Mealways

13. Cooking: a Lost Practice

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

I am old enough to have had a middle school home economics course in which we (girls only that is) learned some cooking basics, long before the arrival of “baby” carrots.I remember learning how to make cooked carrots. Within two years, girls were taking shop class and boys were learning to cook, and I was being encouraged in the high school arena to set my sights high, because women were now truly free of the “bondage” of homemaking to be and do anything they wanted.  Today, life skills classes are rare.   Children are more apt to take technology classes than they are home economics.  Ironically, it’s  much easier today to find a recipe on the Internet than it is to follow its directions.

Despite my schooling, however, I was still in for some truly big surprises when I married because I had learned little at home about food preparation.  With almost no money my husband and I had much to learn about how to plan menus and meals on a budget, how to shop specials and maximize coupon values, how to read labels and stretch meals by making soups or casseroles that also served as work lunches later in the week.  Neither of us knew how to use a slow cooker, or make a healthy sack lunch, or can or freeze foods, or how to make traditional foods in healthier ways.  We didn’t even know how much milk to buy for two people, or what kind of milk to get, and had to phone home for directions when making our first pot roast (we promptly received a Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook the next Christmas which is still in use to this day).  We only knew how to make macaroni and cheese from a box, and had no clue how to grow our own garden or process its abundance for year-round consumption.

However, just out of graduate school, starting my first job, and embracing all it meant for a woman to be highly educated and employed, my biggest adjustment came with the realization that I had no sense of what it meant to serve with any shred of self-sacrifice.  After six years of university food service, I had never once considered that getting food on the table for my own family might take time, planning, sacrifice, and a less me-centered attitude. It took me by surprise (shock might be a better term) to discover that having a somewhat food-averse spouse meant that, unless I was willing to live on Cocoa Puffs and frozen pepperoni pizza, the responsibility for getting food from store to pantry, and from pantry to table was going to lie squarely and solely on my shoulders for the next fifty years or more.[1]  I was overwhelmed and far, far under-prepared for this role.  What’s more, income from our entry-level jobs in Washington, D.C. did not bring in enough money for entertaining others at our table once our tithe and living expenses were covered.[2]  Not that it mattered; I did not know how to cook for a crowd anyway.

Not long after, as a new mother, I had no idea what to feed this little girl after she was weaned, nor how much.  Is it true she shouldn’t have cow’s milk until after her first birthday?  What should we do when she refuses a food?  Is there a way to prevent her father’s food aversions from rubbing off on her? How should we teach her acceptable behavior at the dinner table?  What foods are dangerous for toddlers? How in heaven’s name is this supposed to work?  There we were with a baby, living far from our own families.  I thank God for my dietitian friend Eileen at church, whom I kept on speed dial.  She helped set me on a path of understanding about food, foodways, service to my family, and the importance of the shared meal.[3]

Today, our daughter lives in Paris. As a matter of fact, I am writing this piece from Paris. Just last weekend, the two of us took a Market Cooking class from Chef Lise at La Cuisine Paris.   lacuisine-paris    We toured the local market, selecting duck legs, 3 fine cheeses, beet root, white asparagus, blood oranges, strawberries, turnip, and several fresh herbs to take back to the kitchen-classroom and learn how to make a French feast, including duck a l’orange (see the featured image). It was a wonderful day of sharing the kitchen and table with each other and 6 strangers.

I encourage you to start cooking more often.  Be on the lookout for easy and affordable recipes that you can use when you invite someone to a simple meal.  If you have children at home, involve them in the planning, shopping, and preparation of the meal- it is an important way of teaching them about hospitality and sharing.

In the next post, we will consider how the shared meal (especially the evening meal) as a practice, in particular a Christian practice, has the potential for both common and sacred relationships in the daily lives of believers.

Until then, bon appetit!

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

[1] Lest you think poorly of my husband, let me defend him here.  Although he cannot cook and his tastes and texture issues create significant limits, he is the world’s best dishwasher.  We have always shared kitchen responsibilities with unspoken devotion; we share shopping, I prep and cook, he cleans.  It is a beautiful arrangement.  Chapter six will explore these duties in the context of family and food.

