Confusing shopping with cooking?

Bill Buford's food writing for the New Yorker is chewy without being dull, lively without being too intense. (It also makes one prone to groping for the kinds of sensual adjectives meant to translate gustatory stimuli into cerebral artifacts.) I greatly enjoyed "TV Dinners" (Oct 2, 06) because it got into the nitty-gritty on how the Food Network makes their food look so dang good, how it appealed to people ( says a development exec: "an affluent television demographic ... saw food as culture"), how it's dropping chefs in favor of entertainment personalities who happen to be able to cook a little, and what its essential appeal is:

You don’t have to know how to cook, just how to shop; and everyone knows how to shop.

But do they?

One of the things I recently found and printed out for home use was the Periodic Table of Produce (part 1, part 2, via Simple Living's Sep 06 issue), which tells you how long you can keep your fruits, vegetables and herbs, and how best to store them. The pedant in me notes that the items are not arranged in anything resembling groups (i.e. vertical columns where the constituents share similar properties) and boy is that a lost opportunity -- anyway, my larger point here is that I needed the information because I felt like I don't know how to shop for produce, and I don't know how to take care of it once I get it home.

Everyone know how to exchange money for goods and services, but I question whether people are smart food shoppers, and whether Food Network is actively hindering them from becoming so. Buford notes that pre-packed, pre-shredded food is the new normal on many Food Network shows:

The ingredients, which, like Rachael’s, so uniformly come out of the fridge sealed in plastic wrap that it is impossible not to suspect an executive order ...  Sandra Lee recommends pre-peeled carrots—the ones sold by Dole. (Who has the time to peel carrots?) In the supermarket, you can get your melon already cut up—it’s over there by the salad bar. Near the meat section, Dave Lieberman tells us on “Good Deal,” you can buy an already cooked rotisserie chicken. (Who knows how to cook one, anyway?)

I found myself taking stock not of what I’d seen during the preceding seventy-two hours but of what I hadn’t. I couldn’t recall very many potatoes with dirt on them, or beets with ragged greens, or carrots with soil in their creases, or pieces of meat remotely reminiscent of the animals they were butchered from—hardly anything, it seemed, from the planet Earth.

The happy exception to this is, of course, Alton Brown. Buford says his is the "network’s rare intellectual show  ... an admirable, exceptional effort." Which is true, but doesn't really erase the main question: if your produce comes pre-bagged, have you really shopped for it? Is a network devoted to food actually hampering your understanding of how to get the most out of your ingredients?

Thing is, the Food Network's Shopping=Cooking approach is cresting in popularity right as more consumers are actually turning into picky food shoppers.

It is not enough to get the choice cut of meat out of the case; some people want a personal acquaintance with the animal it came from. Buford wrote about the experience of butchering a pig and eating no fewer than 450 different meals from the results ("Carnal Knowledge," May 1, 06), and last week, the SFChron wrote about the rising trend of buying a big hunk of animal directly from the people who raised and killed it ("Back to the Ranch," Sep 20, 06).

A growing number of people are buying their food based on production method and provenance, if these clips from the last five months are any indication:

• "Paradise Sold," New Yorker, May 15, 06
• "Local or Organic? It's a False Choice," Grist, May 18, 06
• "A Trend In Buying Food Produced Nearby is Growing," AP via Philly Inquirer, Jun 11, 06
• "Supermarkets Copy Whole Foods' Shopping List," USAT, Jun 28, 06
• "Demand for Organic Food Outstrips Supply," AP via SFGate, Jul 6, 06
• "Is There Anything Left We Can Eat?," WaPo, July 19, 06
• "Is Buying Local Always Best?," CSM, July 24, 06
• "Whole Foods, Taking Flak, Thinks Local," SFGate, July 26, 06
• "The Green Machine," Fortune, Aug 7, 06
• "Going Natural: Organic Food Keeps Growing in Popularity," Times-Reporter, Aug 14, 06
• "Fall Fruit: Falling for It," Progressive Grocer, Sep 15, 06
• "Pasture to Plate, a Fresh Approach," Kansas City Star, Sep 24, 06

Mind you, we are still a ways off from everyone being able to swing $4 for a pretty recycled-glass bottle of milk, so what we're seeing now is what the Food Network development execs saw back in 1993: an affluent demographic who sees food as a culture. Since we also see shopping as a cultural signifier, it makes sense that food shopping is but one more area where people can confirm who they are by what they are, quite literally, consuming. Who doesn't believe they are what they eat?

