At your convenience.

(For some reason, this post devolved into a rant. It probably sounds harsher that I meant it to. I had no intent to hurt anyone's feelings, of course...but I'm letting it stand nonetheless.)

Dear Internet,

As you may recall, I griped about the inexorable dumbing-down of cooking media.

The culinary media is on a downward spiral of its own devising and, much like someone who enjoys the taste of arsenic, loving every moment of the process.

This devolution is manifested in the fetish for not teaching people to make anything involving more than the dumping of jarred, tinned, canned, boxed and/or powdered stuff atop indifferent meats and produce. Anyone who has ever dared to mention making stock has been booted off or sent to gulag-like publications. Leaving us with hit-and-miss wonders on air. (Tere dislikes them for their whitebreadness, I dislike them for attempting to convince the more credulous that white bread is worthy of the effort of chewing.)

Mind you, I'm on record as not being utterly against all convenience products. I just bitterly resent the ever-encroaching assumption that this "always and everywhere" attitude is perfectly okay. A long time ago, when I was even more vain that I am now -- or, at least when my vanity seemed more evident in the way I pursued my nutritional and exercise regimens -- I subscribed to a magazine called Eating Well, which was a sort of healthy-eating-for-foodies. This magazine, sadly, was bought out by the same crowd who publish Cooking Light. The latter magazine is Definitely Not Foodie Grade stuff. So, the publishers promptly shut down* the former. This left readers with a magazine suffused with recipes that instructed readers to gather up tins, boxes, cans, frozen bags, etc. without even an option for fresh edibles.

This isn't meant to automatically slight convenience stuff, though. There are many things which one can buy that will speed the weeknight dinner with only small sacrifices in quality. The biggest eye-rolling a foodie gets from a non-foodie involves making stock. I won't go into a proper and correct and well-within-my-rights tirade on why everyone should, but even if you do, you might not have any, say, beef stock since your family doesn't usually eat beef meaning you usually don't have any for such a purpose.

In any event, you could go with the aseptic packaged Pacific brand. The final result won't be as sublime as if you had simmered (and saved in frozen form) your own, but it will be Not Too Bad At All. When it comes to convenience stuff, though, the Italian contingent pretty much leaves the rest of the foodverse bound and gagged. Not only could you go with the stuff I wrote about previously, but the Francis Ford Coppola sauces (especially the Amatriciana, the Arrabiata and the Porcini-Marsala) are divine, as is Citarella's Lobster Fra Diavolo.

There is also no big deal about getting that washed/bagged produce, or getting something already cut up from the butcher counter. Besides the cost, natch. But that's a damned sight mo' different than getting precut frozen chunks of cooked chicken.

At the risk of seeming like a proselyte, I believe there is something lost at the cultural/societal level when we make it a habit of outsourcing our food preparation further up** the distribution chain. When you choose to continually let commercial enterprises cook for you and your family you are missing out on so damned much. The ease of dialing up and having something delivered, or of dumping things from cartons and bags and the freezer is addictive and, I maintain, corrosive. The food will never be as good, the nutrition certainly won't be.

I'm not talking about being a foodie geek like me, pondering how to cure and smoke my own bacon or straining to find unpasteurized milk to make my own cheese or making my own sausages, or saving pounds upon pounds of bones and carcasses for stock. I'm talking about making an effort to put together something for your family to derive pleasure and nourishment therefrom. When you think about it, there is nothing you can do for those whom you love that will have the same immediacy. You could slave away and buy your son a Wii (like I just did) but in the long run it won't have the impact as you and he in the kitchen making maple-pecan pancakes for brunch. The Wii and the MP3 players and the toys and clothes and stuff are fun, but the fun they bring is ephemeral...just ask any parent whose kid "graduated" from a playing daily with PlayStation2 to whining for a PlayStation3.

Maybe I'm weird. (Wait, I know I am.) But to me having one of my sons tell me that the X we cooked is really, really good is priceless. There is a holistic manifestation of family-ness going on there. That feeling is fragile and easy to lose, unless it's nurtured and maintained.

This is not to say, that on a day when one arrives very late, dog-beat from work ordering pizza is a major personality defect, or that defrosting something is akin to an abdication of love and responsibility. What I'm driving at is the habituation of such a thing and, most importantly, the damnably sad fact that there are TV networks and magazines that stoke said habituation.

OK. Done with this subject.

-J.

* This magazine eventually resurrected and, while the recipes are pretty good it has come back with an inexplicable political slant I find abhorrent, thus letting my subscription lapse.

** This is like the foodies' equivalent of breastfeeding activism.