Ten years ago, cooking shows were synonymous with chubby, funny middle-aged men who uttered taglines like “Bam!” and “Kick it up a notch!” and “If Yan can cook, so can you!”
But reality television has been a game-changer for the food industry. It‘s no longer just an indie thing to have a refined palate. Food snobbery is in.
Salad dressings have to be made from scratch, produce must be organic, gluten and refined sugar are synonymous with the devil. And ethnic food is hot, hot, hot (and I’m not just talking temperature).
I’ll admit it: I’m a foodie. But I haven’t always been.
When I was 20, I was aware of the importance of eating healthy. But I was completely unconvinced of its benefits; to me, it was a matter of calorie counting. If my ideal weight meant that I could only consume 1,500 calories a day, then so what if 500 of those 1,500 calories consisted of a Double Chocolate Espresso Brownie Express? The summer I turned 20 was the summer I moved out on my own. I was thrilled with the freedom and overwhelmed by the responsibility. Feeding myself turned out to be particularly challenging.
Cooking for one is no small feat. It takes a special brand of creativity and discipline that I simply couldn’t muster. So I survived like your stereotypical (male) college freshman. Ice cream (for breakfast usually), Kraft Dinner, and fast food (fried chicken was a favourite). I could often be found sitting around Other Peoples’ family dinner tables, wiping my brow in relief that I had scored another a home-cooked meal.
I gained about thirty pounds that summer.
Transitioning violently from that lifestyle to married life, to parenthood all within the space of a year was, needless to say, a shock to my system. I already had trouble feeding myself — now my husband and I had to feed each other. And we had to start thinking about feeding a baby! Thus marked the beginning of my long and difficult battle with cooking.
Though my husband had no biases about gender roles, he had zero interest in food other than in tasting and consuming it. And though my Hatred for cooking carried a capital H, my interest was just slightly more developed than his. And after we both completed our graduate degrees, I chose to work part-time and he, full-time. So cooking fell to me.
Necessity drove me to the following formula. You are human. You need food. If you don’t cook, then you eat out. If you eat out, then you get really unhealthy and you waste a lot of money. Cooking is paramount. It shames me to confess this — my problem was so thoroughly a first world one. But there it is. Laziness and entitlement collided.
We ended up doing homestay for two of my younger siblings through their college years and we had another child. Slowly, prayerfully and surely, I picked up enough experience to be able to put good food on the table with minimal stress.
As the decade passed and as I finally began to win my battle against food, my head emerged from the cloud of my personal struggle. I looked up to see that people in their 20s are by no means suffering from the same culinary learning disability that had so tormented me. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution had triggered its domino effect. Millennials enjoyed food, and not just eating it. Food was an art, a past-time, a hobby. Palates were refined and cooking was cool.
It seems that my personal battle with cooking predated an inevitable shift in my relationship with food and culture. Even if I hadn’t languished under the weight of unwanted responsibility, would I have eventually discovered (insert Gordon Ramsay barking in your ear here) that food isn’t just bloody sustenance; it’s passion!?!
Though I’m now riding this wave of cultural transformation, it intrigues me to see the parallels between what postmoderns are willing to ingest into our stomachs and what we want to feed into our souls. We cry out for authenticity, diversity and freshness. We want to be discerning. We want to be sophisticated.
Although my struggle is an antiquated one, the spiritual principle is relevant still. We desperately need God’s grace to weed out the entitlement and laziness that does not just plague a generation, but eats away at human nature.
I need to be reminded that good taste and the ability to use it are gifts from God. And that these gifts can be misused. I need to hold and enjoy them humbly, so that I can eat and be filled in order to enter that weirdly evolving space called culture. And then be, as Christ says, the salt and the light of the world.
Flickr photo (cc) by -Phill-MV