[2] I should note here that our apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland was directly across the street from my husband’s office.  As I was not yet working full time, my husband would frequently call around 11:45 a.m. to say he was bringing a coworker home for lunch.  I quickly learned to put out a simple meal that didn’t break the bank, and have always been grateful to him for helping me learn (to unbend really) to trust God to make the “bread and fish” multiply so that there was always more than enough to go around.

[3] As an example, Eileen invited me to drive out to a farm to pick broccoli one day.  I had never known that the “U-Pick” concept extended beyond apples, strawberries, and Christmas trees.  When I got home with about eight pounds of broccoli I had to undertake a crash course in prepping it all for the freezer.  We were graced with months of fresh farm-to-table and highly nutritious broccoli that winter.  It is still a family favorite to this day.

 

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12. Is There Food on Your Table?

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

In Acts 2:42, we are told about the first believers:  “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer… All the believers were together and had everything in common (v. 44)… They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all people.” (v. 46-47)

A study of the communal meal practice of the first century church reveals a radically different model from our present-day attitudes toward shared meals.[1]  Why did their shared meal practices disappear over time, and why, today, do our foodways and mealways look so different?  A foodway is an accepted term that describes the habits and practices of food consumption and production in a cultural, social, or economic context, and shows us “how societies construct notions of self and community.” [2],[3]

The North American approach to food has shifted most dramatically in the past forty years, and seems absurdly paradoxical even for Christians because our foodways swing between two poles, one of apathy and ignorance, the other of obsessive and compulsive control. We now have 24-7 cooking shows on television, yet very few of us actually cook anymore.  We say we have no time to eat, but most of us are overweight, a symptom of eating too much too often.  Time is scarce, while cheap (and unhealthy) food is overabundant.  We spend millions of dollars each year on dieting (i.e. we spend more in an attempt to eat less).  Some of us overdo, while others do nothing; some of us are indifferent to our health and healthcare, while others’ anxiety about their health creates fanatical control issues.  Most people shun regular exercise while others spend far too many self-absorbed hours in the gym. We either become overly fastidious about the quality of our food sources, or we consume vast amounts of processed foods we know are not good for us.  (As one example, boxed cereal, a highly processed food, once promoted as just one part of a healthy breakfast, has become the default nighttime ‘meal’ when we are short on time, energy, or creativity.)  Our dining and kitchen tables are repositories for mail and school papers rather than places for a shared meal.

Since the dawn of time, people have been hunters, gatherers, farmers and shepherds.  Today we are much more disconnected from understanding how food reaches our tables.  At home and at church, we take pride in our manicured lawns and landscaping, but rarely consider using the church property to grow food for others with no land.  It seems that we are hungry, but not for food, and that Christians in particular need to think and pray about their own selected foodways and mealways.

Thoughtfulness can go a long way to help us find a healthy middle ground where food and meals are concerned.

“To grow food and eat in a way that is mindful of God is to collaborate with God’s own primordial sharing of life in the sharing of food with each other.  It is to participate in forms of life and frameworks of meaning that have their root and orientation in God’s caring ways with creation… Food is about the relationships that join us to the earth, fellow creatures, loved ones and guests, and ultimately God.  How we eat testifies to whether we value the creatures we live with and depend upon… When our eating is mindful, we celebrate the goodness of  [all creation has to offer], and…acknowledge and honor God as the giver of every good and perfect gift.”[4]   In other words, we must relearn what it means to care about, and care for all creation, including ourselves.

Perhaps even more importantly, our inattention to meals and cooking means we have stopped teaching our children about foodways and meal practices (mealways).[5]  In my experiential nutrition class a few years ago, I handed a bunch of fresh carrots from the farmers’ market to a student to peel.  I can still see him standing at the sink, carrots in hand, exclaiming with confusion that these could not possibly be carrots, because in his world all carrots were the size of one’s pinky finger and had no peel or green leafy tops.

Fortunately, young people are beginning to show a resurgent interest in healthy (and just) ways to grow, prepare, and share food!

[1] A subsequent chapter discusses the meal practices of the early Church in detail.

[2] Angel F. Mendez-Montoya, The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p.6.

[3] I have coined the term “mealway” to describe the general habits and practices surrounding how a society or culture consumes meals.

[4] Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. xiii, 4

[5] This is a critically important point, as we will see.  Much is learned in the kitchen and around the table that actually has little to nothing to do with food.