Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  It’s a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. “Hey, ladies,” it said to us, “go ahead, get liberated. We’ll take care of dinner.” They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.

  When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation.

  Now what? Most of us, male or female, work at full-time jobs that seem organized around a presumption that some wifely person is at home picking up the slack—filling the gap between school and workday’s end, doing errands only possible during business hours, meeting the expectation that we are hungry when we get home—but in fact June Cleaver has left the premises. Her income was needed to cover the mortgage and health insurance. Didn’t the workplace organizers notice? In fact that gal Friday is us, both moms and dads running on overdrive, smashing the caretaking duties into small spaces between job and carpool and bedtime. Eating preprocessed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health. A lot of us are wishing for a way back home, to the place where care-and-feeding isn’t zookeeper’s duty but something happier and more creative.

  “Cooking without remuneration” and “slaving over a hot stove” are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. In France and Spain I’ve sat in business meetings with female journalists and editors in which the conversation veered sharply from postcolonial literature to fish markets and the quality of this year’s mushrooms or leeks. These women had no apparent concern about sounding unliberated; in the context of a healthy food culture, fish and leeks are as respectable as postcolonial literature. (And arguably more fun.)

  Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of—not so much. We’ve earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it’s too late.

  It’s easy for any of us to claim no time for cooking; harder to look at what we’re doing instead, and why every bit of it is presumed more worthy. Some people really do work double shifts with overtime and pursue no recreational activities, ever, or they are homeless or otherwise without access to a stove and refrigerator. But most are lucky enough to do some things for fun, or for self-improvement or family entertainment. Cooking can be one of those things.

  Working people’s cooking, of course, will develop an efficiency ethic. I’m shameless about throwing out the extraneous plot twists of a hoity-toity recipe and getting to its main theme. Or ignoring cookbooks altogether during the week, relying mostly on simple meals I’ve made a thousand times before, in endless variation: frittata, stir-fry, pasta with one protein and two vegetables thrown in. Or soups that can simmer unattended all day in our Crock-Pot, which is named Mrs. Cleaver. More labor-intensive recipes we save for weekends: lasagna, quiches, roasted chicken, desserts of any kind. I have another rule about complicated dishes: always double the recipe, so we can recoup the investment and eat this lovely thing again later in the week.

  Routines save time, and tempers. Like a mother managing a toddler’s mood swings, our family has built some reliable backstops for the times in our week when work-weary, low-blood-sugar blowouts are most likely. Friday nights are always pizza-movie nights. Friends or dates are welcome; we rent one PG feature and one for after small children go to bed. We always keep the basic ingredients for pizza on hand—flour and yeast for the dough, mozzarella, and tomatoes (fresh, dried, or canned sauce, depending on the season). All other toppings vary with the garden and personal tastes. Picky children get to control the toppings on their own austere quadrant, while the adventurous may stake out another, piling on anything from smoked eggplant to caramelized onions, fresh herbs, and spinach. Because it’s a routine, our pizzas come together without any fuss as we gather in the kitchen to decompress, have a glass of wine if we are of age, and talk about everybody’s week. I never have to think about what’s for dinner on Fridays.

  I like cooking as a social event. Friends always seem happy to share the work of putting together a do-it-yourself pizza, tacos, or vegetarian wraps. Potluck dinner parties are salvation. Takeout is not the only easy way out. With a basic repertoire of unfussy recipes in your head, the better part of valor is just turning on the burner and giving it a shot. With all due respect to Julia, I’m just thinking Child when I hazard a new throw-in-everything stew. I also have a crafty trick of inviting friends over for dinner whose cooking I admire, offering whatever ingredients they need, and myself as sous-chef. This is how I finally learned to make paella, pad Thai, and sushi, but the same scheme would work for acquiring basic skills and recipes. For a dedicated non-cook, the first step is likely the hardest: convincing oneself it’s worth the trouble in terms of health and household economy, let alone saving the junked-up world.

  It really is. Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable: cooking and eating at home, even with quality ingredients, costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory. Shoppers who are most daunted by the high price of organics may be looking at bar codes on boutique-organic prepared foods, not actual vegetables. A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.

