Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  COOKING ISN’T FUN

  By Tracie McMillan

  From Slate

  Tangled issues of food, class, poverty, and social justice lie at the heart of Tracie McMillan’s investigative journalism. As a coda to her provocative 2011 book The American Way of Eating, this essay challenges the easy assumptions that many foodies make about how Americans should cook and eat.

  It took me until I was 33 to start cooking dinner.

  Don’t get me wrong—I was no stranger to the kitchen. I had prepared laborious, extravagant meals before, often using exotic ingredients I’d learned about in magazines. My sisters and I had bonded in the kitchen, spending visits preparing elaborate dishes together for hours. Cooking had been everything the food world told me it could be: a way to engage with a community, to travel without leaving home, to respect the local environment, to look after my own health. I nodded along with the eminences of the food world, convinced that their shared conclusion was the pinnacle of truth: Americans just don’t cook enough, and we desperately need to cook more. Our health, our civility, our culture depend on it!

  And yet, even while espousing the ideals of the communal table and cross-cultural exploration, I rarely cooked dinner for myself in my 20s. Where was the fun in that? My sisters and I would groan to ourselves when my stepmother implored us not to cook Christmas dinner. (Her reasoning: It was too much work and we could just get Costco lasagna and be done with it.) But when left to my own devices, I would feed myself almost anything so long as I didn’t have to turn on the stove. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say I cooked a meal once a week and otherwise made do with hummus and pita, or cereal, or crackers and cheese and olives. I liked to commune with the foodie writers but not enough to cook every day.

  Which brings me to the dirty little secret that I suspect haunts every food writer: When you have no choice but to cook for yourself every single day, no matter what, it is not a fun, gratifying adventure. It is a chore. On many days, it kind of sucks.

  I might have gone to my grave denying this fundamental truth if I hadn’t reported a book that had me living and eating off minimum wage (and less). While working at Wal-Mart in Michigan, I stocked up on bulk items, foolishly using middle-class logic (“great unit price!”) instead of working-class smarts (“save enough cash for rent plus small emergencies”). I soon ran out of money and found myself hungry and exhausted, staring down a pantry containing little more than flour, coconut flakes, a few scraggly vegetables, and two frozen chicken thighs. There was nothing about this scene that inspired me to cook. The ingredients were boring. There were no friends bringing over bottles of wine. I had left my glossy food magazines in New York.

  But there would be no calling Papa John’s for pizza or stopping at Trader Joe’s for premade lasagna or a selection of fine cheeses; my $8.10 an hour precluded that. I had two choices: consume raw flour and cauliflower, or cook. By dint of my newfound poverty, I had lost the third option—the escape hatch, really—that most middle-class people take for granted: eating without having to cook. Once subjected to the tyranny of necessity, I found that making my meals from scratch wasn’t glamorous at all.

  There are many good reasons to cook meals from scratch. Cooking simply at home from whole ingredients is often cheaper, per serving, than heading out to a restaurant—even a fast-food restaurant. Food made at home usually has far less salt and fat than either processed foods or what’s on offer in eateries. And, contrary to popular belief, families don’t save much time by turning to box meals like Hamburger Helper rather than cooking entirely from scratch. Researchers at UCLA found that, whether using processed foods or whole ingredients, American families spend about 52 minutes preparing their dinner every night.

  So the big question is, if cooking from whole ingredients is so easy and cost-effective and healthy, why don’t Americans do it more—particularly the low-income ones who are affected the most by obesity? This is a much trickier question than it seems because it implicitly evokes two pernicious myths about Americans’ cooking habits that I uncovered in the course of my reporting.

  The first myth here is that the poor do not cook. We tend to think that low-income Americans are flooding McDonald’s, while more affluent citizens dutifully eat better meals prepared at home. In reality, it is the middle class that patronizes the Golden Arches and its competitors. (That’s because fast food may be cheap, but it’s still more expensive than cooking at home.) Indeed, beneficiaries of the Agriculture Department’s food-stamp program (officially known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) typically spend far more time than other Americans preparing their meals. (This trend may shift in the future, as some states have begun allowing some subsets of SNAP recipients to redeem their food stamps for fast-food meals.)

  The second myth is that cooking is easy. Making food quickly and well is easy once you know how to do it, but it is a learned skill, the acquisition of which takes time, practice, and the making of mistakes. To cook whole foods at a pace that can match box-meal offerings, one needs to know how to make substitutions on the fly; how to doctor a dish that has been overvinegared, oversalted, or overspiced; how to select produce and know how long you have to use it before it goes bad; how to stock a pantry on a budget. Without those skills, cooking from scratch becomes risky business: You may lose produce to rotting before you get the chance to cook it, or you may botch a recipe and find it inedible. Those mistakes are a natural part of learning to cook, but they will cost you and your family time, ingredients, and money without actually feeding you. They also make a persuasive case that cooking is not worth the trouble and that Hamburger Helper is worth the cost.

