The grocery store as a restaurant
There is a lot of modern life that allows an individual to do things that might have taken a professional years ago. A modern computer is an empowering device.
A modern grocery store is an invitation to forget some basic skills like cooking.
When we graduated from college in 1971 there was a noticeable back to land movement. While you often heard our parents' generation worry that no one from our generation would ever learn how to can and preserve food, it turned out to a premature worry.
Many of our generation did go back to the land. We learned not only how to garden, can, freeze, and preserve vegetables but some of us, my wife and I included, went further. We ended up on a farm.
While it seems eons ago, we had a milk cow, did our own butter, and even made yogurt and tried our hand at cheese. We grew all on our vegetables, had chickens for eggs, and produced our own beef. I even butchered a few pigs and cattle. We made salt pork and were fairly self-sufficient for a family living in the Canadian north.
We went to the grocery store for some essential like salt, coffee, fruits that we couldn't grow, and poultry since the chickens were considered members of the family.
Before we moved to our commercial cattle farm we lived on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia in Saint Croix Cove. There we even pickled fish and often bought our other fish right from the fishermen.
With all those great ingredients and a southern heritage, my wife Glenda became a great cook though she nows worries that she has forgotten how to cook. That is a worry completely without foundation.
Now that we are in our late fifties and cooking as little as possible, I am beginning to worry that real cooking from scratch is a dying art and that the modern grocery store is hastening the death of cooking.
We were in the new Ukrop's in Roanoke, Va yesterday. I was amazed at the number of prepared foods even down to hot dogs that had already been inserted into buns. While Glenda loved the lighted shelves, I kept wandering from one counter of prepared food to the next, shaking my head all the time.
There were many complex dishes, yet I saw nothing that looked as good as a home cooked meal.
Over the years we have tried a few grocery stores dishes, and once in a while we still grab a salad of some sort. When Fresh Market came to Roanoke we tried a number of their items. While some were fine, all were expensive, and none were better than what we could prepare at home if we were willing to take the time.
Time is the one thing that most people don't have these days. We are all rushing from one place to another often chasing our own tails. Cooking is something that takes time.
Still cooking doesn't have to be that complex. In fact Glenda comes close to refusing to cook anything with more than five ingredients.
While a plate of home fried chicken might be more than you can ask a modern cook, a bowl of classic southern pimento cheese is easy enough for anyone to fix and can be done for a lot less than nine dollars a pound. It only has five ingredients counting the salt.
Even a meal like pan fried flounder, slaw, and hush puppies isn't that hard to do.
Of course there are plenty of healthier meals like Glenda's fantastic vegetarian baked beans but the point is that you will probably never know what good food tastes like if you depend on restaurants and grocery stores striving to become your source of take out food.
Our kids all hung around the kitchen while food was being cooked. Now when we have a holiday, part of the tradition is the kids making part of the meal.
Cooking together takes eating together one step further. We even have meals that the kids count on having like some of their mother's clam chowder when they come home for Christmas. The kids also get very excited when their mother decides to make cornbread which has been a southern staple for years.
Of course not all cooking is universally approved in our family.
I am only allowed to cook Dutch Mess every three or four years, but I can survive between times on my Rotisserie Chicken, homemade tuna fish, bologna, or tomato sandwiches.
I hope cooking doesn't go the way of the home handyman who is also rapidly disappearing just like the neighborhood hardware stores.
Maybe I should cook myself some country ham and eggs for breakfast before all the frying pans are gone. It is almost as good as my perfect Saturday breakfast that kept my father going for ninety years.
I know one thing, it will be a long time before I pay almost eight dollars for a small plastic box of watermelon with the rind removed.
More thoughts on grocery stores over on my Once was a Reston Resident Blog.
On another note lots of the slide shows of my boating adventures and the local festivals on the NC coast have links posted at this site. How does a nice Oyster Roast sound? People better not forget how to roast oysters.
