Truffles Quarterly

Jennifer Steinhauer is appalled that other moms in her well-to-do West Coast milieu are not bringing home-baked goods to bakesales. She mentions that "moms" are the culprits, with wording that might suggest she'll have a more egalitarian approach, but then doesn't question that moms and moms alone need to step it up. Not once are "fathers," "dads," or "men" brought up. It's strikingly unapologetic wimmin, kitchen, argument, with the notable caveat that this particular wommin is a journalist for the NYT, and thus not a housewife.

As someone too old to be bakeselling (or is that how to fund humanities departments?), too young (in my academic milieu, if not biologically) to have school-age children, this isn't an issue I give much thought to. If I didn't reflect on it, I'd probably agree with Steinhauer that "bakesale" implies something that was, you know, baked by the person (or a parent of the person) bringing it in.

I'm blogging the article in part because in one part of one of the sentences, the principle flaw of the food-movement approach is (inadvertently) as clearly laid-out as I've ever seen it: 

"Some pull out the 'lack of time' card when it comes to baking (though in truth, Rice Krispie treats take less time to make than going to Safeway for cookies) [.]"

Unless you have a marshmallow tree in your backyard, you're going to the store. Either on a special trip, or picking up bakesale goods while doing the rest of your shopping. If you have to do something with what you bought at the store, i.e. if you must then cook, like with ingredients, this is in addition to the time you spent shopping. Cooking takes more time and energy than not cooking. This may seem obvious, but rather than pointing to the other factors that compensate for this (i.e. home-cooked is often tastier, healthier, cheaper), food-movement sorts feel compelled to claim that from-scratch is effortless. Those who think cooking is exhausting, that there are better uses of free time, are, they want you to know, mistaken. 

Writers like Steinhauer completely misconstrue what the "'lack of time' card" is about. It's not that there is literally no time, that in "times like these" everyone's working from literally when they wake up to when they go to sleep. It's that the time is, as determined by those whose time it is, better-spent doing something else. Yes, that "something else" might be recuperating from a long day of work in front of the TV for three hours. But that doesn't mean those are three hours that could perfectly well be spent whipping up a meal. I mean, they could and they couldn't. It might mean being more exhausted at work, or (because guess what, the person being asked to make this tradeoff is a laydee) this sentiment known as resentment. After a long day, I have to work more?

Note also the arbitrary divide between prepackaged (bad!) and homemade (good!). The dessert in question - which I myself have never been known to turn down - is made from ingredients that are about as food-industry as it gets: a Kellogg's cereal (if one of the least-offensive ones) and marshmallows. This is super-revelatory, as it shows is that the key "ingredient" for food-movement types is kitchen labor. Were you just on your feet in the kitchen when you might have been reclining on the couch? Then there you go.

Much of the article might have come from a food-movement-piece generator. From-scratch is better! Let's emulate our grandmothers! It also hits the usual notes regarding socioeconomic class. There's the usual food-movement scorn for those whose reason for not cooking is something other than the most abject poverty. As always, there must be a disclaimer about how some families are so poor that they can't afford a baking tin, a nod of sympathy for those families, and then a quick switch over to romanticization of those who are not quite as poor, but still too poor (or, in this case, too gloriously Old Country) to buy premade treats:

No question, some people cannot afford the equipment needed to bake, even if they wish to, though flour and sugar are cheaper than Chips Ahoy. And in my observation in the four American cities where I have lived, income does seem to be the underpinning of the problem. 

Indeed, I have witnessed the reverse: the more upscale the community for the bake sale, the fancier the store-bought cookies. (Sprinkles Cupcakes may be the single biggest supplier of bake-sale goods in West Los Angeles.) Lower-income parents, especially first-generation immigrants, often turn up at school parties with the best-tasting homemade treats.

Bad yuppie women! You correctly assessed that your time and energy have significant value in your society, and chose an extra hour at the firm over one over the stove! Meanwhile, note also the YPIS-worthy conflation of those not rich enough to spend $3.25 each (say) for cupcakes for an entire class of kids, and those so poor they can't afford the raw materials to bake from and don't have access to an oven. Speaking on behalf of those who buy flour without a second thought, but who often gasp at the price of  upscale pastry (and imagine buying enough for 20-30 kids!), we're out there, and we're not "lower-income" except insofar as our incomes are lower than... I don't want to resort to OWS lingo, but you see where I'm going with this.

Then things get baffling. Steinhauer also conflates a host of foodie concerns that are rarely found in the same individuals:

It strikes me that all this bake sale corner cutting and potluck shrugging-off are odd anomalies in our ingredient-obsessed, locally sourced lima bean eating, organic milk swilling culture. We objectify food with our smartphones at restaurants, sticking photos with sauces slithering off the plate onto our blogs, and with fancy journals devoted to a single ingredient on our nightstands. 

We stick up our noses at out-of-season blackberries, and compete over the brands of our stoves and dishwashers. We moralize about the family dinner, outdo one another by killing and plucking our own turkeys and plan vacations around a dinner reservation.

Are "we" food-movement post-hippies? Jet-setting gourmands? Yuppies whose high-end, pristine kitchens as good as announce that we don't cook? These may all be well-off predominately-white coastal sorts with some proclaimed interest in food, but they're not the same people, not at all. The fancy-cupcake-bringers aren't an anomaly. They're merely the fancy-unused-oven-owners.

The more I think about the food-movement issue, the more I think its flaws come primarily from the near-unspoken assumption that the "we" who aren't cooking as much as we ought to (and thereby causing the downfall of Western civilization) are women. A movement that's ostensibly progressive, and that's spearheaded largely by men who do in fact cook (Bittman, Pollan, Oliver...) and women who've become so rich and famous from food that they're about as far from housewives as they come (Waters), in theory addresses men and women alike, but in practice, not so much. The question, then, is whether we should ask that these articles at least claim to be addressing men and women alike, or whether when they do just that, they're covering their bases but ignoring the reality of who, precisely, is being told to feel bad about not spending more time in the kitchen.