How to Eat
I was talking with Joseph Yang the other day about what I eat – he noted that I don’t eat a lot, though I do intake a fair amount of junk food. It got me thinking about one of the major life skills that we’re never really taught: how to eat properly.
Sure, our parents are supposed to teach us “how to eat right”, but that’s easier said than done. When you’re a kid, it’s hard not to eat right (of course, your experience may vary with your parentage). You’re not actually involved in the process of deciding a menu, shopping for the food, and preparing it. You just eat. Even the gross stuff is still easy to eat when it’s already prepared for you.
Once you’re out on your own, it’s an entirely different story. What did I eat in university? Hmm. Wow, I’m totally blanking. I know I ate perogies. And meat, there was some meat (possibly hamburgers?) in there somewhere. And pasta, the old standBy. I seem to recall bacon, but the only real image I’m getting is of a puddle of grease in a pan, and that could have been left by the hamburgers. Thinking back on it now, it’s amazing I lived this long once I left home. As students, we all heard horror stories of foreign graduate students dying from malnutrition because all they ate was Ramen noodles, in an attempt to save money. Were we doing any better than the guy with the chopsticks, face down in his bowl in a dorm room somewhere?
Probably not.
The sum total of my culinary training is as follows: boil water, insert (eggs) or (pasta) or (soup mix), wait ten minutes, eat. Even “home economics” in junior high didn’t prepare me. Pita pizza pockets? Why bother learning how to make those yourself, when science and the microwave provided the same feast, ready to nuke? I wasn’t even out of junior high and already my cooking skills were obsolete.
Half the time, we’re just too tired to plan, tired to shop, tired to cook. What would really improve the situation would be a tool that allowed people to plan their meals, providing recipes and generating grocery lists and meal plans with a few clicks of a button. Or better yet, a site that you can tell what you have in your larder, and it will tell you how to make something with the ingredients you already have at hand.
Then again, I guess there are limits to what such a system could do: I doubt it could help you make a meal entirely out of condiments.
Have you read “Fast Food Nation” yet? I’m currently reading it right now, and it is making for both a disturbing and fascinating read. It is truly shocking to see just how pervasive that industry really is.
Makes me wonder if the McWifi is really worth it.
Oh yeah – I especially enjoyed the part in that book where the OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) was stripped of its ability to recall tainted meat in the Reagan administration. This is the same agency that has the power to recall toys due to the risk of a choking hazard, yet it can no longer recall tainted meat without the meat packer’s consent.
Yeah, there’s something to be said for how the fast food industry has twisted our perception of what constitutes healthy eating. Is part of our inability to plan our proper meals due to our addiction to the high salt, high fat food peddled by the likes of McDonald’s?
I think that green eggs taste better, are more relevant than U2 and, when looked at in certain angles, seem more appropriate to the topic at hand.
http://eat.epicurious.com/recipes/enhanced_search/index.ssf/?/recipes/enhanced_search/index.html
That’s a pretty good site – now if they could provide nutrional information, that would be even better. Imagine that web site, plus a planning calendar that tracks your meal choices and lets you know what you’re missing in your diet.
Wonder how hard it would be to cross-ref with this.
I suppose that if you had a standardized recipe template, it wouldn’t be that difficult. You could create a weekly shopping list at the same time as well.
Why bother learning to cook?
Well, my dear learned friend, look one day at the salt content of those oh-so-tasty frozen eatables and you will be in a nasty shock. Look for all the multi syllable preservatives while you are at it.
The homemade version that you lament learning about in high school is: lower in salt; higher in nutritional value; and has less fecal matter (zero in fact!!).
I love cooking. Its very much suited to my personality and has much of the same satifaction that programming gives me; start with an empty pot (project) and in the end you have a meal (application). You get to debug (spicy? bland?), test (hmmmm, tasty) and if you like the results you have code reuse (leftovers)!
The only food I prefer to buy is sushi and shellfish but that is due to their required handling and preparation techniques.
Back in the day, I had a plan for an online grocery system much as you describe. Such a system would not be terribly difficult to implement, and could even become another revenue stream for the vendor — this week’s recipe sponsored by, or pay to have certain ingredients listed as their brand name.
