Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense Of Food, gave an interview on NPR on the same topic as his latest New York Times Magazine piece. You should seriously listen and read, but since we both know you’re a lazy shit here is the basic premise:

People are cooking less and watching cooking on TV more.

This simple fact opens up a variety of issues for discussion and Pollan does a great job addressing those he sees. One in particular struck a chord with me. While talking with Harry Balzer, trying to nail down a definition for “real scratch cooking,” Balzer remarks:

“Here’s an analogy,” Balzer said. “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

Cooking Is So 20th Century

At first take, does that thought scare you as much as it does me? I don’t know about you but I can see it. I see it now. I know more than a handful of people who can’t boil pasta, sauté any kind of meat, or bake a cookie. These people have Lean Cuisines, packaged Costco Orange Chicken, and dairy aisle premade chocolate-chip cookie dough. The can opener is the new chef’s knife.

And I’m not that different. I’m a lazy shit just like you. I’m guilty of having sat down with a bucket of KFC to watch Emeril Live, which just helps to prove that I have absolutely no shame (or taste). But I can and do cook, whereas I have friends with neither the knowledge nor the inclination to pursue it. I suspect you have friends like this as well.

Pollan attributes a good part of the decline in cooking to the industrialization of the food industry starting post WWII. From there we’ve been marketed into taking as many shortcuts as possible to putting a tasty meal in our stomachs, ostensibly as a way to counter our much-too-busy-to-cook schedules. And that sentiment, as Pollan shows, is rooted in some truth.

When asked in the interview what he thought of Balzer’s prediction, Pollan offered a couple of short, hopeful responses. The local, fresh food movement we’re seeing emerge may grow, but it won’t go anywhere unless people make a move to cooking in mass. The government, he hopes, could put policies in place to encourage a move in the right direction, but he sees only small steps in the near future.

I’ve got a different outlook.

22nd Century Cooking

Coincidentally, NPR ran another interview a few weeks ago with Christopher Steiner, author of $20 Per Gallon. Chapters of this book correspond with different prices of gasoline, highlighting problems our society would face and paradigm shifts that may occur near each price.

Steiner does note that near $6 per gallon, people will drive and eat out less while walking more. So far so good.

Further in the future, near $14, Steiner predicts that the Big Box model will fail. Large stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot rely not only on consumers commuting miles out of their way to shop, but more importantly a vast distribution network. A supply chain that relies on cargo shipments from China and a nationwide fleet of trucks puttering across the country is at the mercy of oil. They give you cheap things because of cheap gas.

A similar system that gives you cheap things because of cheap gas? Yes, our industrialized food industry. A large part of what makes this packaged food situation possible is that a Stouffers Lasagna can travel 3000 miles and still cost you 10 bucks. With rising gas prices the food industry is going to have to do the same as Wal-Mart and adapt. And adapting will almost invariably mean turning local.

So there are my two cents Michael Pollan. Our hopes in the future of cooking probably don’t lie in increased food health awareness education, or local farmer government subsidies. The system is going to have to move local naturally behind the ridiculously powerful force of oil, and its scarcity.

And to you, couch-dwelling, Cheeto eating reader. Congratulations, if you actually listened to and read all those links. You’ve probably just spent blown through two whole hours of your life. Imagine what you could have cooked in that much time!

(Thanks to Tyler for originally pointing me to Pollan’s article.)