So, I'm going to speak to you today partly about why people don't cook anymore
but also more importantly, I think, why people should.
It's an idea which sounds so very simple; I hope it will prove revolutionary,
and I'm going to try and argue why people should spend time in the kitchen.
Actually, I really wanted to have it written on my hands - "Go cook!"
I didn't do it, but I'll do it afterwards.
Think about this for a second -
In the past 20 years,
there has been a meteoric rise in interest in cooking.
I mean, you see it everywhere.
It's in popular media;
there are best-selling books about food and about cooking;
there are TV programs about cooking all over the place;
there are magazines -
just everywhere you look in the media, someone is cooking,
and I should say that this, kind of interestingly,
also in the past 20 years, has spilled into academic interest.
You will see food conferences proliferate;
there are several huge encyclopedias,
food series, journals,
and of course, college classes - I teach one of those.
So it's not just in the popular media;
it's pretty much everywhere you see people obsessed with food,
which is great.
But oddly enough, at the same time that this is happening,
all evidence shows that there is a decline in actual cooking at home.
Of course, there are some people who cook,
some crazy people who just love spending time there.
Interestingly, the studies show it's men increasingly cooking,
which is very interesting.
But on a whole, if we look at the average American,
we cook less, we spend less time in the kitchen than before,
and that should seem sort of weird to you, right?
But I think there's evidence that shows this,
just sort of anecdotally, if you go through your average supermarket,
you stroll down the aisles, especially the center aisles - notice -
you will see a proliferation of convenience foods.
And what do I mean by that?
There's canned foods;
there are frozen foods, a whole huge aisle just for frozen foods;
and things which I'd call sort of prefab,
and that doesn't necessarily mean pre-made meals,
it means things that kind of give you the illusion that you're cooking
but you're not really.
A cake mix, I think, is the best best thing, right?
It takes the same amount of labour to put together a cake mix
as it does to put together raw ingredients,
but they charge more for that cake mix.
And you sort of walk away feeling happy - "I cooked something, look what I made!"
Now, I want to really ask this, in all seriousness,
is this a kind of conspiracy on the part of the food industry?
Did they set out to say,
"Let's make sure these people don't know how to cook;
let's ruin all their skills;
within one generation, we're going to make sure no one can do anything
so they become dependent on us, on the stuff we make."
And I don't think anyone, well, maybe they did,
but I don't think anyone actually sat down and decided that,
but it's clear what they did
is they realized that if we do things that are "value-added,"
that's the term the industry uses,
if we can charge more for product because we have prepared it -
we've done something to it, so it costs more -
we'll increase our profit margins.
Very simple.
You take a box of Tater Tots and the same weight of potatoes,
these cost a lot more;
Tater Tots make more profit, so they will do that sort of thing for you.
Okay? Again, a prefab food is to make profit, right?
Now, I was thinking, well, okay, so people eat some processed food,
but the statistics I found are actually slightly alarming.
Processed food accounts for 80% of food sold in the U.S.
That's in terms of profits.
It's not the volume, the weight or anything;
it's the money that is made in food: 80% of that is not cooked in a real way.
The USDA says that in terms of volume,
we eat 31% more packaged food than fresh.
So, convenience foods are -
this is a fact, I'm not just making this up -
are sort of taking over the landscape of our food ways.
There are other things that are important,
microwave ovens, you know, simplicity of preparing these things now.
I think it's also very clear - and this is just anecdotal evidence -
that eating out has proliferated, and people have done studies on this,
that we're eating out a lot more, and it's not high-end restaurants,
especially since the economy has slid,
it tends to be what they call "downscale casual restaurants,"
things which, I guess -
just drive up and down Pacific Avenue or across March Lane,
and you will see, you know, Applebee's, Chili’s, TGIF,
Red Lobster, Marie Callender's; there's dozens of them!
That’s not even to mention the fast food,
just these sort of chain restaurants that are prefab, homogenized,
things shipped in from elsewhere,
and of course, just sort of warmed up there, and you eat it,
but that's on the rise as is takeout,
that's another phenomenon that is meteoric in rise.
And the weird thing is, this whole entire phenomenon,
is the more we watch cooking on TV and read about it magazines,
the less we actually do it, okay?
It's sort of like sports or sex, right?
People want to watch it a lot,
but the more we watch of it, the less of it actually happens.
I don't know how they know that about sex but, it's ...
