Jane Jetson's Kitchen

You know what? I'm actually glad I don't live in "the future" as it was seen through the eyes of 1955.

Don't get me wrong: flying cars would be cool. But it seems that everybody in the '50s was so obsessed with time-saving and efficiency that they didn't realize that maybe, we'd actually want to spend time on certain activities. Like cooking.

I've written here before about the evolution of cooking from chore to hobby - which had something to do with time-saving techniques that allowed women to get out of the kitchen at least some of the time. Based on this Popular Science slideshow of "kitchens of the future," the real attitudinal shift - when people started thinking of cooking as fun - didn't happen until well after the mid-20th century.

The kitchen above was designed in the mid-50's and it takes efficiency to a whole new level. The idea was that with the push of just one button, an entire meal - seasoned and all - will be prepared. No need for Wifey to toil away over the stove. Now she's got more time for vacuuming and hospital corners (or martinis).

Do I want it? No. Does it represent a time and a place I'm glad I don't live in? Yes. But am I so, so glad that scanners were invented so that we can preserve it? Absolutely. It's a pretty great reminder that when my grandmother was making dinner, it was a much bigger pain than it is for me today.

Plus, even if the actual technology behind the kitchen misses a few late 20th century trends, I'll tell you what I do like: that mid-century aesthetic. Look at those cabinets and all that stainless steel. Why, it looks like...my kitchen.

Monarch Coffee: It's Got a Story

The company I used to work for, Context Research, has an excellent tag line: Stories Matter. (Context is an ethnographic consulting company, and cultural anthropologists are about nothing if not stories.)

I don't know if it happened while I worked there, or if I found the job there because it had already happened, but at some point, I internalized that message. Stories matter, and everything's better when it comes with a story.

Especially food.

And that is why, after nearly six years of letting it hibernate in its box in the closet, we finally hauled out our brand-new-wedding-shower-gift coffeemaker. Until this week, when we wanted coffee, we went out and bought a Dunkin Donuts Box of Joe. We are that lazy. That inefficiently lazy.

But no more, thanks to Cooper's high school friend Patrick and his wife, Lori. Patrick and Lori live in Denver, but were in town last week for the holidays, and they came bearing gifts. A sheriff's badge and moose t-shirt for Dixon and a package of ground coffee for us.

But not just coffee. The coffee came with a story. You see, the people who sell the coffee (which is called Monarch) are friends of Patrick and Lori's, so they've got a special attachment to the brand. I wish I'd had a video camera to record Lori explaining how cool it was that their friends bought a coffee bean farm in Costa Rica, and turned their house into a roasting facility (imagine how amazing it smells all the time).

It's the kind of story that I like best - a work/life fairy tale. Two people figure out what they're really passionate about, then they figure out a way to turn that into a job. Not everyone can do it, but the ones who can are really lucky.

And as a result, they've created coffee with a great story. Oh, with great flavor and a great aroma, too. I am not, obviously, a coffee connoisseur, but this stuff certainly beats Starbucks (at the very least).

The story alone, though, is worth buying some coffee. Worth buying a coffeemaker, actually.

Artsy Wednesday: Grocery Store Semiotics

A long, long time ago, I was peripherally involved in some semiotic analysis of pubs in North Dublin. That project was, as you might imagine, extremely cool (and kind of funny, since it also included a video diary portion, with participants taping themselves as they got ready to go out and again when they got home from the pub. Priceless.)

Even before the pub project, though, I was interested in how retail spaces - their layouts and graphic elements - influence the way we shop. So, apparently, is Steven Heller. Writing in the NYT, Heller praises Berkshires artist Erin Piester for her hand-drawn signage that frames the produce in Guido's Market in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

The signs are pretty, but I wonder if they're as unique as Heller thinks they are. I have a vague impression of seeing similar signage someplace around here...Atwaters, maybe?

(via @deepglamour)

Michael Pollan on Class, Glamour, Food TV & Lots of Other Stuff

DC Jason just sent me a link to Michael Pollan's NYT manifesto that hits just about every big point that relates to Americans current relationship with food and cooking. It's a brilliant article, really, starting with Pollan's childhood memories (from Julia to Swanson and back, without missing a beat) and closing with the most simple, yet unlikely to materialize, solution to America's obesity problem.

It's long, but well worth a full read. But in the meantime, a few quotes:

Cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child did. In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television.

So-called fancy food has always served as a form of cultural capital, and cooking programs help you acquire it, now without so much as lifting a spatula.

