Convenience

Can you believe all the great, from-scratch, healthy, sustainable, tasty food I've been cooking lately?! Amazing, I tell you, simply amazing. You may sit in awe of me.

Oh you didn't see it? Did I forget to share it with you?

Okay, okay, actually it was a whole lot of Taco Bell. We've made a big push over the last few months to really "finish" our new house, and since neither work nor our normal busy weekend schedule seems to likely to slow down to accomodate us, we've had lots of busy weeknights filled with painting and drilling and swapping out hardware until the dog lets us know it's time for his walk, which means it's 9:00 and we haven't eaten a bite. Oops.

Now, we've survived the apocalypse before. I know there were plenty of things I could have done to avoid the late night Taco Bell trips. One Friday I actually did manage to take an hour out of projects to whip up a couple pasta bakes that sustained us for nearly two weeks (one went in the freezer, e.coli averted). But I'm not going to lie. It's really hard to stay on top of it all in the middle of craziness, and even harder to just stop and get a handle on it in the first place.

All this eco-friendliness often laughs in the face of progress, and while I'm first to admit human progress is often less than brilliant, it's important to note once in awhile that we did come up with these "advances" for some kind of reason. All these modern conveniences from canned beans to Hamburger Helper are supposed to save time - and we've filled that extra time with other persuits. We can argue chicken or egg all we want, but the result is in 2009 we're left with all kinds of expectations. If we want to turn back to kitchen escapades like it's 1940, some other kind of time filler really does have to go. This is hard enough for a couple DINKs without a lot of mandatory responsibilities, but we're going to need some kind of innovation in thought or technology for the world to even be able to catch on, much less want to.

Sustainable Food makes the point that we're only afforded the time to even be concerned about things like sustainability precicely because our total efforts have been decluttered by things like convenience food. (This is a nest of quotes of like three different blogs; if it didn't make so great a point I'd spare you the horror)

Clarke: "In a paper published a couple weeks ago, Dr. Sherilyn McGregor of Keele University in Staffordshire points out that when environmentally sound living requires extra work, that work is usually 'women’s work.' ... What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling.

"Of course, we men carry all those containers to the curb, which perfectly balances the division of labor. But then you add Environmentalism 2.0 to the mix, and you have the Slow Food (read: hours spent in the kitchen) and Local Food (read: hours spent shopping) movements, and with that kind of scheduling pressure a woman likely wouldn’t even have enough time left in the day to type up her husband’s poetry."

Henderson: That's not random snark -- Clarke is specifically referring to poet Wendell Berry's anti-computer tirade of a few years back, in which he explained that his wife types his stuff on an old Royal typewriter. It's all very well, as Keele writes in her paper, to idealize participatory citizenship as in Athens of old. But "as feminists have noted, these Athenian citizens were freed for politics by the labour of foreigners, slaves, and women who were not granted the status of citizen. Citizenship, understood as being about active participation in the public sphere, is by definition a practice that depends on 'free time'; it is thus not designed for people with multiple roles and heavy loads of responsibility for productive and reproductive work." ...

So just as I'm feeling subjugated - and laughing at the idea of Not Michael Landon writing or dictating poetry - a little burst of optimism comes in the form of this UCLA study that says convenience foods aren't actually all that convenient after all. It's not a terribly diverse or large sample, but they concluded that heavy reliance on convenience foods saved only 10-12 minutes of hands-on cooking time and didn't save at all on total prep time.

Convenience food was instead used to make more "elaborate" meals, cater to individual kid tastes, and avoid making a grocery list beforehand. Really? I'll admit I have a rather simple palate and enjoy clean, uncluttered flavors, but if "elaborate" = HFCS and modified food startch, please, count me out. I can't particularly comment on picky child eaters, having never been responsible for ones well-being for any extended period of time, but Not Michael Landon has been accused of having a child's palate, we eat the same thing, and we're both alive. And if life is too complicated to make a grocery list before you go shopping, well, just stick to the same simple repetoire and/or hire a therapist.

So, I'm ready to stop making excuses and put down the Taco Bell. And it's a good thing, because too much of my CSA is going to waste, and my homegrown veggies are just starting to ripen. I'll give you a hint on step 1 - have a big party. It forces you to clean your house and leaves a bunch of quality leftovers. Change is much easier with a clean slate.