  In this country, some of our tired and poorest live in neighborhoods where groceries are sold only in gas station mini-marts. Food stamp allowances are in some cases as low as one dollar a person per meal, which will buy beans and rice with nothing thrown in. But many more of us have substantially broader food options than we’re currently using to best advantage. Home-cooked, whole-ingredient cuisine will save money. It will also help trim off and keep off extra pounds, when that’s an issue—which it is, for some two-thirds of adults in the U.S. Obesity is our most serious health problem, and our sneakiest, because so many calories slip in uncounted. Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers. Cooking lets you guard the door, controlling not only what goes into your food, but what stays out.

  Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood. Cooking and eating wi
th children teaches them civility and practical skills they can use later on to save money and stay healthy, whatever may happen in their lifetimes to the gas-fueled food industry. Family time is at a premium for most of us, and legitimate competing interests can easily crowd out cooking. But if grabbing fast food is the only way to get the kids to their healthy fresh-air soccer practice on time, that’s an interesting call. Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.

  Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they’re missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven. The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family, after people have made their separate ways home to be together. The nurturing arts are more than just icing on the cake, insofar as they influence survival. We have dealt to today’s kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents, which would be us, the ones taking care of them. Our thrown-away food culture is the sole reason. By taking the faster drive, what did we save?

  Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair. I’ve grown new vegetables just to see what they taste like: Jerusalem artichokes, edamame, potimarrons. A quick recipe can turn slow in our kitchen because of the experiments we hazard. We make things from scratch just to see if we can. We’ve rolled out and cut our pasta, raised turkeys to roast or stuff into link sausage, made chutney from our garden. On high occasions we’ll make cherry pies with crisscrossed lattice tops and ravioli with crimped edges, for the satisfaction of seeing these storybook comforts become real.

  A lot of human hobbies, from knitting sweaters to building model airplanes, are probably rooted in the same human desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Karl Marx called it the antidote to alienation. Modern business psychologists generally agree, noting that workers will build a better a car when they participate in the whole assembly rather than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day. In the case of modern food, our single-bolt job has become the boring act of poking the thing in our mouths, with no feeling for any other stage in the process. It’s a pretty obvious consequence that one should care little about the product. When I ponder the question of why Americans eat so much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation. We can’t feel how or why it hurts. We’re dying for an antidote.

  If you ask me, that’s reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family’s life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products. It’s the prime motivation behind our vegetable garden, our regular baking of bread, and other experiments that ultimately become household routines. Our cheesemaking, for example.

  Okay, I know. You were with me right up to that last one. I’m not sure why, since it takes less time to make a pound of mozzarella than to bake a cobbler, but most people find the idea of making cheese at home to be preposterous. If the delivery guy happens to come to the door when I’m cutting and draining curd, I feel like a Wiccan.

  What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It’s too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We’re so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home. Knitting clothes found new popularity among college girls, thanks largely to a little book called Stitch and Bitch. Homemaking in general has its Martha. French cuisine had its immortal Julia. Grilling, Cajun cooking, and cast-iron stewing all have their celebrity gurus. What would it take to convince us that an hour spent rendering up cheese in our kitchens could be worth the trouble? A motivational speaker, a pal, an artisan—a Cheese Queen, maybe?

  Yes, all of the above, and she exists. Her name is Ricki Carroll. Since 1978, when she founded New England Cheesemaking Supply and began holding workshops in her kitchen, she has directly taught more than 7,000 people how to make cheese. That’s face to face, not counting those of us who ordered supplies online and worked our way through her book, Cheesemaking Made Easy, which has sold over 100,000 copies. An Internet search for Cheese Queen will pop her right up.

  When I went to see Ricki, it was equal parts admiration and curiosity. If my family is into reconnecting with the processes that bring us our foods, if we’ve taken it upon ourselves to be a teeny bit evangelical about this, we have a lot to learn from Ricki Carroll. We’re just small-time country preachers. This woman has inspired artisans from the Loire to Las Vegas. She’s the Billy Graham of Cheese.

