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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Too busy to cook? A new book argues that your kids may be missing out on more than just veggies. Plus: Healthy, stress-free recipes guaranteed to make your family ask for seconds.
Jun 30, 2005 | You have Domino's Pizza on speed dial, and laundry piled high on your dining table. Your kids think Veggie Booty is one of the basic food groups. You spend more time in the car than in the kitchen.
You're not alone.
The home-cooked family meal is quickly becoming a thing of the past. A recent survey conducted by the University of Minnesota shows that the number of American families who regularly eat dinner together has dropped by more than one-third since 1970, as busy parents opt instead for the convenience of restaurant meals or takeout in front of the television. But Marialisa Calta, a food writer and working mother, is on a mission to turn back the clock. And while encouraging American women to unleash their inner Betty Crocker might not seem progressive, Calta's serious commitment to helping parents embrace domesticity, at the dinner table at least, has landed her in the ranks of a quiet revolution taking place in small towns and cities across the country. Backed by a spate of studies showing that children who routinely eat dinner with their families not only perform better in school but are also less vulnerable to depression, drug and alcohol addiction and eating disorders, a Columbia University substance abuse counseling center (CASA) has even set aside an official holiday -- Sept. 26 -- devoted to getting parents and kids eating together.
Calta's new book, "Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the Modern American Family," takes readers into the kitchens and dining rooms of a dozen families across the country as they attempt to make a healthy, home-cooked meal every (well, almost every) night. With unpretentious advice and simple menus drawing on pantry staples such as beans, chicken stock and pasta (and featuring a special section on that Nixon-era workhorse, the slow cooker), "Barbarians" offers an antidote to the fussy, labor-intensive Martha Stewart mentality that intimidates many home cooks. "You don't have to chain yourself to the stove," she writes. "If you are organized enough to get your tired self dressed and to work every day you have the tools to get food on the table." Around that table, Calta believes, parents and children share much more than food -- they exchange stories, learn about each other's lives, and hone social graces that serve them in school and beyond.
"Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the Modern American Family"
By Marialisa Calta
Publishers Weekly
240 pages
Nonfiction
Calta spoke with Salon by phone from her Vermont home about saying no to over-scheduling, getting men into the kitchen, and how to make the world's simplest, most scrumptious macaroni and cheese.
What inspired you to write this book?
A lot of books and magazines pretend to have quick and easy recipes but don't, so I wanted to provide that. Also, no one ever talks about the fact that cooking is hard work. For the parent who cooks on a daily basis, no one is saying, "Way to go" or "Great job!" I mean, half the time your own family is sitting around going "eeew!" So I felt like working parents -- and the book speaks mostly to women because that's mostly who I found were cooking -- need all the encouragement they can get to get the job done.
You make a point of cheering parents on for the work they already do, and provide many tips on making cooking easier, but given the hectic schedules many families have today, the family dinner ritual seems like something of a relic. Wouldn't reviving the family dinner really mean drastically reworking the way modern families live their lives?
Absolutely. I think this book addresses the issue of priorities as much as anything else. We're over-scheduled to an insane degree and I'm speaking of myself and my family too -- my younger daughter did three sports for a while, every season. It's crazy, and you have to say no to some things. You have to prioritize, and most of all, you really have to plan. Even if you are not a planner, you have to make yourself get organized around food. Why is it that people who excel at jobs, who go to every soccer game, and do everything else, somehow think it's OK to fall apart as far as dinner is concerned?
Yes, cooking is hard work, and we tend to avoid hard work -- that's human nature. We avoid things that we're not good at, or take time, or that we don't get a lot of praise for -- but I think that's what we have to get over, that hump.
Making home-cooked meals every night seems like a big task. Why is it so important?
Because with our crazy schedules, when do we ever really get to be together as a family? You may spend a lot of time watching your child on the soccer field, but to me, that is not the same quality of time as sitting across a table, looking your children in the eyes -- as a friend of mine says, "Seeing if their pupils are dilated ..." -- and having a conversation. I don't understand how we can define ourselves as families when we're just people connected by blood that just happen to live in the same house.
In the beginning of your book you quote Marion Cunningham, author of "The Fannie Farmer Cookbook," as saying, "We're living a motel life ..." Is that the idea you're referring to -- that as families we're constantly moving in and out, orbiting one another, but never meeting?
Exactly. I think that meals are a time when families can really learn about their connections. One of the mothers I interviewed said, "My kids have had to learn that even if they've just had a fight with their sibling, they still have to sit next to them at the table." That's important. It's not always pleasant, but that's a really significant thing to learn.
A recent article in the Washington Post followed a family in which neither the mother nor any of her [now grown] children knew how to cook anything. Theirs was an extreme situation, but certainly there are legions of adults who to some degree feel insecure about cooking. Do you see this as a cycle, in which parents who don't see cooking as a priority pass those attitudes on to their children?
I realize cooking is an intimidating thing for some people, and I hope I can help them get more comfortable with it. But also, I hope that I can help them see how meals should be made a priority -- we can all seek out simple recipes and try them. That said, to me the most important part of "family meal" is the family and not the meal. If you can gather in some other way -- over a game of Scrabble, even -- bringing people together is the primary point. But the food piece is still important, as we now see with the rise of obesity and other nutrition-related health problems.
So, especially for parents who are away from their kids all day, the family dinner is a place where they can monitor the kinds of food their kids eat and act as healthy models of adult diet and behavior?
Exactly. The fact is your kids still have to eat, one way or another, whether or not you cook. They're going to eat, and you're going to eat -- so I figure, you might as well do it as well as you can and do it together.
Given the growing concern about children's poor eating habits, do you think perhaps the government, as well as the family, should take the initiative and teach kids how to prepare food? Maybe home economics should be reintroduced into the standard public school curriculum?
The government would probably do best to provide healthier meals for hot lunches and help schools keep soda and fast food franchises out of the lunchroom. Certainly, though, I think classes in cooking might prove quite popular in schools. In middle school my kids learned all these outdoor survival techniques -- and it does make me wonder why cooking isn't considered a lifesaving skill! Maybe we need to be teaching kids basic kitchen survival skills, too. But I hate to advocate for sweeping government expenditures when there's so much else to worry about.
