Why Take Food Seriously?

Our relationship with food is changing more rapidly than ever, and like many others, I’ve watched in awe. As a food journalist and author for 30 years, my perspective has been unusual: I’ve worked with influential people in the field while remaining in frequent contact with my readers, who are some unknowable percentage of the home-cooking, food-obsessed segment of the public.

I’ve never been more hopeful. (In fact, I was never hopeful at all until recently.) Each year, each month it sometimes seems, there are more signs that convenience, that mid-20th-century curse word, may give way to quality—even what you might call wholesomeness—just before we all turn into the shake-sucking fatties of Wall-E.

We are taking food seriously again.

Until 50 years ago, of course, every household had at least one person who took food seriously every day. But from the 1950s on, the majority of the population began contentedly cooking less and less, eating out more and more, and devouring food that was worse and worse, until the horrible global slop served by fast-food and “casual dining” chains came to dominate the scene. One result: an unprecedented rise in obesity levels and a not-unrelated climb in health care costs.

Yet we would not let food go to hell permanently, at least not without a fight. And even at its nadir there were signs of awakening. Beginning in the 1960s, more Americans than ever discovered France, Italy, Mexico, Japan, and other countries, where traditional cooking remained intact. Revised immigration laws gave us a new and varied influx of immigrants, whose previously rare cuisines—Tibetan, Cambodian, Ethiopian, and Ecuadorean, for example—became visible in many cities. At the same time, people like Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and Julie Sahni made once-exotic cuisines accessible for amateurs.

Nevertheless many Americans began applying the word “cooking” to the act of defrosting and heating mass-produced frozen food in a microwave oven. Still, by the mid-’80s there were new vistas for food lovers. There was a nascent food-as-art scene, presaging Ferran Adrià. Old-style French food—the fancy stuff, with sauces—died a quick death (thank you, Paul Bocuse). Fantastic local ingredients, treated minimally, became all the rage (thank you, Alice Waters and friends). European chefs in the United States embraced Asian ingredients (thank you, Jean-Georges Vongerichten).

At first these changes affected few people. But a confluence of factors—new cuisines, a cultural fixation on health, frustration with low-quality food—led to a renewed appreciation of eating and home cooking. Logically, this led to an increased awareness of industrially raised animals and overprocessed food and ultimately to an interest in local ingredients, in vegetables, in sustainability, in human health.

Then there was food television. We were ripe for the Food Network’s Emeril, Rachael, Mario, and Bobby, who created a buzz based on celebrity that grabbed not only the middle-aged and the young but also the very young. And when 6-year-olds started wanting to be chefs—that was different.

The news wasn’t all good. At the millennium, we knew that fish had disappeared from the seas, taste had disappeared from chickens, regulation had all but disappeared from government agencies, and humanity had disappeared from the way we handle animals. Obesity and its associated lifestyle diseases became news, as did acute illnesses like salmonella and mad cow. It also became clear to everyone who took the time to think that our overconsumption of meat was contributing to the hunger of nearly one billion fellow earthlings.

This has led many Americans to think as much about food as they do about Survivor or the N.F.L.—which is to say a lot—and its preparation is no longer limited to what was once called a housewife. The unrelenting pressure on women to join the workforce encouraged (forced?) men to at least learn how to turn on the stove; from there, many of them took to cooking enthusiastically (some, no doubt, because so many gadgets are involved). Those children who dream of being chefs share in the cooking; nearly every young person I meet cooks routinely.

Of course, food continues to be fetishized; organic food has been commodified; the federal government subsidizes almost all of the wrong kinds of food production; supermarkets peddle way too much nonreal food (“junk food” or, to use my mother’s word, “dreck”); and weight-loss diets still discourage common-sense eating. But questions like “Would you prefer a mass-produced organic grape from Chile or a nonorganic one from a backyard vine in Upstate New York?” are more common in conversation, and the dialogue about food routinely includes words like locavore, vegetarian, sustainable, and flexitarian.

The real issues—how do we grow and raise, distribute and sell, prepare and eat food? And how do our patterns of doing these things affect the rest of the world (and vice versa)?—are simply too big to ignore.

And if we are obsessing about where our food is from and how it’s grown rather than whether our fries are cooked in beef fat or “cholesterol-free oil” (or, even worse, whether our gold-leaf-topped foie gras is good for us), this is progress.

Simply put, many more Americans are seeing food as more than a necessary fuel whose only requirement is that it can be obtained and consumed without much difficulty or cost. Perhaps just in time, we’re saying, “Hold the shake,” and looking for something more wholesome.

OCTOBER 12, 2008