It's a sad state of affairs when we as a society have reduced ourselves to purchasing an oven that we can pour water in and pull a pre-prepped meal from the refrigerator, scan a barcode put that meal in the oven and so many minutes later have a meal on the table and call it dinner. Where is the love? Certainly not from the person that prepped that meal. They don't know you. They don't care. What has happened to us? I'll tell you what happened. They took home economics out of school. They took an important life skills class and did away with it. They said it wasn't important anymore. They told us that families had to have a gazillion things for our kids to do so there was no time for moms to slow down enough between school, soccer, football, cheer, and fall baseball to fix a nutritious meal for our families. So they pumped the airwaves with commercials saying eat this, buy that. Subliminally, they said we want to make you unhealthy. Therefore mom's started to rely on hamburger helper,
drive-thru Micky D's, and Papa John's Pizza Delivery plus many more lessening their cooking skills and upping the diabetes factor. Guess what, parents were so busy with all the extracurricular activities they forgot to teach their own children how to cook, one of the major life skills that every child should know. Oh, the child now knows how to speed dial the cell phone and order their meal on mom or dad's credit card. How to boil water, not so much.
I had Home Ec, now known as Family and Consumer Sciences, from the time I entered 7th grade up until 12th grade. I graduated from High School in 1967. Did I need it? Probably not, as both my mother and grandmother were very proficient in cooking and sewing, but I loved it just the same. I learned something from each teacher I had. I loved cooking. Making fancy yeast dinner rolls. Constructing a pleated skirt. I bought my daughter a sewing machine for her birthday several years ago. I am the one that uses it when I go visit. She has never gotten it out of the box. She is afraid of it. As I told her, "You are going to have failures in anything you do, not everything is going to be perfect. Get used to it." She is one of these people that if it isn't perfect the first time she won't try it ever again. I don't know where she got that from, certainly not from me. I'm the failure kid. You can't grow if you don't fail.
Cooking, for example, a chef will try a recipe 100's of times before he might hit upon the right blend of ingredients to make the dish just right. A recipe can always be improved, we all know that. Nothing is set in stone. I have been watching CHEF'S TABLE on Netflix, different famous chefs from all over the world, and their stories. The chef from Turkey was very interesting. How you have one country and so many different ethnic dishes, yet one sect of people will not eat other sects of people's dishes just because of the different ethnicity. It is so sad because they are really missing out on something really special in the food, to learn about a different culture and a different way of doing things. The chef was really sad as he discovered the area he grew up had all but lost its food culture. No one knew how to make greasy dumplings, a dish his grandmother used to make. Thankfully he still had one family member who knew how to make the dumplings. He managed to save that part of his culture. It is now in a book.
I write this because I ask you, what part of your culture are you saving. What has your mom, dad, or grandparent passed down to you food-wise? What memory do you have to pass to your children? We as a society are losing our food culture fairly quickly without realizing it. I am getting ready to purchase an on-line children's food prep course for my grandsons. They are at the age to start learning all about the kitchen and food and start learning how to cook. I started at 8 being able to help my mom prep things in the kitchen. I knew how to bake a cake. I sat at my grandmother's knee and watched her make icing for cakes. I watched my mom make home-made noodles. I did it quite a few times myself before I was 10. So good in chicken and noodles, Sunday dinner with homemade coleslaw with special dressing. There is so much to pass on to our children and grandchildren. The problem is getting their noses out of their electronic games and devices.
Learn to cook again people. Learn to enjoy making a simple bechamel sauce, a fancy word for a white sauce with three ingredients. Butter, flour, and milk. It was one of the first sauces my mother taught me to make. The foundation of any good Mac and Cheese recipe. And no, it is not a gravy. Learn to enjoy constructing a dish you can be proud to say you made. If necessary go and take some classes. Have fun with it. Make it a couples thing. Don't just Nuke everything. It's not the same. Watch YouTube videos if necessary. But learn to prepare a special dish and surprise your family. Set the table with the good china and glassware. Teach your children respect for the food they eat and where it comes from, and no it doesn't come from the grocery store it comes from the farm, from the good mother earth. Our children need to know where their food comes from, how it is grown, harvested, prepared, cooked, and served. It just doesn't just magically appear at the grocery store and we purchase it.
I leave you with this. One day you will wake up and will remember something your mother use to make when you were little and you would like for your kids to taste it. You don't know how to make it, you don't have a recipe for it because you didn't take the time to ask your mom for the recipe and write it down. Now it is lost because you don't know how to cook. Think about that. A food culture lost because all you know how to do is scan a barcode and turn on a microwave. It's never too late...
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