Since the beginning of time, or as far back as we can surmise, humans have felt a need to eat. Some sparingly, others like King Henry VIII in glutenous binges until you’re so stuffed you can barely walk. Unlike lesser animal forms, that would eat pretty much whatever was at paw or claw until it ran out, and then they moved on, we human beings, an imaginative sort, learned fairly early on to either grow or hunt our own.
We further discovered fire, to make the process of eating other animals less disgusting. Then, using water, we could make what we’d hunted or grown into tasty soups and stews. Voila, cuisine was born. I feel it’s important to provide my myriad readers with historical information and perspective.
My late father-in-law, a farm boy from upstate New York, would tell us tales – most true, I suspect, about raising their food themselves, because that’s what people did on the farm. He was one of 10 children, so food prep was an all-day affair. While the boys were out early milking the cows, his mother was getting breakfast started. After cleaning up from breakfast, she’d immediately start on lunch. If you’re a true New Englander, lunch is actually called “dinner”, because that was the big meal of the day. In the evening, the fair was lighter, and thus because “supper”. I was surprised to learn, when my parents moved to a small, rural community in Southern New Hampshire, that my classmates called lunchboxes, “dinner pails”, or worse, “dinner buckets”. I was in the fourth grade at the time, and the culture shock still hits from time to time. But I digress.
As more and more people flocked to the cities during and post-industrialization, the advent of the grocery store emerged. Not one-stop shopping, mind you, because you still had green grocers, dry-goods stores, fruit vendors – sometimes using carts and outdoor displays, and butcher shops. Perhaps the butchers were folks that flunked out of surgery classes in medical school. But these eventually merged into the “supermarket”, which saw a proliferation throughout the late 20th century up to the point where even Walmart and Target were selling food. The big improvement of the supermarkets has been that they carry things we used to get only at certain times of the year, because along with the supermarkets came the portable refrigeration. Fruits and vegetables grown in California, Florida, and Mexico could now be shipped before they rotted to stores all over the country. Along with this has come the development of the “recall”, but that’s something for another chapter.
The 21st century, seeking to establish its mark on food preparation, has overseen the rise in “prepared foods” – those things that you bought full prepared, carried home, and popped into the oven. At first, we called these “television dinners”, because we no longer needed the dining room or the dining room table. We could now eat in the living room on tray stands and watch television. What a giant step forward, allowing us to eat our dinners (or supper, if you prefer) while watching the evening news, with its shots of war, mangled bodies outside smoking buildings, or flooding and mudslides and more dead bodies, or even tornadoes and, yes, dead bodies.
Some people still, in an effort to reverse time, will show up on House Hunters occasionally looking for plots of land on which they can grow vegetables. The acres and acres of family farm has given way to more manageable family gardens. People don’t expect to feed themselves year ‘round from these gardens, but they do still want to produce some yearly vegetables to consume what the slugs and rabbits don’t get first. It gives them a great sense of satisfaction to be “living off the land” as it were. In Britain, as well as in urban areas, there are “allotments” and “community gardens”, where many folks share gardening space with their neighbors in limited plots. Apparently, it’s very communal and friendly as well as producing vegetables, and I’m told many find it therapeutic. Others even fill their backyards with chickens, ducks, goats, pigs, and all sorts of animals that produce everything from eggs to milk and, I guess, the occasional chicken nugget or a rasher of bacon. I often read about these “back to the earth” people in the newspapers because their neighbors are complaining about the noise and the smell. These disputes often make the front page and some interesting reading.
The invention of the microwave truly sped up the process of food preparation. Cooking time has been reduced substantially, which coincides with Americans’ growing impatience with everything, but in particular food preparation. Most prepared foods come with instructions both in microwave-speak and a somewhat condescending, “if you really want to put this in the oven or use the stovetop” alternative. My mother had a dear friend who was still, when we were growing up, used a wood stove. She explained to me one day that she knew exactly how many chunks of wood it took to cook a ham. In her later years, when she left her farm and moved into town, she had to switch to electricity, and never really got the hang of it.
