In other words, the "one knife, one pan", "I don't need kitchen gadgets" snobs aren't a better, purer sort of cook; they're just ignoring most of the contents of their kitchen. How many of them cook over an open fire, rather than using one of those high-faluting fancy stoves with their automatic temperature regulation and their electric lights? Why are they storing all their food in a cold box rather than shopping for each day, the way people do in India? Who needs a special pot for coffee when your great grandparents just boiled it up in a saucepan and settled the grinds by dropping eggshells into the resulting brew? Why own a blender instead of putting the food through a grinder and then a chinois? Wouldn't the dishes get cleaner if you boiled up water and washed them by hand? And hey, what's that toaster doing there?
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
3 comments:
I agree with McArdle, but consider Alice Waters and the notorious wood-oven egg video. Sometimes the purists mean business.
Agreed. I suspect McArdle's target was less Alice Waters than the people who want that without all the implied effort. I also think you're right on the question of sincerity, though I tend to think the impracticality of it swamps whatever value the sincerity might have.
But this is a general philosophical orientation of mine (in theory terms the ideal/non-ideal debate; a mediocre plan that can be put into effect is superior to a perfect goal that can never be realized (and I have my doubts about the practicality of many of the more extreme food movement goals)), and I admit that it's somewhat unsatisfying in various contexts, this one perhaps included.
In terms of sincerity, one complicating factor is that many proponents of this approach make a living doing things like spending four days preparing one loaf of bread, then writing about it. While they ostensibly gear their suggestions to a home cook with a day job, they often hugely miscalculate what quick-and-easy constitutes for someone else, as well as what the tradeoffs will be for a home cook, that is, whether maybe a marginally inferior result that could be completed in one evening would be the better option.
As for non-food-professionals advocating that we get rid of our food processors, I'm not aware of this happening all that often. As far as I can tell, there are on the one hand purists, who tend to be food writers, and on the other home cooks who, via their experience in the kitchen, think many single-purchase/$1,500 gadgets are a waste of money/status symbols. When I see something like a device whose only purpose is to slice a peach, I tend to think it's being marketed at those who'd be better off with very basic kitchen skills.
But McArdle's right - you should go by what you'd use, and if you slice a lot of peaches and the device sames time, why not?
Post a Comment