Why the Experiment?

In the beginning, I loved to cook. I learned to cook when I moved into my first apartment, using a cookbook my mother gave me. It was a simple, basic manual of cooking called Good, Cheap Food by Miriam Ungerer, and her delight in feeding her family shimmered on every page. I started to acquire other cookbooks from the clearance table at the bookstore, greedily browsing among photos of sugary baked goods. I began to experiment on my own.

I was a graduate student living alone, and my connections to people were strengthened by food. I would bake cheesecakes and bring them to school, leaving them to be gobbled in the student commons by grateful colleagues. I would invite groups of students to my apartment and fill them with homemade soup and bread. I was a midwesterner living in Alabama, and one evening a guest declared, shaking his head with mock sadness, “Veronica, I’m gonna have to tell my mama I finally found a woman who can cook, and she’s a yankee.”

I loved it.

But somewhere along the way, cooking became more of a chore. I married, and eating out was a way to escape the confinements of home and the tensions of housework in new couplehood. We had children, and the children changed us even more. I could not knead bread when an infant cried to be held. I could not fit all my baking into the time of the baby’s nap.

We had more children, and the pregnancies exhausted me at the same time that they created insane hunger. We kept more and more pre-packaged food on hand. It saved us money: it was more expensive than cooking from scratch, but less expensive than ordering take-out, which is what we did when the exhaustion and hunger hit me at the same time.

I gained thirty pounds with each pregnancy, and lost twenty after each baby was born. Ten extra pounds X four pregnancies is some deeply unfortunate math.

At the same time, I began reading more about agriculture and the production of food. My graduate degree was in ancient near eastern history, and I chose to focus one comprehensive exam on the history of animal domestication. My leisure reading also involved more and more books on the production of food: Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, David Mas Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach and Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire made their way to our shelves.

Michael Pollan in particular has popularized a call for thorough reforms in the way we grow, make and eat food. He wants a return to organic farming and polyculture, the practice of a single farmer growing multiple crops. He wants us to eat less meat, more vegetables, and focus our choices on from-scratch cooking and local food sources.

At the same time, I began to hear about the Slow Food movement, a deliberate reaction against fast food and eating for convenience. The Slow Foodies want a return to family meals and home-cooking, quality ingredients and real restaurants, and a deliberate awareness of the origins and nature of our food.

All of these ideas were simmering around in my head. My husband Az and I talked about food politics from time to time, and we incorporated some ideas into our lives. But we are also parents, and children really don’t care about their parents’ food convictions; they care about eating something that tastes good to them. McDonald’s is a far too frequent guest at our dinner table. The demands of slow food are heavy, and the costs in time and peace may be high.

Then I read this Pollan article, in which he interviews a consumer researcher who studies how Americans eat. Like anything else that Pollan writes, there were some things that resonated with me and some that made me roll my eyes. But the clincher was the very last paragraph, in which the consumer researcher crustily offers Pollan some advice:

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

I looked at Az. Az looked at me. “I believe that man is daring us, ” I said.

This blog is the story of how we took that dare.