Up to, and particularly during the recent COVID pandemic, when nobody ventured out without everything from facemask and disposable gloves to a full HAZMAT suit, grocery delivery became a “thing”. I know I signed up for a service, at the insistence of our daughter, who really wanted her mother and myself wrapped in plastic until the numbers went down. But I was willing to forego my daily trips to the store, consolidating our groceries onto a week list, and ordering delivery. For those that never fully grasped how this worked, I’d sign up for service, on which I could log in and place an order. In one respect, it was quite useful as I could add items as we ran out, and then submit a complete list once a week. It would be charged to a credit card at roughly twice the cost of actually going to the store. Sale items were unavailable, of course. The “personal shopper” would text message anything he or she couldn’t find, and suggest alternatives. In a scene roughly akin to the Black Death in the 14th century, where households “put out their dead for collection”, we’d have the shopper place the order on a bench by the back door, and then I’d bring them in and put them away. It was necessary, again as our daughter informed us, to disinfect everything with wipes before putting them away, and it was important to check to make sure that everything we paid for was actually in the order. Typically, there were two or three items missing, so I’d go back to the delivery service to report things missing and get a credit. Yes, it was definitely a fun time to be shopping. When you placed the order, you’d specify a day and time for order to be delivered, so you could be on the lookout for your things. Most of the time, it worked. But it all broke down one day when my shopper, Dylan or Darrell, was to arrive between 1 and 2 PM. As the story goes, his car, a vintage Oldsmobile, broke down and he didn’t get here ‘til about 5:30. To make up for the delay, he’d combined about five orders into one, with a packed trunk of orders all mixed up into miscellaneous bags. It was another half hour sorting out my order from my print-out, and there were a dozen things not there. I ended up giving him a small tip anyway because the poor fellow – Dylan or Darrell – was practically in tears and was apologizing not just for the order mix-up, but for the pandemic and the Trump presidency. It was clearly not his best day. To top it off, we ended up ordering a pizza because it was too late to cook. I haven’t used the service in a couple of years, but they email me almost sobbing, asking me to come back and offering us discounts. I don’t think so.
What I find particularly interesting is that, along with making meals faster, easier, and more streamlined with enhanced equipment and methods, we’ve also seen a proliferation of television shows, magazine articles, and newspaper columns dedicated to exotic food preparation. There’s been a distinct rise in special ingredients – sea or kosher salt, fresh herbs and spices along with tools to grind them. Previous generations never saw air fryers, zesters, immersion blenders, and convection ovens among other things. My mother wouldn’t have known anything “non-stick” if it chased her across the kitchen. It would appear that, as we’re doing less and less at home because of our busy schedules, we simultaneously have more and more “stuff” with which to do it. As I’ve mentioned before, I love the folks on House Hunters that need an island the size of Manhattan and six-burner gas stoves, that finally admit, toward the end of the show, that they “don’t really like cooking” or don’t do much of it.
The whole purpose of this food preparation overview, is that I’ve seen commercials recently for the next major breakthrough in food service. We’ve been inching in this direction, with suppliers that send you everything you need, in measured proportions, delivered to your door. Just cut it up, put it in the oven, and, presto, dinner! This new development, though, and its name escapes me, comes with its own little oven – it looks not unlike the toaster ovens of yore. You pop in the food and scan the instructions, and out comes a fully cooked, delicious-looking meal. Not all complete, though. I suspect that the people in ads had to actually arrange the food in an attractive manner on a dinner plate, which is so time-consuming. How do they make the time to pop, scan, plate, and eat? I’m reminded of a great bit from comedian Ellen DeGeneres, talking about dissolving breath mints. She mentions what a great innovation that is, because (and here she makes a sucking noise with her tongue) “is too much effort.” The folks that show up at your door and shove the cooked food right into your mouth will really make a fortune.
I hope my readers have found this informative and enjoyed this trip down the food prep memory lane. Bon Appetit!
I'm Thinking...No! 