In Praise of Fast Food ... well, not "fast food" itself ...

I like cooking. I do not have an extensive repertoire, but I do all right. The more I cook, the less I find foods at restaurants tasty anymore--particularly for the price they charge for the quality they offer. 

But, and despite this, I don't diss the extensive practice of eating food that somebody else has prepared: fast food in many variations. Because, as I tell my students when we discuss geographic patterns in agriculture and food, the "old ways" were also the times when women had pretty much no choice but to be cooks, or most men had no choice but to be farmers.

The story of economic progress has been one of walking away from such limited choices into exercising freedom in terms of what we want to do.

It is quite possible that my grandmother hand-made a lot more dishes and snacks than my mother did--and she made some wonderful sweets that I always, always, looked forward to.  And, yes, my sister makes way fewer eats than what my mother did.

But, the differences in terms of what my sister has done/does versus the previous generations of women, include everything from, say, my sister having a masters degree in the sciences ...

The productivity difference is also enormous. For instance, the electric rice grinder that mom bought about thirty years ago, which she still uses, gained her the two hours that she would have otherwise had to spend at the "aattukkal". (The large version of the mortar/pestle in the photo here.)  Now, both mom and sister have yet another choice--they can directly purchase from the grocery store the machine-mass-produced ready to cook ground mix!  It is their choice now, if they want to do anything the "old way" ... to be able to exercise that choice is freedom.

Freedom in our daily lives matter a lot.  These are not freedoms that a constitution can guarantee, but can only come from economic progress.  Thus, when I feel like having vadas while visiting India, mom does not have to slave in the hot kitchen and fry those delicious vadas and come out of the kitchen drenched in sweat--a two minute walk takes me to the restaurant where I can pick up any number of vadas I want.

So, why such thoughts?
It is not only because I think of food a lot :)

I have started thinking about the kind of topics that I would like to discuss with students, or at least keep them in my mental back-pocket, which I can then appropriately use in discussions. And I ran into this article (ht), which is a wonderful essay.  Even though to excerpt from that is a crime--it really needs to be read from the start to the end--well, here are the concluding observations:

If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old.

If we fail to understand how scant and monotonous most traditional diets were, we can misunderstand the “ethnic foods” we encounter in cookbooks, at restaurants, or on our travels. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multi­national corporations bent on selling trashy modern products—failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market. A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?”

If we assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food, we miss the fact that lots of industrial foods are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for 72 hours. And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to two convenience foods that even purists love, factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty delivered to us by (ironically) the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving.

Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor; and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.

Yes!
I am already pumped up for my classes; I wonder if my students are ready as well :)