Are we that small a demographic?

[dickens]

As you may be aware, I'm in the habit of reading practically anything that Michael Pollan writes.

But I have to admit, I bounced off his latest essay in the NY Times Magazine. On page 3, someone who studies people's eating habits says that 'scratch cooking' is so rare that they don't even ask about it in surveys, they consider 'cooking' anything that requires the assembly of ingredients (so lettuce w/ dressing or a sandwich count) and that cooking is vanishing from American life because "no one would know how to do it anymore".

I think both of them have been stuck in some sort of restaurant dominated twilight zone.

On my live journal, most weeks I read about something that one of you all is cooking, and it all sounds good.
Heck, how do kitchen stores stay in business if no one cooks?
Why were the last few cooking classes I took full?
Do the produce and meat sections of grocery stores occupy the same mental space as gym memberships (something people pay for but never use?)
How come I can still buy canning supplies if no one else uses them?
Why do I have to make sure to get fresh cranberries days before Thanksgiving if no one besides me makes their own sauce?

Or are we all just weirdos? (Okay, I suppose we are, but in this particular sense?)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am probably far out on the bell curve, given that we cook for our dog here. (Ground meat, brown rice, mixed veg, etc.: she is happy, our house doesn't stink like dog food, hurrah.)

But whenever people are contrasting the Good Old Days When Women Used To _____ with Now When They Don't, I break out in mental hives and start taking everything they say with a huge grain of salt.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

Re: Mental Hives - I didn't have that particular reaction (Kate Harding did over on Salon's Broadsheet) because, well... I don't know exactly why not.

Maybe I was just too flabbergasted by the rest of the premise.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't remember if this is the fella who wants us to eat food our great-grandmothers would have recognized as food.

My great-grandmothers--I knew them well--recognized Cheetos as food and would have been fairly sure bok choi was a decorative plant. So I think this is maybe not the metric for me.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's him. From Defense of Food came the mantra 'Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants.' or something like that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And that mantra is fine with me, as long as you're not trying to claim that it's what my great-grandmothers did, when in fact they were not sure something really qualified as a meal if it didn't have whole milk/cream gravy on it.