I heart Michael Pollan and his food education ways

My coffee companion this morning? Michael Pollan's most recent NYT article: "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?pagewanted=1&em

As someone who loves to think about food, look at food, (sometimes) cook food, and of course eat food, his article definitely struck a nerve. His central point: We are watching food on TV far more than we are actually cooking it. The paradox is unsettling. We watch people chop and braise fresh food on Top Chef AS we chow down on microwave popcorn and lean cuisine. Cooking has become something glamorous, something fast and trendy, something other people do. And I totally agree: I don't watch Top Chef to learn how to prepare a mise en place, I watch it to judge and sometimes salivate over the contestants' uber food creations. And I definitely don't watch any of the "dump and stir" programs on the Food Network Pollan talks about. When over half of the ingredients Ray Ray uses on 30 Minute Meals are from a box/can/jar, what is "real" about the cooking going on?

So, you ask, what does this rant/review have to do with teaching, which is supposed to be the purpose of this blog? This: Food = Learning. It teaches us about culture, about family, about corporate greed. It shows us that eating well has become a social justice issue. If I teach my students that humans are meant to eat carrots and not cheetos I could fundamentally change what my students eat, and in doing so, shed a small light onto other injustices in their life. Learning that you have the right to eat well is a fact I want them to embrace. To own. To become really, really angry about. That's why, no matter if I teach English, Theater, Playwriting, what have you, the information that Michael Pollan so powerfully puts out into the world will be shared with my students.

On that note, here are some of the Pollanisms I will be thinking about as I watch Anthony Bourdain shove various amounts of tubed pork product into his gord tonight:

"The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch — into yet another confection of spectacle and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch" (4).

"We seem to be well on our way to turning cooking into a form of weekend recreation, a backyard sport for which we outfit ourselves at Williams-Sonoma, or a televised spectator sport we watch from the couch....But to relegate the activity of cooking to a form of play, something that happens just on weekends or mostly on television, seems much more consequential. The fact is that not cooking may well be deleterious to our health, and there is reason to believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to corporations and 16-year-olds has already taken a toll on our physical and psychological well-being" (7).

"...when we don’t have to cook meals, we eat more of them: as the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake" (7).

"The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not" (7).