Hello

It’s possible that there is a strand that connects all today’s topics. It may be more efficient not to cook, but it robs you of real food. It may be more efficient to automate food systems, but it robs you of resilience. It may be efficient to use a microwave, but … No wait, there may be no downside to that. And it is definitely inefficient to contemplate breakfast in too much depth; inefficient, and fun.

Cooking in Self-defence

The latest soundbite on sound food guidelines is at heart exactly the same as all previous exhortations: Eat Real Food. And, like all previous attempts, it is doomed to failure because in order to eat real food, you have to be able to cook; many people, for many different reasons, can’t.

That’s the thrust of the latest newsletter from Mike Lee. He points out that exhaustion and lack of time, including lack of time to stock the fridge and pantry, may be more important factors than lack of knowledge and skill. Then there’s the problem of identity: “cooking is something other people do: foodies, retirees, people with more time, people with different lives”.

To change that, Lee suggests people need to start small, just one dish, spaghetti with a jar of prepared tomato sauce. This turns them from people who can’t cook into people who can and from there it’s a hop, skip and jump to fresh tomatoes from the farmers’ market, with garlic, basil and who knows what.

Lee expands on this simple idea at great length, and I agree with many of the points he makes. If you cook, you do understand how to bend recipes around what you have on hand, you do know how to adjust seasoning, you can imagine how things will come together. Can you start doing that as an adult, holding down two or three jobs just to pay the rent and afford the fast food that you don’t have time to cook? Lee says “[t]he industrial food system’s biggest advantage is the widespread belief that making food is something other people do”. I’d say there a bit more to it than that.

Good Inefficiency

For quite a few years now, and certainly since the start of the Covid pandemic, it has been clear that efficient systems are fragile systems. Remove all the “waste” in a system and you remove all the resilience, so that if one little thing goes wrong, the whole system collapses in on itself. An article in The Conversation looks at the many ways in which “automated and opaque” decision-making threatens food security.

In some respects, this is a familiar story. The author, Mohammed F. Alzuhair, has drawn together the many different ways in which seemingly localised glitches — from cyberattacks to untrained staff — can ripple outwards to result in empty shelves. He says that his aim is not to create alarm but to raise awareness. The bigger point is that when it comes to vital systems, efficiency is the falsest of gods. Resilience may seem expensive when conditions are stable. Conditions are not stable.

Microwaveable

Do you have a microwave? Does it take you beyond leftovers and reheating coffee? Someone who calls themselves Malmesbury describes their journey to an alternative timeline, one in which the microwave replaces the stove. Yes, for everything.

I enjoyed reading about Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One and the ten years she spent “figur[ing] out a way to prepare absolutely everything” in a microwave. You do need special equipment, asnd given that you can even achieve a perfect sear on a steak, should that be what you want.

Fascinating stuff, and probably not for the faint hearted, but it did prompt a little reflection. Long ago, I was friends with a delightful couple who lived just outside Washington DC. They both loved good food, and she was a spectacularly good cook, often making very elaborate dinners when we visited, two or three times a year. One time, we arrived perhaps a little early and found her in the kitchen wrapping something with clingfilm into a fat pink sausage. “It’s a smooth country terrine,” we were told.

Not for us, I remember thinking, it’ll be hours before a terrine could be ready, must be for future guests. But no, she popped it in the microwave and it served as a starter. I can’t remember what else we had, but I do remember we spent much of the evening talking about this wonderful woman called Barbara Kafka and her iconoclastic Microwave Gourmet. Published two years after Microwave Cooking for One, I suspect it might have been more influential, not least because while there are 10 recipes for Stews (“see also Ragout”) there is not one for Steak.

Who is still singing the praises of the microwave for good food?

Playing with Breakfast

OK, this is not going to appeal to everyone, but I liked it, and if you’re the kind of person who enjoyed the whole Cube Rule of sandwiches thing, you might enjoy The Hunt for Dark Breakfast. I’m surprised, though, that it doesn’t consider the whole cereal-is-soup argument.

Take care