Local Food and How to Cook

(I wonder if other bloggers have the same problem.  I couldn't get to sleep last night composing this in my head!)

One of my main problems with local food these days is that I don't like to cook.  Don't get me wrong.  I love the coop and I like buying food from the coop from local farmers and producers.  But local food tends to be in an "unprocessed" state".  That's the point, right?  That local food doesn't have those 10 calories of fossil fuel used for every 1 calorie you eat? 

But I've forgotten how to cook.  And I've gotten really lazy about cooking as well.  

When I was a child, my mother cooked a full meal every night, often with a homemade dessert as well.  Always protein, veggies, & starch.  And I learned to cook from her.  She often had me help, or sometimes would call and tell me to start something if she wasn't home yet.  I remember taking cooking lessons in middle school, and getting excited about bringing home easy recipes my mom didn't have.  Like sugar cookies. 

Later, when I finished college and got a professional job, I discovered the blossoming world (in the 1980's) of fast food and sit-down restaurants.  I didn't have to cook, as long as I could afford eating out.   I can't even remember eating at home much, I probably ate a lot of ramen!  If I threw in an egg, that was protein, right?

When I got married and had children, I had to cook.  And by that time (1990's), the variety of processed food had blossomed in the supermarkets.  I could pick up easy meals to cook, and this fit my schedule - working full time and raising two kids.  I could shop on the way home, and then quickly cut up some protein, throw it in a pan with a frozen mix with vegetables and sauce, and dinner was ready in a jiff.  I did most of the cooking, and so I had to deal with the kids finicky eating.  Shopping for food and cooking was a chore.

When I got interested in local food, in 2005, I came face to face with the fact that I no longer cooked anything from scratch.  And I didn't know how to cook most of the mystery cuts that came in my Meat CSA share, or the variety of vegetables from my Vegetable CSA  share. Thankfully, at that time, I was only working part time, so I had time to figure out what do to with a overload of tomatoes one week, or corn the next.  But most of the irregular cuts of meat went bad in my freezer before I dared figure out how to cook them.  And only half of the excess from the CSA that I had frozen got eaten before it got freezer-burnt.

Then I went back to work full time, and all that processed food in the grocery store made sense.  For full time double income families or single parents, those processed food meals and fast-food/take-out meals are lifesavers.  I don't know how most families do it these days without taking shortcuts.  Cooking a full meal every night is exhausting, especially after a long day of working and commuting.  

So they really do have us over a barrel.  We want all those consumer goods they keep pushing us to buy, and the bigger house, so we send both parents to work, and then there is no one home to cook dinner.  So then we go out and buy fast food and take out and processed meals from the grocery store since we have so little time.  So we end up supporting the gigantic corporations and watching the little guys go out of business.  And all of us gaining weight on all that processed food. They have us RIGHT WHERE THEY WANT US!

I believe that the local food movement will continue to be a small fraction of the population, as long as we ignore the other pressures on families.  Consumers are under stress with little time and less money, and they need to be able to get their food/meals quickly, with little effort, so that they can have a little rest each night before they go off to work again the next day. 

We need simple cooking classes.  We need personal chefs.  We need entrepreneurs who are cooking local meals from local produce and delivering to our homes. We need more people living together in houses so at least one person is at home to cook and shop and other necessary home-type stuff - yes, housework, but we hate to call it that, don't we.  But someone's got to do it.  We have to stop trying to be so independent, and gather together so that we have the energy and the support to do what's right.  Grow our own food, shop locally, and do-it-yourself whenever you can.