Increasing productivity in the kitchen

Matt Yglesias made an argument on food that seems to have ticked off many of his commenters (Hat tip, Chicago David Chen)”

If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch… [emphasis mine]

And maybe someone could do it. The world’s purveyors of processed foods have noted a real market demand for healthier products. Consequently, they’re poured a lot of time and energy into creating things that at least seem healthier. And so we really have a lot of healthy-seeming options. But they’ve never, as best I can tell, poured all that much effort into trying to create things that are actually healthier. But someone could. Jamie Oliver could do it. Mark Bittman could do it. Michael Pollan could do it. And it would be more likely to succeed than an endless procession of NYT Magazine articles hectoring people about how they should cook more.

Apparently Oliver did work to improve school lunches, so good on him for that.  In any event, given some recent disappointing results from NYC food labeling, I’m going to focus more on the home production side.  Yglesias is correct that you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch, but that is quite different than saying you can’t speed up cooking in the home.  There’s a reason microwaves are everywhere, they’re fast, cheap, and make things hot.  There’s downsides to this of course, I think first and foremost the weakness is that they dehydrate the food, but I could be wrong on the cooking science there.

Anyhow, I’ll be doing a home cooked meal for my wife’s birthday today.  Which is cool, I enjoy cooking and since I follow the federal holiday schedule I’ve got the day off.  However, most days if I’m cooking something it has to be within 30 minutes.  Happily, my Mark Bittman cookbook does have a 30 minute index which I find very helpful, although I often don’t have the necessary ingredients on hand.  What I could really use is not a cookbook so much as a home economics book.  Lay out weeks worth of recipes at a time, tell what you need to buy, what you need to cook ahead on the weekend, and estimate the time and price investment.  Also, perhaps put the maximum efficiency recipe in with all the shortcuts and then layout where time can be added and what the benefits are.  E.g. go with fresh veggies rather than canned to improve nutrition and taste; do pure oven baking rather than a mix of oven and microwave for juicier chicken but at the cost of 15 minutes.  That sort of thing.  This does seem like an area where software could help, particularly in combination with grocery delivery services like peapod.  However, the software solution might not be useful for the people who most need to have productive kitchen options.

I think a lot of the trouble here is that the tradeoffs of restaurant cooking are rather different than the tradeoffs of home cooking.  Cooking does scale nicely, but learning to exploit those economics of scale is not an easy task, particularly in a small household.  In any event, how do we get to more home economics books?  Perhaps by marketing it to men.  While I was no Don Juan in my single days, I did find even low level cooking skill consistently drew positive comments from women and similarly enabled parties.  I won’t rehash the whole ‘nice guy’ discussion here, but generally speaking there’s no real reason to believe that being ‘nice’ or even just being genuinely kind is a particularly efficient signaling mechanism for your fitness as a romantic partner.  The ability to cook seems to be, and it also has the advantage of being a skill that raises your general fitness rather than just tries to invest a lot of effort in a single relationship with a person that isn’t interested in you.  I would love to see the foodie coaches capture the marketshare of the pickup lunches coaches.

Comments

[Moti]

I cook a lot more than I used to, as well, and I find that focusing on things that keep well for a few days makes things easier. It's also like most things - once you do a couple of things at the outset, it's easier to learn how to do more.

I second one of the other comments on the feed - the Joy of Cooking goes a long way to solve these problems. There's a lot in there about the chemistry of food. I would also add in the Flavor Bible - this isn't really home ec, per se, so much as something that tells you how to use ingredients you have on hand to make interesting and flavorful combinations. We get a lot of use out of it, here.

Which also comes down to, if you allot a bit of time for cooking for the week, and you just keep ingredients on hand, there's a lot of stuff you can just throw together quickly that's good. Slow cookers help in this regard, too.

(Now I'm thinking I should make chili tomorrow. Well, that's an idea. ^_^)

[Greg Sanders]

Hm... I may pick up a Joy of Cooking if I don't have it around already.

My big meal on this past Saturday actually turned out pretty well. Craziest new thing was a lime sorbet. People also seemed to like the chicken with white wine sauce, but I wasn't that impressed by it, I think the failing was likely in my technique but that means I'll probably just try something new instead.

Also, my email notification of comments seems to be broken. That's worrying.