“Mom’s apple pie.” “Grandma’s pancakes.” “Fried chicken like mother used to make.” “Dinners that taste like home cooking.” That’s the way restaurants used to advertise their specialties.
But no more. Home cooking is out of style. Mom isn’t in the kitchen any more. She’s been liberated by restaurants and fast-food chains. The hope of some that the liberation of women from the kitchen would be balanced by an equal harnessing of men to the kitchen just didn’t work out that way.
Today’s commercial food-service slogans reflect the tremendous shift in our national eating habits. Supermarkets are advertising foods that “taste like take-out” and “have that restaurant-hamburger taste at home.” Small appliance departments are advertising electric gadgets that “make fried chicken as scrumptious as any you’ve brought home from a carry-out.”
A whole generation has grown up in the fast-food lifestyle. One survey indicates that 40 percent of Americans under age 30 believe that food eaten away from home i s at least as good as food cooked at home.
Americans today spend nearly one-third of their food dollars on meals eaten outside the home. Nearly 30 percent of those restaurant meals are eaten in fast-food places.
I’m not knocking fast-food in itself (except for the so-called “shakes” that pretend to be milk shakes but never came near a cow). I’m just sorry that cooking has become such a lost art that so many of those under 30 think that fast-food is “at least as good” as food cooked at home.
Of course, they could be right if all they ever got at home was instant food, TV dinners, frozen pies, and snack food. If that is so, then they are truly disadvantaged and deprived, but not from a lack of money. Good home-cooked food doesn’t cost any more than fast-food and snacks.
Fast-food serves a definite need — when you’re in a hurry. But as a steady diet? Oh, the dreary sameness of it all!
Instead of commercial bread or buns, will the fast-food generation ever taste the delights of overnight yeast-rising breads and rolls, or old-fashioned buckwheat cakes for Sunday breakfast? Will they ever taste how different real homemade ice cream, the kind that literally melts in your mouth, is from the commercial ice cream glued together with preservatives that refuse to melt?
I wonder how many homes will enjoy real home-roasted turkey this Thanksgiving? The turkey is such a marvelous fowl that Ben Franklin wanted to make it the American bird instead of the eagle. Much restaurant turkey is dry and tasteless because it is baked without basting, chilled for neat slicing like bologna, and then reheated for serving.
Does the fast-food generation know the delight of strawberry shortcake made with genuine shortcake and real whipped cream instead of cake out of a package and “cream” squirted out of a can? Do they know all the endless succession of delectable dishes that can be made from the many kinds of squashes on the market in the fall? Can they really be content with an instant potato, when a real potato is so easy to bake and so delicious?
The fast-food diet will never include that most delicious of dishes, the souffle, because it requires hand-beaten egg whites in order to rise without artificial support. Souffles come in endless flavors; the favorites in our household are chocolate, cheese, spinach, and lemon.
From what I observe on the airlines and in restaurants, most Americans seem satisfied to be served fake “cream” with their coffee instead of the real stuff that requires refrigeration. And speaking of airlines , since Jimmy Carter went into the White House, there seems to be an unwritten rule that only peanuts can be served on non-meal flights.
Americans demand variety in entertainment, automobiles, and vacations. It is a puzzle how so many can be content with such a boring standardization in their food, especially when our supermarkets offer such a dazzling variety of beautiful fresh foods for home preparation.
