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Wed, 26 Jul 2006

We're Eating Ourselves Out of House and Home!

I've been pondering home cooking and the environment. The practice of cooking meals at home from scratch has all but disappeared since my grandmothers' day, while environmental pollution has grown to threaten life on earth.

My grandmas were teenagers in the 1930's. At that time, most women stayed home, raised children, cooked, gardened, and preserved food. Small farms were common, and most food was still organically grown. I don't want to paint that period as some kind of bucolic ideal - it definitely had a downside or two or three. But still, people mostly ate food cooked from scratch at home.

My Mom, my aunties, and all their friends loved convenience food because it liberated them from domestic slavery, but it started us down a slippery slope. Home cooking was the norm for thousands of years, and now, in less than a hundred years, we've become a fast food culture.

What does the decline in home cooking have to do with the environment?

That's a book I don't plan to write, but here are a few snapshots:

• Gigantic factory farms, dependent on polluting fossil fuels and chemicals, have mostly replaced small mixed farming operations.
• Organic farming is a small percentage of agriculture.
• Small ag based communities have largely declined or disappeared, and most people live in cities.
• Most women have to work outside the home to survive. Time and motivation for cooking is hard to find. Never mind gardening!
• Our food travels thousands of miles to reach us, through a transportation system that gobbles up natural resources and pollutes the environment.
• Most of our food is chemically and mechanically processed in food factories; packaged in plastic, paper, and metal; served up at fast food chains; sold in big box grocery stores.
• Meat and dairy dominate our fast food diets; pizza and burgers are staple foods.
• For meat and dairy, we cut down the rain forests, turn agricultural land into deserts, destroy the ozone layer, poison our air and water, accelerate global warming, and starve millions of people in third world countries.
• Our diet, along with our sedentary lifestyle, has caused a heartbreaking and costly epidemic of obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
• Cooking is a lost art, and most people don't have time. They just heat things up in the microwave, plastic, cardboard and all.
• The more advanced or creative among us might steam some frozen veg, maybe make some pasta or rice - if we have time.

All Is Not Doom and Gloom For Home Cooking

Cooking is a basic human urge. The huge market for cookbooks, food magazines, online recipe sites, and celebrity chefs on TV, shows that we have a deep desire to cook our own food. More and more people realize that food made at home with your own hands is better for health and nutrition, tastes better, costs less, and is much more satisfying than fast food.

The question is, how can home cooking change from a spectator sport to everyday reality?

Time and Energy For Cooking That will happen if people can work less, commute less, work at home; women are paid to be stay at home Mom's if they want to, and couples share the cooking and shopping. That's a cultural revolution which has been growing in fits and starts since the sixties.

Quality Over Quantity: Do we really need all those things more than we need health and happiness? Amazingly, the less we earn, the more likely we are to stay home and cook, and the better we eat. Of course, there's the problem of how to get groceries home on your bike, but human ingenuity knows no bounds.

Growing Awareness: Home cooking increases as people become aware of the alternatives to our national food disaster - vegetarian diet, organic locally grown food, and balanced nutrition instead of a meat and dairy based diet. See the Savvy Veg reviews of Veggie Revolution, by Sally and Sara Kate Kneidel, The Food Revolution, by John Robbins.

Home Cooking is a big part of the rapidly growing organic food industry, the trend to growing and raising your own food, homesteading, farmers markets, CSA's, buying local, natural food stores, and the slow food movement. Read the SV article, Vegetarian Diet and Sustainable Agriculture.

The World According To Savvy Veg: As home cooking grows and spreads, environmental problems will disappear as if by magic. The human species will survive and prosper. All we need to do is go home and cook.