Even the most ordinary dish follows a similar arc of transformation, magically becoming something greater than the sum of its parts. Every dish contains not just culinary ingredients but also the ingredients of narrative: a beginning, a middle and an end. Bring in the element of fire — cooking’s deus ex machina — and you’ve got a tasty little drama right there...

What is on your plate, the choice or selection, or preferences -- or ingredients -- almost any place you are eating, are the end result of movements of people and resources, the punch line of a story usually involving (at some point in history), deprivation, starvation, colonialism, slavery, greed, and warfare. No need for us to get all depressed about that.

The end result of the above -- at least (and only) as far as cuisine -- is more often than not, good. People eat what they eat for a reason. And they tend to cook well for a reason. That reason may no longer exist as a prime motivator -- but it's there if you care to go back and look.

Bourdain's most recent blog post is a good one. He defends some of their choices in terms of editing and country selection and reasserts his desire to keep politics out of the show as much as is practical. While I have a feeling he and I would disagree on some of the finer points of politics, he also seems like someone I wouldn't mind having a political conversation with. He's obviously open to civil discourse.

It's a good post and what motivated me to write about it is right at the beginning. It's not a new idea, but it's still the one that drives me to blog: what we eat (and how we eat) tells the story of who we are, both individually and culturally.

This, of course, is what keeps me up at night, as I study food to try to understand all aspects of all cultures, from the beginning of time.

Food & Gender

Ann Althouse wrote a post this morning about cold soup, starting by mentioning Bourdain and his childhood experience with vichyssoise (he loved it). Reading a couple of other blogs, she notices a comment made by a female blogger, saying that "chilled soups seem to be a tough sell for men."

Althouse references Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, and asks how her readers feel about gendered foods. I think about the fact that I'm making quiche Lorraine for dinner tonight, and Cooper will be perfectly happy with that. He is also very masculine.

I think I do have some preconceived notions about gender and food, but they're not borne out of widespread stereotypes. Instead, they come from my immediate experiences with the guys around me. For instance, I think of rice served without Asian food as somehow feminine, but only because my dad and brother and Cooper don't like it. But quiche, especially the kind that's full of bacon? Totally gender neutral.

I was also wondering if I'd written anything about this subject before. I hadn't exactly, but last summer I did write about an article exploring the differences between the way men and women cook.

One last thought - English is a gender-neutral language, but I wonder how gendered speech connects to connotations about food in other countries. I'm most familiar with French, and somehow I doubt that French men have many hangups about the gender of their food. But I wonder about other cultures...

Quotable Tuesday: The Creative Chef

The problem with food is that it occupies this existential space that is really personal, yet at the same time, it's also a commercial thing. Food is a very, very personal subject, and it's a very subjective subject. And so it becomes a subject that people have strong opinions about. Somehow, there's this strong idea that these restaurateurs and chefs are polluting the idea of what they do by 'commercializing' themselves. But nobody attacks Armani for having A/X, right? Or Ralph Lauren for licensing his name for a fragrance. Or Richard Meier for designing cheap products for Target.

- The New York Observer's Bryan Miller, in David Kamp's The United States of Arugula

Well, yes. So that about sums it up, right. After reading this quote, I almost thought, "Maybe I should just stop blogging. Because that, right there, is what I think."

Miller is talking specifically about people who complain that big name chefs spread themselves too thin, suggesting that if they're not constantly in their own kitchen (like Andre Soltner) then somehow their work doesn't count. I think Miller does a nice job of explaining a) the complicated space that food occupies in our lives, which is similar to that of fashion and b) that chefs are creative personalities - both thinkers and doers.

History probably encourages people to think of chefs as "people who cook", rather than people who think, so it's understandable why people may complain. But there has been a shift in the profession, and technology and communication tools (not to mention a general improvement in cooking skills even among the most entry level employees), all of which has created an environment that frees chefs up to do a little more thinking and oversight, rather than having to actually cook. I'm sure Colicchio can grill a mean steak, but I don't need him to be the one at the grilling station. I'd rather that he spend his time thinking up the recipes, not just executing them.

P.S. Yes, everyone can expect a few more days, at least, of Arugula references. I'm sorry...but the book is just too good.

The Root of Happiness

As I've written here before, I do a lot of reading and thinking about happiness as a general subject. What makes us happy? And how can I be happier? These are questions that aren't necessarily top of mind every day, but they pop up on a regular basis. I read about happiness, I write about happiness. It's like a hobby. (As an aside: I am actually very happy overall. But reading about it makes me feel productive. And that makes me happy, too.)