(Laughter)
What's weird is - stop and think for a second -
these are really biological necessities, right?
We need to eat, feed ourselves.
We need to compete; that's hardwired in our systems.
We need to reproduce.
And yet, as a society, we're not doing so much of that,
we're not as good at it as we used to be.
I don't know.
In any case, it is what food historians call "deskilling,"
and I think you can see it.
You just turn on the TV and watch any food TV program;
it's really not about instruction anymore.
I mean, in the days of Julia Child, she'd stand in front of the table,
flop a chicken down and say, "Here's how to cut it up."
That just doesn't happen anymore, right?
It's now about entertainment; it's now about competition;
it's about, you know, someone trying to build the highest cake;
it's about eating weird things; it's about traveling -
very little of it is actually instruction anymore.
Now here's a question - I'm a historian, so I always ask,
"If we cook less, what's the real evidence?"
That implies that in the past, people must have cooked more, right?
Somehow they were cooking up a storm back then,
and today, we just don't anymore.
Well, the evidence is a little contradictory, I have to admit.
You know, if we look at the past,
we tend to think that cheap, fast restaurants
are a modern phenomenon - they are not.
Every city would have had its, you know, sort of cafeterias and taverns
and places where you could just go and find cheap, quick food.
Fast food is its own phenomenon, but it exists in the past also.
There also -
Very interestingly, if you look at the way people lived in cities,
tenements often didn't have cooking facilities.
That means people had to eat out, necessarily.
There were also things like boarding houses,
where you'd live there, and they would feed you,
and that's a very common phenomenon,
just a hundred years ago.
So what other kind of evidence is there?
If you look at cookbooks per se -
I like to tell people cookbooks
are absolutely no indication of what people in the past ate
nor today, for that matter.
They're really aspirational.
People read them; they're sort of, you know,
they're prescriptive, they're not descriptive.
You open them up, sit in your armchair, say, "Oh, wouldn't that be nice to make?"
you put it away, right?
Rarely do people cook out of them,
but I do have to say,
150 years ago, cookbooks were a lot more complicated than they are now.
The techniques that they're talking about, the range of ingredients,
I mean, even 200 years ago,
there's a recipe for how to cook a whole turtle,
I mean things that we just would never think of doing anymore.
And it is a fact that 150 years ago, there were no convenience foods.
Canning was not yet - it was invented, but no one was really using it.
There were no frozen foods; there were no prepared meals,
and I think also, very importantly, there was a much lower urban populations,
so people who lived out in the country had to cook if they wanted to eat.
It doesn't mean it's good, but they had to cook.
Let me give you some percentages.
Recently, the percentage of home-cooked meals
cooked from scratch
dropped from 72% in 1980 to 59% in 2010,
I don't know how they document that, but that's statistics, okay?
Now, looking at this situation, nutritionists have thought about this,
government bureaus have thought about this,
obviously the USDA and everyone are thinking, typically,
"What do we do about this situation? We must educate people."
And you all know there's been a slew of programs
like to teach cooking in grade school;
there have been school gardens, which have been very successful;
culinary courses in community colleges, extension programs;
and, of course, more cookbooks.
They just keep churning these things out.
There's also a whole brand of nutrition education,
which means, "Let's try this shape pyramid.
No, that doesn't work; let's try another pyramid."
It's all very politically driven, you probably know.
You know, milk and meat and grain and corn;
that's what we grow in this country, so that's what shows up on the pyramid.
And I think the nutrition education -
the funny thing about it is it never works.
One of the topics I've written about is nutritional theory 500 years ago.
No one paid attention to it then,
and, I think, for the most part, they don't do it today either.
People really want what tastes good and not really what's good for you.
And the tendency of these cookbooks and the education,
in general, has been to simplify simplify, dumb down everything;
if we have to tell them how to boil water, we will.
The other thing, which is my own personal ax to grind,
is the modern recipe format.
Think of what happens when you open up a cookbook.
It has to be a list of ingredients;
it's assuming you work in a professional kitchen -
we'll need your mise-en-place.
It has very precise measurements;
if you put a quarter-of-an-inch more, a cup more of something in that,
it's going to be ruined,
or, Heaven forbid, you substitute something else, it won't work.
This is the implication.
Very precise cooking times,
which with the exception of maybe cakes and cookies,
how long you cook something, really doesn't matter.
