The Slow Food USA Blog

Cooking for Dummies

Print this Page Send to a Friend

Interesting NY Times Op-Ed from Amanda Hesser last Sunday about Michelle Obama missing an opportunity to talk up cooking. 

Our first lady has been an outstanding champion of fresh fruits and vegetables, of teaching our kids healthy eating habits that last through life by connecting them to food and where it comes from.  Surpassing any and all hopes and expectations, she has planted an organic garden on the White House lawn.  She has knelt in the dirt with her kids, and others’ and helped to grow her own food.  She has visited soup kitchens, and elementary schools.  Last week, she visited her young friends at Bancroft Elementary School. 

As reported on School Lunch Talk Michelle O. said that: “‘kids can lead the way for us.’ And school lunch can help them do that. We need to make sure that “the food that our kids are getting in school each and every day is as healthy as it can be, so that we’re bringing some of these lessons home and we’re also expanding them in the classrooms and in the schools.”

What more could we ask for?!  Well, Hesser points out that Obama still hasn’t stood up and supported home cooking, thereby supporting common public perception that cooking is too time consuming, too complicated, and—that old chestnut—too expensive to be worth anyone’s time.  As Hesser says, “Because terrific local ingredients aren’t much use if people are cooking less and less; cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth.”

[For more about how cooking from scratch is right for your pocketbook, read Chef Kurt Friese’s article “How I beat KFC’s Family Meal Challenge” on Grist, that also appears in this month’s Snail magazine].