In the same New Yorker article that talks about Food Network placing food in decontextualized, prepackaged universe, Buford also reports that the demographic profile has slid slightly; the network's audience is not quite so affluent as they used to be. I am wondering if it'll be another decade before fresh, healthy food slides down the shopping ladder too.

Comments

[Roger Vaughn]

The ingredients, which, like Rachael’s, so uniformly come out of the fridge sealed in plastic wrap...

You know, in regard to her 30 Minute Meals show, I've long though how easy it must be to make wonderful, delicious meals in only 30 minutes... if you've had a small army of apprentices and assistants do all of your prep work for you beforehand. And now we have Buford raising a very similar point. Hmmm.

[Kerry]

Bing, bing, bing! And food as culture was completely typified in the Julia Moskin article in the NY Times last week about her trip to the supermarket in search of food she'd actually bring herself to eat. I went off on it on my blog as the most entitled piece of food snobbery that I'd read in a while. Drove me nuts.

Lisa, the foodie bloggers are always writing en masse about how your food should be locally grown--it's a singular mind focus and as Emily Bazelton pointed out in today's Slate, easy to do if you have the time and money to make foraging the focus of your day. Oh, and if you live on the West Coast. Here in OH, with an 8-5 job? Not so easy.

Sorry, this fetishization of food is one of my peeves.

[Lisa]

No, no, no, no ... I'm glad you posted because now I can go hunt down all those links you mentioned.

Although -- and this is my guilty confession -- I've been carrying around that Moskin piece for a week, because I'm mulling the wisdom of a taste teste on some of her picks.

[drunken monkey]

Last weekend, my stepfather killed a moose. In Newfoundland, you can have a license for one adult moose every two years. My stepfather, his two brothers and a neighbour share so that every year two of them have a license, and the kills are always split equally four ways.

So now, he and my mother have about 200 pounds of moose in their freezer, which they processed themselves. They've also got several cod caught this summer, and they'll have wild birds come November. They'll eat it along with the veggies they grew in their greenhouse this summer -- corn, potatoes, carrots, etc. The pickings are slim for fruit, but they've got lots of frozen blueberries and strawberries.

They don't eat like this because it's ethically correct, or because they are snobs; they do it because it's cost-effective and how they've always eaten. So it's not just the West Coast of the U.S. where people can really eat locally. That said, it's very time-consuming -- not to mention space-consuming -- and their location allows it in a way that isn't possible everywhere. I don't exactly have wild moose roaming around behind my apartment building in Toronto. (Thankfully.)

I have an irrational sort of dislike for Rachael Ray, motivated in part by her twee habit of calling olive oil EVOO. But it strikes me that while you may be able to prepare a meal that's tasty in 30 minutes, using her method it wouldn't necessarily be cheap. The cost of those pre-sliced veggies adds up. There's missed opportunity to show people that fresher foods can be easy to cook with and affordable, I think.

(And Lisa, thanks so much for linking those produce tables. I have no idea how to buy/store mine, either; I just toss it all in the crisper drawer and hope for the best, usually.)

[Oceana]

I'm kind of digusted by the trend to turn every food into "convenience" foods--the packaging is wasteful and polluting, the processing destroys the flavor, and processed food is many times more expensive! Finding local and organic food does not have to be as time consuming or expensive as a lot of people think. In sympathy with the commenter from Ohio, I live in Michigan and also work a full time job. Also having a toddler in the house means I can't make a whole lot of time for shopping--certainly not daily, like I think a lot of people envision when they think of shopping locally.

Here's what I do: Every two weeks I go to the farmer's market and load up on all the veggies, fruit, eggs, chicken and pork I'll need, most of which is organic since our farmer's market is pretty cool, and it's really inexpensive when compared to the stuff at the organic grocery store. Then I run over to said organic grocery store and buy whatever I need that I couldn't get at the farmer's market (this means I do spend more money on produce in the winter, when the farmer's market doesn't have much, due to the cold climate, though I spend WAY less in the summer, and as much as I can, I eat seasonally). It doesn't take more time than going to a big box grocery store, because the farmer's market and organic grocery are both smaller and have shorter lines so I'm out of each place faster. It takes me longer to cook stuff since I didn't get pre-ready meals--I spend most of my day off cooking a bunch of meals all at once to store in the fridge, but that means I've got stuff ready to just heat up as soon as I get home each day from work, which saves me time when I need it the most. And I save money not buying so much prepackaged stuff, too.