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

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

I skimmed it, didn't read it in detail, but...

I think his numbers - that about 58% of the population cooks at least somewhat, at least sometimes, feels about right to me. I know plenty of people both in the midwest and on the coasts who absolutely do not cook, but also plenty of people who do. But since he doesn't define scratch cooking, I don't know how to evaluate his claim that it's so rare.

I think that Ben and I are unusual, but not freakish, in the degree to which we cook for ourselves. But I don't know how often we would meet his qualifications for scratch cooking.

I think this article has a lot of "get off my lawn" about it. It starts with a pretty obvious premise, which is that most FoodTV shows are less about teaching people how to cook than about watching people cook and/or eat. But then he applies an unhelpful layer of nostalgia to the issue, consults with another crank, and ends up asserting that if his readers aren't making Chicken Kiev or boeuf bourguignon from scratch, they may as well be eating dog poo and styrofoam.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

...and ends up asserting that if his readers aren't making Chicken Kiev or boeuf bourguignon from scratch, they may as well be eating dog poo and styrofoam.

Yeah. And I expect better than that from him, thus the bounce.