Personally, I stick to non-processed food as much as possible. I always have. Part of this is my upbringing. Both of my parents are from Germany, and when they moved to Vancouver, they found they didn’t really have to adjust their diet all too much — you can get great bread at Andy’s Bakery on commercial, you can go to the Freybe outlet store and get meats and cold cuts, and cheese…well, if you stay away from cheddar, there are some grocery deli counters that have a decent selection.
As for teaching people how to eat…back when I had TV, I remember watching Dr. Phil with Kate. It involved mothers with overweight children. They were passing their own bad eating/knowledge of food onto their kids. There was a 4 year old that weighed almost 200lbs! One of their main excuses wasn’t time, but that buying fresh/unprocessed food was “too expensive”. Dr. Phil did some side by side comparisons, and not only was buying fresh food healthier — it was a lot cheaper, too!
And this is for one-off meals — if you have a freezer handy, you can buy certain things in bulk (economy packs) and portion them out into single servings.
On occasion, Kate and I will spend and evening preparing a bunch of meals to take to work or to just have on hand so we don’t have to go out to eat. It works great, especially for soups, stews, chilis, etc.
Lastly, learning how to cook doesn’t have to be a scary thing. The most important thing is a willingness to experiment. And hey, if all else fails — one of the tastiest things is one of those “Dagwood sandwiches”, where you just pile on the meats, cheeses, vegetables, and condiments….
True enough, Evan, the pre-prepared food available to save time comes at a heavy price. However, the alternative provided in my own culinary education was hardly much better – pita pizza pockets do not a balanced diet make.
True, learning to cook better would be a good idea, but like many people, I really don’t care about the food preparation process itself. I just want to eat and not kill myself (in either the short term, or the long term) in the process. I guess this is the same as how most people approach computers: they don’t care how they work, they just want to write a document or send an email. Food for thought?
Actually that is a scary statement BW. You slave over the information that you put in your body yet you could care less about the fuel that keeps your brain pumping.
I heartily recommend a cooking course for you! 🙂
Alternatively invite yourself and Ash over for dinner some night in the future and I will go through my, albeit small, repetoire of recipies that take less than an hour of cooking/eating/cleaning. You will be eating better AND saving money! I would recommend about 2 weeks as that is when my beer (currently fermenting at the u-brew) will be ready.
Boris has remarked that I am slowest chopper/slicer/knife weilder that he has ever seen, but I still gots all my fingers!
The thing with cooking is that for more people, recipes aren’t the answer. You need to develop an intuitive sense of what things go well together, how they are best cooked, and so on. A lot of this is based on experimentation and lots of practice.
There are dozens of recipe sites online. Any bookstore (new or used) is filled with recipe books. The library has rows and rows of cookbooks, way more than I would have imagined. Yet I often hear of people in the same boat: I have a bunch of stuff in the fridge; what do I do with it?
The problem is similar in nature to that of the computer neophyte. They pidgeon hole themselves into following directions exactly because they’ve had bad experiences before. They cling to information taken from books or courses and are afraid to walk off the beaten path. The irony is that as long as they do that, they are guaranteeing a slow development. Any one of us can sit down in front of 99% of software applications and get them to work, at least at a rudimentary level, even if we’ve never read about the application, or taken a course. We have an intuitive understanding of how computers work.
I think a much more powerful utility would be a way to help those linkages form. What do I have? Tomatoes. Suggest: cilantro & lime, OR basil & oregano, OR …
In short, a companion finder. Maybe select what kind of companion you’re trying to find, be it vegetable, animal, herb, or whatever. By avoiding giving specific recipes, you set people on the path to culinary independance.
I’ve used sites that do that. Sort of. eDiets.com generates meal plans with nutritional content and then gives you a shopping list to print & take to the store. Seattle-area based HomeGrocer.com had recipes where you could have all the ingredients dumped into your virtual shopping basket and delivered to your house.
Unfortunately, eDiets costs money, and HomeGrocer was swallowed up by Webvan.com in 2000 – and then Webvan went under. Likely because they kept building distribution centers & expanding into cities they just couldn’t make money in & their employees had it way too good.
Scott Adams, however, has fixed that entire problem. He created the Dilberito. Technology is finally used for a foodstuff that wouldn’t make Fast Food Nation.