges that shape the family meal.” It goes on to state: “This emerging standard is a tasty illusion, one that is moralistic, and rather elitist, instead of a realistic vision of cooking today.” Since last week the noise has grown, with bloggers and Twitter adding to the fray.
[Read: Lose Weight in Your Kitchen, Not Your Gym .]
While there’s no doubt been a great deal of social support for the notion of home-cooking being a form of tyranny (including Marcotte’s article’s, which now has more than 35,000 likes), many bloggers have taken both the article and the study to task. The Lunch Tray’s Bettina Elias Siegel, in her piece “Why I’m Ticked Off by (Almost) Everyone in the Latest Family Dinner Debate,” fairly points out that we have no idea what questions the sociologists asked in their interviews, and moreover notes that the researcher’s language suggests they had their own pre-defined definition of home-cooking. They described it as “a foodie version of a home-cooked meal” that in order to be healthy required “fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean meats.”
Joel Salatin, over on Mother Earth News, wondered whether or not the researcher’s fair concern for the impoverished should translate to not encouraging home-cooking for everyone else, and provided this rather abrasive, but perhaps in some cases fair, observation: “Soccer moms driving their kiddos half a day one way to a tournament, stopping at the drive-by for ‘chicken’ nuggets, and then dismissing the kitchen as ‘too stressful’ is an upside-down value system.”
[Read: Don’t Blame Your Children for Their Weight .]
And over on Bloomberg, Megan McArdle — in her piece that explained how she manages her family’s cooking — noted that “the sociology study reads like it was written by aliens who unfortunately never got to spend much time on their visit to our planet.”
However, all of this isn’t what made me scratch my head. Rather, my head-scratching had to do with how we’ve come to this place in a time where people are clearly buying into the notion that home-cooking is an out-of-reach, unrealistic, elitist activity. Clearly it wasn’t so long ago when there was no options other than home-cooking, and yet we managed. How did we do that?
Listen, there’s no doubt that the inconvenient truth of healthful living is that it does indeed require effort. There’s also no doubt that there are some people who, for a myriad of reasons, are so disenfranchised that regular home-cooking is genuinely impossible. But simply put, sandwiches aren’t elitist. Nor are the toads in the whole I regularly make my three daughters. Nor is the chicken we roast in the oven at least a couple times a month. That chicken, by the way — though it does require a kitchen and an oven — feeds my family of five for in the neighborhood of $10. And it usually yields at least one lunch worth of leftovers.
[Read: Why Is Everyone Always Giving My Kids Junk Food? ]
No, what I see as elitist and unrealistic is the suggestion that the promotion of home-cooking is in fact the promotion of gourmet, “foodie” style meals. Those of us who work with real-world families like those interviewed by the sociologists plainly don’t do that. And maybe, just maybe, if you’re a researcher writing a paper questioning the utility of the promotion of home-cooking, it would be worth your time and while to actually investigate the real world recommendations of us who are actively involved in said home-cooking promotion — rather than hang your hat on your own half-baked notion that reality is something only you can fathom.
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Can Recommending Sandwiches, Eggs and Roasted Chickens Really Be Considered ‘Elitist’? originally appeared on usnews.com
