Food TV, Michael Pollan, and Generation X

So I was fascinated by Michael Pollan's recent (lengthy) article in the New York Times, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch (thanks Will Samson for the head's up). In it he takes aim at our cultural obsession with watching television about food while at the same time spending less and less time in the kitchen. While the article explores in depth the cultural and social issues surrounding food tv and cooking in our modern world, his main point is to assert that cooking is important and shouldn't be abandoned. I generally love Michael Pollan, and aside from his digs in the article at stay-at-home moms and tall women, I agree with most of what he wrote. Cooking is important – it is healthier, cheaper, and better for you to cook from scratch. No argument there. I just don't know if I would point a finger as vehemently at food television as he does. Pollan writes -

How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

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.

…

The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch — into yet another confection of spectacle and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch. The formula is as circular and self-reinforcing as a TV dinner: a simulacrum of home cooking that is sold on TV and designed to be eaten in front of the TV. True, in the case of the Swanson rendition, at least you get something that will fill you up; by comparison, the Food Network leaves you hungry, a condition its advertisers must love. But in neither case is there much risk that you will get off the couch and actually cook a meal. Both kinds of TV dinner plant us exactly where television always wants us: in front of the set, watching.

Let me first, say I have a love/hate relationship with the Food Network. I was addicted to it during my pregnancies when I was so sick I had to be hospitalized for severe dehydration. I couldn't eat much less cook, so I lived vicariously through the Food Network. That said I really can't stand to watch Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee, Paula Deen, Bobbie Flay or Guy Fieri – but I am a huge fan of all things Alton Brown and Iron Chef America, as well as a Top Chef fan. I admit that most of those shows have little do do with cooking, and are at best simply food porn. Some people like to watch guys dress up in costumes and chase a ball around a field for entertainment, and some of us like watching a chef attempt to make a gourmet meal on a dorm-room hot plate. To each her own.

But.

Every person I personally know who watches cooking shows says it has inspired them to spend more time in the kitchen. Far from being the cause that keeps us away from the stove, it has been the impetus that brought us back. You see, we at the tail-end of Generation X are the children of the 80's, in other words, the children of convenience. We grew up on diets of poptarts and hotpockets. Dinner was the McDonald's drive-thru or maybe Chili's on special occasions. I remember my mom mocking a friend who claimed to always make her soups from scratch – condensed Campbells was our normal fair. Just recently I had to explain to my husband that you could make mayonnaise from scratch. We are the generation that never learned to cook. Most people I know would have no idea how to make their own pasta sauce – or even why they should. That is until they started watching the Food Network. All of a sudden a generation that never had the opportunity to learn how to cook is abandoning the drive-thru and learning a new skill. On numerous occasions I have watched a Food Network show, downloaded the recipe and tried it myself. Recently a friend told me that her tween daughter one evening paused the Food Network show she was watching and went to the kitchen and made the featured dish. For me and many of my friends, the Food Network has taught us how to cook.

But not only are we learning how to cook, we are rethinking what we are eating. When we see Michael Simon say he would never use frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts or hear Jamie Oliver discuss seasonal produce, some of us start asking why. Why is it better to eat whole foods instead of processed things? Why should I eat in season? Why is is better to buy whole chickens than just the breasts? Sure these are all basic aspects of cooking that our grandparents knew well – but which my generation never learned. There were valid reasons our parents gave up wholesome food for pre-packaged convenience, but how can we honestly be expected to know what's better unless we are taught. And for better or worse my generation's teacher is The Food Network. It of course has it's issues. It's corporate, has the products it must push, and seems to care little about ethical issues related to food. But perhaps all that is a symptom of a problem and not its cause.

So, I agree with Michael Pollan's conclusion. To be healthy we (men and women) should be spending more time in the kitchen cooking from scratch using whole ingredients. But, from my limited perspective it's not necessarily the Food Network turning us into couch potatoes, it is instead helping save us from what we've already become.