THE CASE FOR THE HOME-COOKED MEAL
By Rafael A. Nazario

For many folks, a good many folks, too many folks, eating has become a strange collusion of commerce and entertainment, everyone enslaved on a galleon called ‘convenience,’ where meals are pre-cooked, frozen, made from desiccated bases and/or in a bag you can conveniently boil or “zap” in the microwave. Most folks in the US of A are raised on simple and over-simplified flavors, the daily diet having been geared –engineered, really– towards appreciating, glorifying and sanctifying the burger, as if in partaking of this “national dish” (one that distinguishes itself by its singular lack of resemblance to any cuisine) were somehow synonymous with waving the flag. (Don’t get me wrong, a great burger now and then can be a thing of beauty. But I digress.) Consequently, most folks take their meals at a hamburger joint/franchise rather seriously, yet somehow manage to pay little attention to what they are really consuming, the obvious salts, the high sweets, the industrial, cheap bread; the paucity of flavor in the dubious “cheese product.” It’s all very simple and very obvious, precisely so that you don’t have to pay too much attention; so that you don’t think too much. Critical faculties are thus suspended the way disbelief is suspended at a fantasy film. But hey, it was fast. For many, eating has been relegated to something that takes place between or during other activities, a parenthetical endeavor between destinations in this busy, busy world. Enter the need for more convenience.

This idea of convenience isn’t really new. We can go back to the teens and twenties, when the nascent food processing industry began publishing little tomes in the form of ersatz cookbooks, peddling the modern ease and alleged benefits of its products, “The Magic of Crisco” “Magic in the Kitchen!” and other heart-stopping titles. Now consider that little over a 100 years ago, some 90% of the flour sold in the United States was destined for the home baker and you realize just how far the pendulum has swung. Grow up having enough of those ‘instant’ meals, you know, the ones with the easily recognizable spray-canned, slap-you-silly flavors of processed “food products” and our cravings and expectations for instant, yet shallow gratification will always run high, because after all, we are not just what we eat, but how we eat.

As a chef, I see it all the time, taste buds dulled by years of being hammered with coarse, faux flavors and additives easily reject the purity of dishes and ingredients they don’t readily recognize. The visual equivalent of such a lifestyle –if it could be called that– would be one restricted to seeing primary colors only. Imagine absolutely everything painted in bold, bright yellows, reds and blues only [which: curiously enough, are the colors fast-food outlets seem to favor]; imagine a life oblivious to shading, nuance, all manner of delicate colorings and the auric subtleties of a rainbow; blind to the part of the spectrum where real beauty resides. It wouldn’t be so pernicious if it weren’t so insidiously habit forming. If we lose the desire to take the time to take the trouble, meals lose their meaning and we lose the connection to each other. Our humanity slips away while we entertain ourselves dipping the fries in the ketchup.

We eventually grow up but we don’t necessarily grow out of our upbringing, identity, being also forged by what and how we eat. We leave our parent’s homes and move into the world knowing what we like and, here’s the kicker: liking only what we know. Hence, more often than not, we know nothing.

But all is not lost. Life can be an acquired taste. Similarly, taste can be an acquired life, a developed lifestyle. The palate is a muscle, albeit a muscle of perception. It responds to stimuli the way it’s been trained to. However, you can train the palate the way you train other parts of your body, with patience and diligence; regularly pushing the envelope and monitoring your progress. Inexorably, the palate wakes up to that which brings its buds to life, namely, fine food (not just ‘fancy food;’ simple, pure, fresh, home-cooked food) and yes, maybe skip the soda pop and opt for a glass of good wine. Do it enough times and it just could be that a home cooked meal with all the trimmings, which to some seems like a luxury or a thing of the past or an inconvenience, slowly becomes a daily necessity, a new-found cause, a standard to live by; the one love you perhaps could –but really shouldn’t– live without.