Fight Poverty, Not Cooking





Cooking, of course, is easier for people with predictable working hours, true living wages, and access to ingredients and efficient mass transit. And the fact that many people cook, despite schedules that would make many of us melt, points to cooking’s necessity.

So I would argue with the article’s notion that “The idea that home cooking is inherently ideal reflects an elite foodie standpoint.” It’s not important that everyone cook, but it is important that everyone eat well, and, right now, the best way to do that is to buy good food and cook it. That not everyone can do that, or enjoy it, doesn’t make it less true. (Much of the commentary about the article overlooked the fact that interviewees cooked dinner an average of four to five times a week. This isn’t surprising because most poor people don’t have a choice; cooking is the cheapest way to eat.)

The authors conclude that we should “brainstorm more creative solutions for sharing the work of feeding families,” such as “a revival of monthly town suppers,” healthy food trucks, schools that offer to-go meals that families could easily heat up on busy weeknights, and so on. “Without creative solutions like these,” they write, “suggesting that we return to the kitchen en masse will do little more than increase the burden so many women already bear.”

These are creative solutions, but they’re not necessarily without burden. For super-busy, low-income people, cooking for a large group regularly may take more time than they have, and the reciprocal meals may not happen at convenient times. Healthy food trucks and healthy fast food exist, but they’re not inexpensive. Schools offering to-go meals is a brilliant idea, but who’s paying?

Which is the point. The authors are not anti-cooking but anti-poverty, and they want to determine ways that people can get and provide decent food without becoming overstressed. One of them, Sarah Bowen, told me in a phone interview, “There are so many other things that matter: poverty, food access and food insecurity, regulating our food system, how we treat workers and farmers in that system. People might get lulled into feeling like ‘because I go to the farmers market and cook dinner I’ve done it,’ but that doesn’t address bigger issues.”

I’m in favor of raising the standard of living for most Americans, and I’m in favor of dependable jobs, better mass transit and other progressive measures. Encouraging people to cook is not incompatible with these and, in the short run, it’s more likely to be effective in improving diets.

I’m also in favor of other people cooking for anyone who wants it or can afford it. But right now even that’s a privilege: a fast-food budget for a family of four would be around $50 a day, and that’s the cheapest fast food; decent fast food could be twice that. Wealthier people can order high-quality food, or eat in restaurants 10 times a week, and spend hundreds of dollars a week on food; that’s hardly a mass solution.

Mass solutions are pretty easy to figure out, and would drastically lower health care costs and human suffering and, yes, provide jobs; they simply require billions of dollars per year. For people who want and are able to cook, let’s subsidize cooking lessons, equipment and even ingredients (real ones, of course). For those who are unable, one alternative is the reheatable meals idea, picked up at schools, libraries, post offices or, for that matter, convenience or liquor stores. Another is the establishment of community kitchens, canteens or cafeterias, where good food is cooked daily and served at low cost. This happens, of course, in what were once called soup kitchens and are now referred to as “emergency food programs.”

The best of these I ever saw was in Delhi at a Sikh temple. Dozens of men and women cooked fresh chapatis and served them along with rice and lentils to thousands of people who came through during the course of the day. (They even gave them gratis to obviously well-fed American tourists.) The cost, no doubt, was less than a dollar per meal; even here, those ingredients wouldn’t cost much more. (Bread, lentils and rice are all heavy in water.)

But there was a significant amount of free labor in that equation. This is an unavoidable truth: cooking is work. It may be unpaid work based on love, obligation, entertainment, charity or coercion; or it may be paid work. When we cook for one another, we provide labor.

Thus if we labor for our families and don’t “charge,” cooking remains the least expensive way to provide good food. This means that encouraging home cooking is currently more effective than arguing that we set up — let’s say — 100,000 community kitchens around the country. (I’m thinking each feeds 500 people a night, and that’s 50 million people; perhaps conservative, but let’s start there.) There’s a range of what such meals would cost, but if you assume $3 each, that’s around $150 million per day, or $50 billion per year. And that’s only one meal per day. (You can do the math if you’d prefer to assume that each meal cost $1 — or $5, for that matter — or that you’d like to provide two or three meals a day.)

This would be money well spent; I’m all in favor of it, and I’ll work on that project.

But meanwhile, more people (especially more men) need to cook, even if it’s a chore. Not everyone will be able to, but let’s not let that concern get in the way of this: More cooking means better food, which in turn means better health and a better environment. No one should argue against that.