Apparently I'm not alone. According to this Newsweek article, 8 out of 10 Americans think about their happiness at least once a week. Also according to the article, which is really a semi-review of The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, it's that dedication to the search for happiness that might actually keep Americans from achieving a higher level of the stuff than they have right now.

Weiner, a former NPR correspondent who spent his fair share of time in very unhappy, war-torn locations, wanted to better understand what makes some cultures more prone to happiness than others. America is the 23rd happiest country, according to surveys that simply ask those in the country how happy they are. What Weiner wanted to know was, what's so special about the top 22?

So he visited all of them, as well as Moldova - consistently the least happiest country.

And he found out that...well...I haven't read the book. But according to the reviews I've read, he had a hard time narrowing down his findings. There were no easy political or economic or social factors that determined happiness. Countries with lots of equality and inequality, with strict politics or permissive laws, with diversity or homogeneity. They're all happy.

I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with homogeneity of attitude. People will be happiest if they live somewhere they feel like they fit - at least that's what I'd posit. For some people, that might be a place where everybody has the same color skin or makes the same amount of money; for others, it could be the opposite.

But I'm digressing, because I'd hoped to make this about food. I'm struggling with that, though, because I'd also posit that happiness is easier in countries with amazing food. But that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case. Yes, Thailand is mentioned as one of the places on the list, and by all accounts, the food's amazing. But so is Iceland. And I've seen the No Reservations where Tony has to choke down Icelandic food. It looks bad.

It's possible that I'm just going to have to get it together and read the book, then report back.

Until then, I will try to keep my happiness-searching to a minimum. And maybe then I'll be happier? We'll see.

But What Do YOU Want to See Before You Die?

I'm finding this Althouse post and its comments sort of mesmerizing. As a general rule, I enjoy glancing through books like 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Obviously, I'll never see all those places, but I never would've heard of some of them, either, if not for the book.

Althouse links to an article about the publishing trend toward these types of books, and mentions the oft-forgotten second half of the title: "Before You Die". The half I tend to ignore when I'm flipping through the pages.

In the comments, the discussion turns to the many ways it's possible to fully experience life without visiting your travel agent, book in hand. Several commenters get spiritual in a sort of "eastern" way, basically saying that life is an internal journey, not necessarily a global one. That people who sit still and reflect will learn more than those who jetset without stopping. They're not suggesting that travel is bad, but that blindly following a book's checklist without thought is not exactly the path to enlightenment.

In the middle of the comments, Althouse chimes in with a suggestion:

Maybe everyone should a list of 1000 things that you've found worth seeing within 20 miles of your home. And it's not a list for other people to do and check off. It's an exercise to teach yourself that you are completely in the fascinating world wherever you happen to be. (Excluding some disastrous places.)

Regular commenter Pogo starts listing right away with a couple of powerful (in the emotional way, not, like, the political way) people and places within a block or two of his house. Another regular commenter, Beth, who lives in New Orleans, relates this idea to her post-Katrina experience, watching well-loved institutions immediately or gradually disappear from her life. Both offer a pretty meaningful lesson in appreciation and not taking things for granted.

Obviously, this is about something bigger than food. But food has to be a part of it. For one thing, my list of 1,000 places to see about my home would certainly involve the inside of a lot of restaurants. Not necessarily the Petit Louises (what is the plural of Louis?) either. My list would say things like "See the deck of Carroll's Creek Cafe from a table with a bowl of cream of crab soup in front of you. Preferably on a Wednesday night so you can watch the races. Do this in May or June of 1996."

Beyond my own personal experiences, these days, you can't separate food from travel. It's everywhere you look. Between Bourdain and Zimmern and Samantha Brown and, well, everybody else on the Travel Channel, food and travel are increasingly tied together in the public mind - not just the minds of foodies who have been searching for the most "authentic" of whatever for a handful of years. It can't be long before we see a book called "1,000 Things to Eat Before You Die".

And these are those forces that drive me crazy - the ones that have led to "the insidious rise of cosmo-cuisine", to steal the Abdelnour title. I won't go off on my rant again, though. I've already said enough on that subject.

Finally, because this post is feeling a little heavy (and long) to me...here's the "Stuff White People Like" take on it. It's funny. Because it's true.