  Okay, not really. She’s just Ricki. She starts to win you over when you step onto the porch of her Massachusetts farmhouse, a colorful Queen Anne with lupines and lilies blooming around the stoop. Then you walk through the door and fall through the looking glass into a space where cheesemaking antiques blend with the whimsy of handmade dolls winking at African masks, unusual musical instruments and crazy quilts conversing quietly in several languages. The setting prepares you to meet the Queen, greeting her workshop guests with a smile, waving everyone into the big kitchen as she pins up her wildly curly hair with a parrot-shaped barrette.

  Ricki had invited our family to come for a visit, after hearing of our interest in local and artisanal foods. Generously, she let us and half a dozen of our friends sit in as her guests at an all-day workshop for beginning cheesemakers. Now we sat down at long tables and introduced ourselves to the twenty other workshoppers. I was already taking notes, not on cheesemaking, but on who in the heck comes here and does this thing?

  Anybody. For several men it was an extremely original Father’s Day gift. A chef hoped to broaden her culinary range; mothers were after healthy, more local diets for their families. Martha, from Texas, owns water buffalo and dreams of a great mozzarella. (Their names are Betsy and Beau; she passed around photos.) Maybe we were all a little nuts, but being there made us feel like pilgrims of a secret order. We had turned our backs on our nation’s golden calf of cellophane-wrapped Cheese Product Singles. Our common wish was to understand a food we cared about, and take back one more measure of control over our own care and feeding.

  We examined the stainless steel bowls, thermometers, and culture packets assembled before us while Ricki began to talk us into her world. Cheese is a simple idea: a way to store milk, which goes bad quickly without refrigeration but keeps indefinitely—improves, even—in the form of cheese. From humble beginnings it has become a global fascination. “Artisanal cheesemakers combine science and art. All over the world, without scientific instruments, people make cheeses the way their grandparents did.” In the Republic of Georgia, she told us, she watched cheesemakers stir their curd with a twig and then swaddle the warm pot (in lieu of monitoring it with a thermometer) in a kitty-print sweater, a baby blanket, and a cape.

  Forging ahead, Ricki announced we were making queso blanco, whole milk ricotta, mascarpone, mozzarella, and farmhouse cheddar. Yes, us, right here, today. We looked on in utter doubt as she led us into our first cheese, explaining that we’d make all this with ordinary milk from the grocery. Raw milk from a farm is wonderful to work with, unhomogenized is great, but any milk will do, so long as it’s not labeled “ultra-pasteurized.” Ultra-high-temperature pasteurization, Ricki explained, denatures proteins and destroys the curd. The sole purpose of UHP is to ship milk over long distances; after this process it can sit for many weeks without any change in its chemistry.

  Because its chemistry is already so altered, though, UHP milk will not make cheese, period. This discussion confirmed what I’d learned the hard way at home in my earliest efforts. Before I knew to look for the term “UHP” and avoid it, I’d used some to create a messy mozzarella failure. The curd won’t firm up, it just turns into glop.

  “Ask your grocer where
your milk comes from,” Ricki instructed us; the closer to home your source, the better. Reading labels in your dairy case may lead you to discover a dairy that isn’t too far away, and hasn’t ultra-pasteurized the product for long-distance travel. Better yet, she suggested, ask around to find a farmer who has fresh milk. It may not be for sale, since restrictions in most states make it impossible for small dairies to sell directly to the consumer. But some allow it, or have loopholes the farmer can advise you about. You may be able to buy raw milk for your pets, for example. (Those kitties will love your mozzarella.) You can pasteurize raw milk yourself if you like, but most outbreaks of listeria and other milk-borne diseases occur in factory-scale dairies, Ricki said, not among small dairies and artisans where the center of attention is product quality.

  The subject of regulations touched a nerve for several small milk producers in our workshop. Anne and Micki, two mothers raising families on neighboring New England farms, got interested in home dairying after their pediatrician suggested switching to organic milk. If a family can put one organic choice on their shopping list, he’d said, it should be dairy. The industry says growth hormones in milk are safe; the pediatrician (and for the record, he’s not alone) said he had seen too many girls going through early puberty.