I think one of the hardest things to do as a cook is balance between your ethics and what “tastes good.” Fast food is designed to taste good. In the basic sense of “tasting good,” it succeeds – it’s full of fat and salt and sugar, and those things tend to agree with people’s palates. I mean, truly – it’s designed in a lab to have favorable flavor compounds that people desire. That doesn’t necessarily make fast food evil, although the people who market and sell it are probably evil people. But fast food is easy – it’s easy to load up food with crap and sell it to addicts. What’s harder is to take really good stuff – seasonal vegetables and sustainably-raised meat –and make it appeal to a general public raised on fast food and chain restaurants.
When I began cooking none of this was that important to me. I was a vegetarian for vaguely moral reasons, mostly dating back to my early teenage punk rock years, when many of the bands I listened to espoused vegetarianism because of animal mistreatment and suffering. At age 14 it’s almost impossible to think critically about anything, let alone about something as esoteric as food production and sustainability, especially when those ideas about food were so far off. I turned 14 in 1988 and I can assure you, if there had been any such thing as “slow foods” or sustainability or heirloom produce I would have been about the last to know about it. Especially because it didn’t exist.
After being a vegetarian for about 14 years, I eventually realized that not all meat production was as bad as Crass* had made it out to be. There were farmers who cared about their animals, farmers who raised their animals the right way, and as long as I could put aside any lingering objections I had to the notion of any animal dying so I could eat, eating meat was okay. It was a big leap for me, and it took me several more years before I became really comfortable with the idea of eating meat in a restaurant. I still had morals about it; they had just shifted.
If you read even the slightest bit about food, you probably know that the politics of farming, processing, sale and production has undergone a sea change over the last decade. The battle lines are no longer drawn over “vegan vs. vegetarian” or “organic vs. conventional” but rather framed in more specific terms: local, sustainable, heritage, heirloom, biodynamic, humane, free-range, grass-fed. We actually talk about these things with some semblance of knowledge; we actually know our farmers. We know where our food comes from in ways we never could have imagined even ten years ago. It’s an exciting time to be a cook; it’s an exciting time to be an eater. We have access to so much good stuff now that it’s almost embarrassing.
As for me, this wave of information has coincided almost exactly with my own personal education about food. Many years ago I moved beyond the notion that food was simply a means to an end, and started thinking more concretely about its production and distribution and about my place in the food chain. My self-awareness overlapped with some of the most important moments in food thought: Carlo Petrini’s “Slow Food,” a manifesto of the movement and, of course, Michael Pollan’s “the Omnivore’s Dilemma,” still the go-to book for a comprehensive philosophy of how we should eat and why. I’m grateful to have come of age as a cook in these times. It’s exciting and gratifying. Making a great stewed chicken is one thing; making it from a chicken that I bought from the farmer and knew its upbringing is an entirely different kind of satisfaction.
As much as I want to teach people to cook and give hints and make this blog a fun, food-oriented space, I also want to share the discoveries I’ve learned over the last few years and how my eyes have been opened to the important role that food plays in our lives, and how best to respect the incredible bounty we’ve got to work with. It’s a cook’s world now. Time to roll up our sleeves and get to cooking.
(*Crass was an extremely political punk-rock band that concerned itself with vegetarianism, sexism, anti-war, class issues, etc. Their politics and lyrics were pretty much right-on, although a bit mawkish, but their music, viewed in hindsight, is just outright terrible. They’re the kind of band that means a lot more when you’re 14.)
