So I have been musing about food, the buying and the cooking and the eating thereof, and about my Cooking For People Who Don't tag.
I have a lot of strong opinions about food, of which probably the strongest is, Describe Much, Prescribe Little. Which makes talking about it tricky, but ultimately really rewarding.
And it occurred to me last night as I was adding a handful of vegetables and a hefty shake of spice to a canned soup that one of the things that I really want to do when I write about food is to help increase people's levels of food security.
It seems to me that one of the less-considered factors that goes into determining someone's food security or insecurity - subjective AND objective[1]- is, well, knowledge, and access to knowledge. You have to HAVE resources - money, accessible grocery stores with good food in them, transport, a kitchen, physical capacity, maybe some assistance, cooking utensils, time[2] -
and you have to know what and where they are and how to use them.
I don't mean, by the way, that NOBODY ever talks about this stuff. Obviously, lots of people do.
But the large, mainstream discussions about food security, especially food security for people on low/fixed incomes seem to me to consistently miss or just plain ignore lack of time, and to be dismissive and minimising and generally privileged and clueless about lack of knowledge.
And the higher up the
hierarchy of food needs the conversation gets, the more prescriptivist and privileged it seems to get.
And here's the thing. Everytime you want to take a step up that pyramid, you're accepting that food security just got harder to achieve and maintain, and you're going to need more resources.
My family is fortunate. We get to live at the top of the pyramid most of the time, if we choose to. We don't always choose to, because there are always going to be times when something else is more important to us. But mostly, we can choose to eat things that are tasty and nutritious, which were produced under conditions we find ethically acceptable, that we bought from suppliers whose practices and standards we mostly approve of.
And here's the thing: I honestly, seriously, absolutely don't think anyone needs to do things the way we do. I am not interested in telling people what they ought to do.
What I want to do, and try to find ways to do, is share what I know about getting, storing, and preparing food in the hopes that I can make it easier for someone else to get to where
they want to be on that food pyramid.
And I have found over the years that with Food Education as with Sex Education the place where the biggest need is is between Zero and Two: I know a lot of people who are or have been in a position where the major factor in keeping their level of Food Security lower than it ought to be is that they don't know how to buy, store, prepare, and flavour their own food, so they have to depend on someone else - whether that's a family member or a diner or a food company - to do some or all of that for them. It's not just that they don't know how to cook, they don't know who to ask or how to ask or how to access the people who know. So they spend more than they can afford to on food that is less than acceptable to them.
Getting from Zero to Two is not easy. It's a LOT more complicated than disdainfully telling someone that a carrot is "better" than a Mars Bar[3]. And it's risky: when you're trying to get from Six to Eight you end up with some stuff that isn't quite what you wanted it to be. When you're trying to get from Zero to Two, you end up with some situations where what used to be food isn't anymore, because you burnt it or salted it to death, or it rotted. If your Food Security is already shaky... your ability to learn by experiment is kind of limited. Safer to stick with Ramen, or Freezer Pizza.
So when I write stuff for the "cooking for people who don't" tag, I want to be posting about making complex, effort-intensive food, totally from fresh ingredients, and about Doing Stuff Mostly From Cans And Packets and tweaking it a bit to make it tastier and more nutritious, and about things like What A Chest Freezer Can Do For Your Vitamin Situation, or How To Safely Store Twenty Kilos of Beans and Ten Of Flour and Which Things It's Worth Scrimping Elsewhere To Get In Bulk and What It Is Best To Just Get Weekly, and How To Build A Herb/Sauce/Spice Collection at One Jar Per Paycheque, or Living As Well As Possible In A Food Desert, and about Making A Pound Of Meat Feel Luxurious In A Dinner For Six, and about Good Stuff You Can Do With Leftovers. [4]
And I hope it's useful. I want to start doing more of it, and linking to other people who say Smart Stuff About Food.
So that's my Food Philosophy, sort of. Or at least my Talking About Food philosophy.
[1] By objective I mean, how many days worth of good, healthy food you actually have, or can definitely get and by subjective I mean how close that puts you to your own internal sense of "enough".
[2] Time may actually be one of the LEAST talked about resources that goes into a person or family's level of food security.
[3] Also, you tell me that at the half-way point of a 20 km winter hike and I will EAT YOUR HEAD.
[4] Topic requests welcome. Anyone want to listen to me talk about freezers?
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