And think of it this way:
how many people here have a GPS device?
One of those things that navigates for you.
Think of what that does to your ability to navigate intuitively,
to look at a map and just say,
"I'm heading north, maybe I should go this way."
GPS devices have caused people to drive onto railroad tracks:
"I'm following the directions, right? It's got to be right."
The same thing has happened in cooking.
Precise, precise recipes calls people
to trust the recipe and not their instincts,
not what really is going on in the pan, not what they could see!
It says, "Bake this for one hour."
Even if it's burning in the oven,
they'll say, "Oh, it says. The recipe says. I have to follow it."
Now, I totally understand why cookbook authors do this.
They need to copyright their work, right?
They want to write very specific directions.
They want to be original and new so they can have a niche in the market,
and they, therefore, have to make things original.
Therefore, they're going to give you something as precisely worded as possible,
and I think it is dangerous.
I think it's really ruined our ability to cook.
So let me give you my solution.
I hope this sounds as revolutionary to you as it did when it first occurred to me.
As I say, let's lose cookbooks; let's toss them in the trash,
and especially this modern format.
You're probably saying,
"Hey, wait a minute, doesn't he write cookbooks?"
I do, but they're not cookbooks.
They don't have measurements, cooking times or anything like that.
They're really to teach you how to cook intuitively;
they're there to tell you how to use a certain ingredient,
what kind of technique will work on that ingredient,
what procedure could work,
and I think that way it becomes a lot more fun.
You're not just there, slavishly following my directions because I said so;
you're finding an ingredient and "Hmm, let's try this with it!"
And if you fail, so what? There’s food tomorrow.
But it teaches you to cook.
I think spending more time in the kitchen, doing these kind of basic tasks,
I think we have a problem in that we consider that a chore.
We think this is something you just got to get it over with,
get it done as quickly as possible;
taste doesn't really matter, get it in, it's fuel,
go on to more important things.
Well, honestly, what is more important?
I hear people tell me, "I love to eat, I love food, I love this."
"Did you cook something today?" "No."
I stopped on the way, or something.
So I think the important thing to do
is stop thinking that quick, convenient, easy, simple things
are worth your energy.
They're not; they're usually junk.
And start thinking about things that take a long time
or that are difficult or even that are dangerous.
I twisted my back something awful, picking olives the other day -
I crush them by hand.
It was a silly thing to do, I don't recommend it,
but still, it's just the willingness to just get in the kitchen,
see what happens and have fun.
I think the result of this idea
is that people will spend a lot more time in the kitchen,
perhaps less time watching TV or other non-active, passive, things.
I think cooking will be a lot more fun; it'll be a creative outlet.
I hate to say it, but there is no way microwaving popcorn is fun -
it's just putting something in the microwave -
or even following someone else's recipe just doesn't sound like fun to me,
and, I think, most importantly
is even those people who really love to cook, when do they do it?
When they're entertaining, maybe on the weekend,
maybe as a kind of hobby.
It shouldn't be a hobby; it should be an integral part of people's lives.
It should be something they do every day.
Let me make a proposition.
It's going to sound sort of weird and arbitrary,
I think people should spend at least an hour every day cooking.
And I say this only because the US Department of Labor’s survey in 2010
said that the average American -
and this is as a head of household; it doesn't count the kids -
spent 32 minutes each day preparing food and cleaning up.
That means - let's divide that by several meals, perhaps,
and half that time is cleaning up,
so 15 minutes per dinner - that's about average -
compared to 2 hours and 45 minutes watching TV.
Unproductive and, obviously, very productive to spend cooking.
And I think the most important thing
is that sharing food is fundamentally satisfying;
it's what makes us human:
feeding, sustaining other people, giving them nourishment,
taking your creative energy, letting it flow through something living
and making it sustain us
is the most valuable, rewarding thing you can do for others,
and of course, it's the basis of all of our rituals, right?
You never have a party without eating,
you never do anything without somehow consummating that
by sharing food, breaking bread, whatever it may be.
I think it is fundamentally a spiritual thing for our species.
You might argue also fresh food is better for your health.
That's not my primary concern here, but that's what physicians tell us:
food prepared from scratch tends to have less,
you know, preservatives and other junk in it,
but the one thing I will argue is that preparing food from scratch is cheaper.
Go to McDonald’s.
I tried to find out the price of a hamburger, online last night;
it's impossible to find, I don't know why.