Quotable Tuesday: Brillat-Savarin Philosophizes

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

I chose this oft-cited, super famous quote by oft-cited, super famous gastronome and godfather of all food writers, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, for two reasons. First, it is the longer, more nuanced version of the folksy phrase "you are what you eat" - it's familiar for a reason. Because it's true.

Of course, the added texture in the Brillat-Savarin edition evokes something a little more elaborate than the traditional American phrasing. Growing up, my interpretation of "you are what you eat" went something like this: "if I eat my vegetables, then I'm healthy, so I'm good." It had nothing to do with enjoyment or appreciation, just a vaguely Puritanical sense of obligation to be a better person through healthy eating.

Examining the quote in light of today's ethical eating discussion brings out some of the same feelings in me (just modify "vegetables" with "locally grown, organic and seasonal"). But I am nearly positive that wasn't Brillat-Savarin's original intent.

Which brings me to the second reason why it's appropriate to kick off the "quotable" feature with this particular phrase. Brillat-Savarin eloquently (and briefly) captures something that I try to explore through blogging: how food defines us as individuals and cultures (and how we make food choices based on our backgrounds).

Ultimately, it sounds like Brillat-Savarin was the very first food anthropologist...

Food, Traditions, Culture

Last week, I mentioned that my favorite part of cooking and entertaining happens just before the meal goes on the table - when it's still all mine, and full of potential. Over the weekend, though, I realized that what I said is not necessarily true all the time. Oh, it's true that I'm selfish most of the time, but maybe not so much during the holidays.

I cooked my ass off this weekend, almost all for other people, and I loved it. But my favorite parts of the weekend were definitely when I was with those other people.

I don't think this is a change in my attitudes so much a by-product of Christmas. In I Must Have Ate Too Much (which I just finished), Jeffrey Steingarten writes about Thanksgiving, saying,

“In the United States, we have the grandest plat convivial of them all, the
holiday turkey, which we share with 245 million other Americans, including the
members of the armed forces, for whom the government spares no expense in
jetting turkeys about the globe. There is an uncanny and intoxicating sense fo
oneness in enjoying a dish with a quarter billion of your fellows. No fussy
eating allowed, no irrational preferences or aversions, no cultish diet fads or
hypochondria. Just feasting and drinking together, essential and fundamental
nourishment, plus lots of trimmings.”

In my "real work" life, I spend my days analyzing research, often trying to understand the unspoken traditions and connections that make a culture what it is (then, of course, I try to figure out how to sell into that culture, but I digress.) When I read Steingarten's comments on Thanksgiving, they hit home for me. Because cooking for me really isn't just a personal transcendent experience, it's also one that connects me to all other people - literally to the entire world.

A few weeks ago, I was emailing with a former colleague - someone from my ethnography days - and I mentioned that I had a food blog. He made the comment that the food bloggers he knows all have such interesting things going on outside of their blogs. They have crazy lives outside of food. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call my life "interesting" - certainly not "crazy" - but I like his point: those who love food often make every effort to live great lives.

I think this ties into what the Manolo wrote a few weeks ago. If you really love food, just as if you really love fashion, or art, or music, or literature, your appreciation can't exist in a vaccuum. It's really an appreciation that stems from the desire to learn about culture.

Of course, no chef can do this much thinking all the time. Sometimes we need to just get dinner on the table. But even then we can remember that even the most mundane meals are so much more than a combination of ingredients.

The Selfish Cook

I believe I’ve mentioned here before that, through past research and more recent observations, I’ve realized that people who love to cook fall into two utterly distinct categories. For the first, the people who love cooking because they love providing for and taking care of others, an audience is an absolutely necessary ingredient for gratification. You just can’t take care of someone who’s not there.

But for the second, those selfish cooks who do it for the love of the process and for the food itself, someone to cook for is merely icing on the proverbial cake. Again, as I have mentioned before, I am one of these cooks. The selfish sort.

Sure, it’s always wonderful to hear about what a good cook I am, or how beautifully my table’s been set, but really, the rush I get from cooking peaks before any guest has a chance to comment on my creation. Just before, in fact. At the final moment I am in the kitchen, after I’ve plated the food, arranging it in artful, yet uncontrived, and always aesthetically pleasing jumbles on my pristine white plates. That last second I’m alone, before the meal shifts from personal to social. That is when the endorphins are highest. As much as I love sitting around a dinner table, drinking wine, talking and eating, it’s the moments just before, effort expended, next minutes filled with potential, that make entertaining worth it.