Step Away from the Screen and Into the Kitchen

This post comes to us from our friend Joey Lee at the Monday Campaigns.

The day Julia Child accidentally flipped her potato pancake out of the pan, the whole country watched as it hit the stove. This great moment in cooking history was recreated in this summer’s box office hit Julie and Julia, in which Meryl Streep stunningly recreates the late Child’s unique voice, larger than life stature and that unforgettable accident. “When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions,” Child explained. “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.”

This may seem like obvious advice, but when met with a kitchen snafu, how many of us would just give up on the dish? Child’s show, The French Chef, was taped and aired unedited, revealing to audiences everywhere the good, the bad, and the natural human error that occurs in every kitchen. Viewers got to watch her make the occasional misstep, acknowledge the error and move on, fixing the dish in some innovative manner. In today’s world of absurdly polished 30 minutes-or-less segments, how many of us would storm out of the kitchen in frustration if the roux didn’t come together or the soufflé fell?

Or better yet, how many of us wouldn’t dare enter the kitchen at all?  Currently, the average length of time Americans spend cooking, about 27 minutes a day, has shrunk to less than half of what it was when Child on the air. In this fast-paced world, our attention spans have decreased considerably since The French Chef debuted in 1963. As Michael Pollan points out in his recent essay for The New York Times Magazine, today’s “cooking show” has changed forms to something best classified as “food entertainment,” which produces cooking shows that value efficiency over quality. These shows deemphasize the food’s origins, flavor and participatory cooking, and stress time-saving gadgets that allow you to get out of the kitchen ASAP, presumably so you can work more hours, make more money and buy more gadgets.

But just as our distracted cultural mindset has demanded speedier food shows, in some cases our short attention spans have also resulted in a high level of feedback and interaction with the cook. Julie and Julia also tells the story of Julie Powell, a 29 year old New Yorker, who lives in 2002’s world of fast-edits, impractical food entertainment and easily distracted audiences. Powell takes advantage of the self-publishing nature of the internet and starts a food blog in which she devotes a year to cooking her way through the 524 recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Powell finds purpose and popularity in the blogosphere, appealing to modern audiences’ short attention span, offering easy-to-swallow anecdotes about her experience. Unlike television, blog fans can interact with the blogger, commenting on posts and getting speedy replies, often straight from Julie herself. This interactivity appeals to our need-answers-now sensibility, but unlike modern food entertainment shows, it can also help the reader get up and into the kitchen. Just imagine how much easier cooking would be if you could write Rachael Ray and ask, “What should I substitute for truffle butter in this dish?” or “Where can I find organic peaches in my area?”

Kinzie, a video blogger for Meatless Monday, likes that she can communicate with her audience through the comments posted to her cooking videos, but acknowledges that there are some challenges in appealing today’s viewers. “I think the hardest part is taking a recipe that might take 30 minutes to an hour to prepare and cook and jam it into a less than five minute video,” she notes.

This speedy standard leads to a smooth edit, where the time spent waiting is cut and the viewer is left with an unrealistic expectation of how long the recipe will take. There is some cinema verite magic lost in these smooth transitions as well. If Julia Child had been producing YouTube videos today, she would never have dropped that potato pancake, because those moments would not have made the cut.

So how are we to best use these unrealistically quick cooking videos? Many foodie YouTube’ers do not try to avoid the time constraint by editing, but instead teach a single skill that can be demonstrated in five minutes or less – like poaching an egg or blanching some asparagus. Finding a video demonstration to follow when you stumble across an unrecognizable direction in a recipe can teach you how to cook and adapt – not just to follow directions.

Learning new skills allows us all more creativity and variety in our cooking adventures. We should take advantage of the interactive accessibility and resources that the internet provides. Build up your cooking skill set with brief, but instructional YouTube offerings, or get the skinny on where your ingredients really come from on Locallectual. If you have specific questions, write to the Huffington Post’s EcoEtiquette Column and Jennifer Grayson will fill you in on the dos and don’ts of eating green. Use the wealth of knowledge available online to decipher food labels at Sustainable Table, map your locally available ingredients with the Eat Well Guide, then watch the instructional YouTube offerings’s while you cook for yourself

Participating in your own cooking routine transforms your relationship with what you’re eating. Preparing the food you consume creates a consciousness that can encourage you to be healthier. Earlier this year, the New England Journal of Medicine published a two year comparative diet study, which found that the specific diet the subjects followed was not the crucial of a factor to the diet’s success. The study found that being on any diet made participants more aware of what exactly they were consuming, which caused them to eat healthier. When you immerse yourself in the food you eat, when it is your hands in the dough, or your force behind the knife, you cannot help but become more mindful of what is going into your body.

The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that home cooking mattered even more than income when predicting healthy habits: a 1992 study showed that low-income women who cooked regularly were more likely to consume a healthful diet than their eat-out-often, high-income contemporaries. So be curious, use the food sites, videos and blogs to get to really know your ingredients and have the courage to sometimes step away from the computer screen.  Let the plethora of internet resources excite you enough to run into the kitchen and embark on a new cooking adventure. In the famous words of Julia Child: “Do not be afraid!”