I'm guessing it's probably about three bucks.
And then by the time you get there, by the time you wait in line,
you know, spend all this time,
think of how much a pound of ground beef costs -
let's say you're really money conscious here - $1.99.
If it's a quarter pound hamburger,
that's four people you're feeding for $1.99, plus buns, whatever,
it's always cheaper to cook at home, always, always.
And I think, also, knowing more about food and where it comes from,
how it’s processed
will inevitably make people more responsible eaters.
They're going to start thinking,
"How does this food choice impact the environment?
Was this animal sustainably raised and in concern for its own welfare?"
They'll start thinking about things like food security.
By that I don't mean poop poisoning the food supply,
I mean the access that people have to food.
One of my favorite exercises to do with my food class
is I have half the class go to a supermarket right south of campus,
and another go to a supermarket uptown, more affluent neighborhood.
The food is cheaper uptown.
The further south you go, the more expensive it gets.
The people who don't have the money to spend pay more
because there's fewer supermarkets - it's not as profitable, obviously.
That's a weird thing in this country.
I think also when you start cooking from ingredients,
you feel bad wasting food.
By that I mean just an animal.
Imagine you're buying a big hunk of animal,
you feel kind of bad:
this animal is giving its life for me, and I'm tossing some of it in the trash.
You don't feel that way
when you get an unidentifiable piece of slab of meat in a plastic package.
That's not an animal, that’s a piece of meat;
it doesn't come from anyone.
I think it will make us think more carefully
about what we eat, in better ways, and not waste food.
Food waste is one of the biggest problems in this country.
Most importantly, I think food will taste better.
When people start trusting their instincts in the kitchen,
it will not be laden with artificial flavor enhancers and salt and sugar.
Food will start to taste like itself again,
and I have to say,
when people ask me where I live, I say Central Valley, San Joaquin Valley.
The best thing about living here
is unfathomably good produce, fruits and vegetables,
great wine just north of town, asparagus in the Delta -
I mean, the best thing about living here is the food,
and yet people don't seem to be so thrilled about it.
Let me tell you a very brief, quick story.
Several years ago, it was announced in the Stockton record
that we would be getting our own Olive Garden.
This was a cause for celebration because, of course,
it's an index of material prosperity.
If they will open an Olive Garden in town, everyone's happy.
And the Stockton Record reporter said, "Will you say a couple of comments?"
and I said, "Well, I've only eaten in an Olive Garden once or twice,
a long time ago, on the East Coast, and it was deplorable!
It was absolutely disgusting, vile, heinous filth!"
I said something like that, I don't know ...
And the guy, of course, quoted me on that,
and everyone in Stockton seems to,
"How dare you? We love Olive Garden! I take my grandpa there, and he loves it!"
And I was like, "Okay, do you know how Olive Garden makes that food?
They don't go to Italy to train.
They get a little package, and they microwave it, serve it to you.
Sorry, they don't eat greasy breadsticks in Italy,
they just don't do it."
Even apart from that, the part that this reporter did not mention
is that I said, "We have the best food in the whole country, right here,
and people are going to Olive Garden, that's pathetic!"
Another thing -
I think cooking your food is going to make you appreciate the seasons,
appreciate that when something is good,
you eat it every day, you glut on it,
and then you forget about it for the rest of the year.
When you go into the supermarket
and you see those sad, pathetic fruits or tomatoes
that have been sitting on the shelf,
they're not grown for flavor,
they're grown so they can ship and look nice when they arrive.
And people wonder, why don’t children eat fruits and vegetables?
Well, they taste awful. It's as simple as that! Right?
Have them seasonal.
They should show up a month or so in the summer and then disappear,
and I think that would be great.
And in conclusion, let me just say
that I think cooking from scratch, and especially without recipes,
without the kind of trepidation or fear that you're going to fail
and not impress people, who cares?
I think the more people get in the kitchen and have fun,
the better food will taste, in general,
the more connected people will be to their food,
and the more willing they will be to spend time in the kitchen
and to share their food,
and I have to say, that I hope that the attitude
that somehow cooking is not time well spent -
there are surveys that suggests Americans don't think that -
I think it's completely erroneous.
It's the best time you can possibly spend,
fitting it into your working schedule -
my God,
if I think of all the time getting my kids to one place or another -
but cooking is absolutely essential, and without it, we would not exist.
Thank you.
(Applause)