  There’s not much acknowledgment of these truths in the current discussion about the benefits of cooking. Instead, we divide ourselves into two opposing camps—“those who cook” and “those who don’t care.” When the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding—instead of copping to the fact that it can also be annoying, time consuming, and risky—we alienate the people who don’t have the luxury of choice, and we unwittingly reinforce the impression that cooking is a specialty hobby instead of a basic life skill.

  So here’s my proposition for foodies and everyone else: Continue to champion the cause of cooking, but admit that cooking every day can be a drag. Just because it’s a drag doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it—we do things every day that are a drag. We take out the trash, we make our beds, we run the vacuum, we pay the bills. These are not lofty cultural explorations, but they are necessary, and so we do them anyway.

  This reality check is exactly what’s missing from our discussion about our meals. At least, it’s what was missing from mine. Three years after my stint at Wal-Mart, I’ve gotten over the idea that cooking is fun—or that it is even supposed to be fun. Sometimes it’s not. It certainly wasn’t when I was working at Wal-Mart, especially that first night when I lurched my way around the kitchen and came up with a makeshift chicken curry with cauliflower and onion over biscuits. I grumbled to myself the whole time, but I ate well and physically felt good for several days after without spending an additional penny thanks to leftovers.

  Today, my approach to cooking is completely flipped from my pre-Wal-Mart days. I now think of it not as a choice but as a chore—and that’s been oddly freeing. I no longer fret over what fabulous recipe I’ll make. I don’t try to psych myself up, to frame cooking as a fun event with which to entertain myself. (When I find myself whining internally about having to cook, I find the following phrase to be useful: “Suck it up, buttercup.”) I remind myself that I do all kinds of things that aren’t fun in the name of living a reasonably mature life, and then I cook something from scratch, just like the Mark Bittmans, Michael Pollans, and Alice Waterses of the world suggest.

  THE MEANING OF LOCAL

  By Todd Kliman

  From The Washingtonian

  In a city swarming with pollsters and politicians, the D.C. restaurant scene can easily get overheated
. Enter the voice of reason: Washingtonian dining critic Todd Kliman, who keeps things honest with his monthly restaurant reviews and weekly online chats.

  Several years ago, I was at dinner with a friend, a fellow food lover, a man for whom dining out is preferable to virtually every other form of human interaction. The meal was no joy for either of us. It was mediocre and expensive, and I said so with a sigh when the check came.

  “It was honest,” my friend said, leaping to defend what had seemed to me indefensible.

  The chef was known for sourcing locally and from small farmers. He had cultivated these purveyors, had worked with them to come up with products he wanted, and he aimed to present them as cleanly as possible, without engaging in kitchen tricks that might mask the purity of his raw materials. He was honest—in other words, he didn’t go in for cheap, processed products and try to pass them off on the dining public. He valued the small farmers who worked so hard to put out high-quality goods. He did things “the right way.”

  My friend was therefore willing to extend to the chef the benefit of the doubt.

  Me, I was peeved that he had squandered ingredients that a chef at a family-run Ethiopian or Vietnamese restaurant, tasked with turning frozen poultry and veggies into tasty dishes, would have regarded as a special treat. Peeved that, not for the first time, a chef seemed to have labored under the notion that credit was given for good intentions.

  I’ve since had countless meals like this and countless conversations with true believers who worry that I’m not grasping the urgency of their message.

  In the last 30 years, “local” has evolved from an ideology to a movement to something that looks suspiciously like an ism: more important than any single chef or restaurant—more important, too, than any other philosophy or ideology. It’s so ingrained in the world of food today that it’s all but impossible to talk meaningfully about food without talking about “local.”

  And yet what do we talk about when we talk about “local”?

  Not nearly enough, it turns out.

  A Brief History of Local

  In 1971, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, the restaurant that would forever alter the direction of food in America. From her kitchen in Berkeley, California, she sought the freshest possible ingredients, often from within a few miles of the restaurant.

  Her focus on sourcing locally was, quite literally, a radical statement at a time when factory farming, agribusiness, and chain restaurants had recently cemented their dominance of the food supply. In the world of fine dining, Waters’s shunning of luxury ingredients flown in from Europe, white tablecloths, bowing waiters, and snooty maître d’s had the same bracing effect that punk rock, bubbling up in the culture at that time, had on popular music.

  What Waters was to the West Coast, Nora Pouillon was to the East. In 1979, Pouillon opened Restaurant Nora, on a quiet, leafy block north of DC’s Dupont Circle. Twenty years later, it would become the first certified organic restaurant in the country.

  The designation requires strict adherence: Ninety-five percent of all products in the kitchen must be organic. Restaurant Nora has been eclipsed in the last decade or so by a slew of places spreading her message with greater urgency and excitement, but it’s impossible to deny Pouillon’s influence. Ann Cashion, who went on to create the model for the small locally minded bistro at Cashion’s Eat Place and later at the original Johnny’s Half Shell, got her start under Pouillon, and Ann Yonkers, now codirector of the FreshFarm Markets, worked for her as a recipe tester and cookbook editor.

