The Kitchen Counter Cooking School Read Online Free Page B

just like the woman I met. That afternoon, I decided it was time to abandon the bubble.
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    I stumbled upon a TV interview with English chef Jamie Oliver a few days later in which he talked about why the United Kingdom had been gripped by an onset of obesity. “The thing, I think, is that as people stop cooking, they get less healthy, yeah? People are going by the chippie 2 to pick up dinner, but chips 3 aren’t dinner.” Without realizing it, Jamie got animated, even upset, his adorable East London accent growing even more pronounced. “If there was one thing that I could do, one thing that I could change, it would be to get people to just realize that cooking isn’t that tough. It’s a walk.”
    His words rang in my head. The woman and her cart of boxed food . . . the idea that cooking is too difficult . . . the refrain from the woman in Paris about knife skills. Ever the reporter, I started to conduct research on how they all related. Several studies back up Jamie’s assertions that the less a person cooks real food, the more they rely on processed or convenience foods, whether at home or in the fast-food line, and the more weight-related health problems they experience. To a large extent, the more you cook, the less you weigh.
    What intrigued me was that the woman I met felt that she was cooking. To her, opening a box and doing something with it was creating a meal. I disagree. Yet neither of us is right or wrong. Researchers can’t even seem to agree on the definition of cooking. While a lot of food writers bemoan the loss of home cooking, I found surprisingly little research into the matter. Sure, various studies examined the amount of time people spend cooking, such as one led by a Harvard team that found people spend about twenty-seven minutes a day preparing food, about half the time spent in the 1960s.
    â€œThere’s this notion that there is some kind of decline in cooking and that people aren’t doing it anymore. But that’s not so clear. It’s just that there are so many other choices on what they can do to get food,” said Dr. Amy Trubek of the University of Vermont, a food historian and researcher who has spent more than a decade studying how people cook. “People aspire to cook what they believe is good, healthy food. But then they find the food environment very complex. There’s also a strong sense of ‘time poverty’ in the American culture, this sense that you don’t have time. Cooking is a thing many people perceive they don’t have time to do.” She equated it with going to the gym. “Everyone knows that you should exercise, so they say that they will go five days a week, but when it comes down to it, they don’t.”
    The woman in the supermarket lacked confidence and skill when it came to cooking. She wasn’t sure how to turn whole foods into dinner, and as a result, she found her choices were limited. But that’s the issue. If you can’t cook, you put yourself at the mercy of companies whose interests are overwhelmingly financial.
    Frances Short, the author of Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life, says that while consumers may want to eat healthy and even actively seek out this information, it doesn’t have much effect if they can’t act on it. “Advice to, say, grill or steam food can only be followed if you know how to grill or steam,” Short noted.
    Trubek told me that what I probably gave to the woman in the supermarket was awareness, a good start. “But awareness is no good unless you have repetition associated with it. That’s how knowledge becomes practice and practice becomes habit.”
    One reason that Julia Child made such a formidable impact was her unique ability to inspire people to get off their couches and go into their kitchens. While viewers watched her make potage parmentier, they often took a crucial step—they made it