dark days

i don't think i am a very paranoid person. i don't think everyone is out to get me and i don't do very much looking over my shoulder. that being said, regardless of my specific spiritual beliefs, i do have a fear of armageddon or the world as we know it taking a nose dive. i harbor a strange, keep me up at night, phobia about living through a period similar to the dark ages, or mad max-ish post tech days, where enlightened beacons of culture and humanity disappear and the people who remain have not the slightest memory of the achievements of those who came before them. it would be plain awful to forget all the foundations of everything and have to relearn through trial and error and laborious research everything that was once commonplace.

i bring up this particular brand of panic attack because it occurred to me today as i was reading the very fantastic back to basics cookbook Jam it Pickle It Cure It (a recommendation by my lovely friend Seth--thank you!) that this is exactly what i'm going through to get back to a level of food and home making knowledge that was run of the mill just one or two generations ago. the familiarity with how to make food from whole ingredients, nothing pre-packaged or pre-made, has all but vanished. and then go one more step down the line and realize that there are probably even fewer people under a certain ripe old age who also still know how and what to grow as FOOD not landscaping, straight from the earth outside their door ....and suddenly my dark ages phobia doesn't seem so silly, right?

we seem just a small step away from a certain kind of dark age to me. the fantastic writer michael pollan (omnivores dilemma, in defense of food) wrote a piece in last week's Times that i adored called out of the kitchen, onto the couch. inspired by the film julie & julia, he dissects why we as a culture are currently so fascinated with food and specifically the food network, and yet we have never cooked less as a nation or understood less about food production. the question at the core of the article is how did we let cooking go from something you do to something you watch and pay someone else to do for you? he cites some chilling statistics about how much people cook these days which sounds decent when you hear 58% of us still cook a weeknight meal, but then when you read between the lines of the study that produced the statistics it becomes clear that the whole definition of what it means to cook today has drastically changed. when you count washing lettuce and pouring a bottle of dressing on as "making" a meal or slapping mayo from a jar onto a loaf of store bought bread, the picture seems quite a bit more pathetic and the state of culinary know how even more dire.

why should we care about people cooking less themselves? the article has a whole list of compelling reasons. to me it really is mostly about the fact that very little good seems to be coming from letting others do it for us. we are getting fatter and so are our kids. most of us eat out more than we eat in and that means more money spent and leading less home-centric, busier lives shuffling to and fro. health concerns are voiced nearly daily about the chemicals that industrial food asks us to ingest. if we made stuff ourselves that would cut so many of those chemicals right out of our diets, i mean, when was the last time you reached for your can of calcium sorbate? but the purist in me, the cultural anthropologist if you will, really is most worried about the ramifications of letting the old time ways completely disappear because of the loss of knowledge that it indicates. i think it is weird to know less than someone did 100 years ago about food and survival and call it progress. we have more information at our disposal than ever before but seem to know less about the core subjects that really would matter if the earth were to shift and we were to stare a brand new world in the eye tomorrow, one that didn't have factories, industrial farms, recipe books, or outlets for heaven's sakes. what would we do?

i am not sounding the alarm quite yet, but i'm more like ringing a persistent bell. i want to challenge myself to do more of my own stuff from scratch (cheese, preserved meats, pickles) and really understand the alchemy behind the food products i regularly eat. and then i want to involve my children in the processes. making your own mayo or growing pole beans could be as intrinsic in the next generation as using a touch screen iphone, if we let it. if we want it. let's be truly modern and be willing to look as far back as we look forward.

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