  Pouillon says her motivation was simply to “find a more natural way to do things.” As a young and idealistic chef, she was troubled to learn that farmers could be allowed to “contaminate the soil and jeopardize families,” so she began driving to farms in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, quizzing farmers about their practices.

  Jean-Louis Palladin was on a similar quest at the Watergate, determined to unearth the products unique not only to America but also to his chosen patch of the world. Palladin was concerned mainly with distinctiveness, not purity, but he and Pouillon frequently found themselves in the same company.

  Pouillon eventually settled on a group of purveyors who were as committed and passionate as she was. She also began organizing bus tours, taking chefs to Pennsylvania to introduce them to the farmers important to her. From these trips emerged Tuscarora Organic Growers, a collective of Pennsylvania farmers that many area restaurants today turn to for their meats and produce.

  It wasn’t enough, Waters and Pouillon and others argued, for food to taste good. It had to be good. A chef might be armed with a battery of techniques to transform his or her raw materials, but if those materials weren’t superlative to begin with, Waters wasn’t interested. Shopping counted as much as cooking.

  It Depends What Your Definition Of “Contiguous” Is

  Of the three dozen food-world personalities I interviewed for this article, none could point to an agreed-upon definition of local.

  From as far north as Pennsylvania to as far south as Virginia was as close to a consensus as I could find. One chef defined local as his ability to “reasonably” drive to and from a farm in a day, a definition that seemed to provide wiggle room for four or even five hours. Another offered the drive-in-a-day yardstick, without the modifier “reasonably,” and I imagined him gunning it deep into the woods of North Carolina for some fresh-killed quail, then turning around and speeding up I-95 in hopes of making it back to his kitchen before his midnight deadline.

  Whole Foods defines local differently for each region of the country. DC belongs to the Mid-Atlantic, which includes New Jersey, Ohio, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Until recently, if you shopped at a Whole Foods in this area, where your meat and produce came from was a matter of “contiguity”—anywhere in a neighboring state was considered local.

  That meant, for example, that tomatoes from North Carolina were considered local in Arlington stores—because North Carolina and Virginia share a border—while those that traveled a shorter distance from New Jersey were not.

  This summer, Whole Foods is changing to a new definition, under which foods grown within about 100 miles or in the same state as the store will be considered local.

  But if there’s no agreed-upon definition of what local is, that means it can be anything at all, and it’s simply how a chef or restaurant or farmer or business chooses to define it. It means the term is essentially meaningless, a point Emily Sprissler drove home rather decisively when I rang her up at Mayfair & Pine, a British gastropub in DC’s Glover Park that has since closed.

  “America,” Sprissler declared, “is my local.”

  Was she saying local is a limitation?

  “I don’t find it limiting. I just don’t pay attention to it.”

  A comparison between France and America followed, along with a discussion of economies of scale. “Look, France is the size of Texas,” she said. “It’s easy to get anything you want there, and quickly, and it’s all great. If I’m only going to get products within a hundred miles or whatever, [the definition] is limiting.”

  Here Sprissler stopped herself, perhaps realizing she’d come dangerously close to branding herself a heretic in the church of local. She began again, choosing her words more carefully: “I’m trying as hard as I can, from toilet paper to tenderloin, to put American products in my restaurant. I’m giving my money to another American so that they can keep their job and put food on their table. I do a miso chicken—there’s a company in Massachusetts that makes its own miso, and it’s amazing. There’s a lot of amazing products out there, and I don’t care if they’re from Michigan or Wyoming.”

  She was proud. Proud and defiant and convinced of the rightness of her approach. And she ought to be, both because it was hers and because it seemed a chance to expose her diners to the best artisanally made products from around the country.

  But what did it say that she seemed so determined to align herself with the local m
ovement, even as she rejected its core tenets?

  Inherently Better?

  Let’s look at the foundations of the local movement—the arguments that are most often advanced to make the case not merely for its worth but for its necessity:

  Local reduces our “carbon footprint.”

  The phrase is eco-shorthand for the fuel expenditures an ingredient generates before it lands on the table. It’s less simple than it sounds, a romantic notion only sometimes supported by the data.

  Eggs that have been trucked in from 50 miles away or less are no great environmental stressor, but when the definition of local is as loose as it is, 50 miles is seldom to be counted on.

  And not all methods of delivery are equal. One restaurateur told me he’s constantly wrestling with questions such as: “Is a large 18-wheeler coming from 80 miles away better than 50 pickup trucks bringing the same ingredients from 50 miles away?”

  I told him that sounded like an SAT question.

  Right, he said. And with no correct answer.

  Local is good for the local economy.

  This would appear to be true. As it would be true for giving your money to any small, independently owned business in your neighborhood.

  The problem is the notion that this money is a driver of the local economy. You’re supporting a person who presumably spends that money locally. But of course, how many of us do? We live in a global, interconnected world where Amazon and others have displaced the neighborhood store, making shopping cheaper, faster, and more efficient.

  One thing we can be sure of is that supporting a local producer helps keep that producer in business, and that is indeed a very good thing.