Does Cooking Matter?

Introduction

In my family the women take turns each year to organise Christmas lunch. A few years ago, I was the designated cook and host, and so I reached for the famous British food writer Elizabeth David's books for inspiration. David's writing is full of strong opinions, engaging prose and classic recipes; for the younger, modern cook they must be disconcerting as they contain no glossy pictures. It's about the words. Leafing through a collection of her reflections on Christmas, I was struck by the following passage.

If I had my way – and I shan't – my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening. This lovely selfish anti-gorging, un-Christmas dream of hospitality, either given or taken, must be shared by thousands of women who know . . . that they'll spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning peeling, chopping, mixing, boiling, roasting, steaming . . . That someone will say the turkey isn't quite as good as last year, or discover that the rum for the pudding has been forgotten, that by the time lunch has been washed up and put away it'll be tea time . . . and tomorrow it's the weekend and it's going to start all over again.

I love this image. After days spent preparing terrines, desserts, turkey, vegetables, traipsing all over the city for the right ingredients, I was exhausted come Christmas lunch and contemplated reading out these paragraphs before the assembled clan. Instead I placed the book on my mother-in-law's plate, bookmarking the passage above. As a David lover and long-time family cook and entertainer, I knew she would empathise.

David's words – so much more profound because they come from a person who loved cooking and made her fame through it – point to a truth about cooking that is too often forgotten. Cooking is first and foremost a labour, a chore, for almost all of us whether we love it or not. For those working in the food industry it's a job, often a stressful and low-paid one, and one that can't often be sustained or matched with family responsibilities. For those of us responsible for cooking for a family, it's a daily 'what the hell is in the fridge that I can whip up in twenty-five minutes that everyone will eat?' challenge. Cooking as pure creativity, as leisure, as stress release, exists, of course, but it's not the norm.

The notion that cooking – and the production of the ingredients we need to do it – is first and foremost labour should be reinstated and reinforced. If we really understood the labour associated with the production of food perhaps we would be less focused on wanting food to always be cheap (a potential benefit for our local farmers and producers). We might also waste less of the food we buy (Australians currently waste up to $8 billion dollars of edible food every year). If we saw cooking as labour maybe we'd be more appreciative of the everyday, noble efforts of the main meal preparer in the home (still usually a woman), and possibly even be willing to assist more. Recognising the production of food and the creation of meals as labour should not diminish the enjoyment some of us derive from food and cooking; ideally it would enhance it.

Then again, I don't believe people have to be passionate foodies – collecting the latest cookbooks, frequenting the hottest restaurants, collecting the latest gadgets – to have a sophisticated, healthy and enjoyable relationship with food. In fact if we present – through food media or whatever channel – a notion of cooking that is too challenging, too complex, then people disengage. It all appears too intimidating. There will always be a passionate minority of people interested in cooking, who could make the top twenty of any TV cooking show. For me those people are inspiring, interesting but mostly irrelevant to understanding our society and our relationship with food. What's more important in my view is how you get the majority of Australians – regardless of age, gender, family formation or socio-economic class – to do the following: cook regularly, develop a varied repertoire of dishes that includes vegetarian options and animal protein options, use seasonal ingredients, know what to do with leftovers, minimise food waste, eat out less and entertain at home more. More importantly – and this is increasingly difficult as we are bombarded with often confusing information about provenance – we need to be able to ask all the right questions about where our food comes from. While we won't always be able to grow our own food or engage in meaningful discussions with primary producers at the local organic farmers' market, we should be able to ask enough questions to be able to trust and understand the ingredients we use to cook.

Perhaps the question 'does cooking matter' is a silly one. Who could legitimately argue otherwise? And yet we do live in a world where it is possible to avoid cooking regularly, or at all. It is possible to do this regardless of your income and lifestyle. There is enough takeaway, pre-prepared food on offer to mean that you need never turn on an oven and only ever use your stovetop to heat up preprepared foods. You can feed yourself easily every day with a phone, a microwave and a kettle. I often hear Australians in groups reflect that it is more time-consuming and more expensive to cook from scratch than it is to rely on takeaway and prepared foods. That it is less stressful to socialise with friends at a restaurant than it is to have them over for a home-cooked meal.

Of course many messages coming out of the diet industry reinforce this 'minimal cooking' approach to eating, with regimes based on the idea that meals can be replaced by protein bars and smoothies. Then there are those diet plans where all the food you eat in a day is delivered to your door, precooked to be stored in a freezer. The TV ads for these kinds of diets show already-svelte customers staying they are going to continue with the plan (even though they have lost the weight) so they can free up their time for more important things like spending time with family. As if spending time with your family preparing meals was a waste of time.

Such an approach to cooking only stands up if you view cooking as an economic rather than a social activity; that the best choice is decided according to a comparison of cost, money and time and nothing else. Does cooking matter? The short answer is yes. But the short answer is misleading. The longer answer takes us in and out of the domestic kitchens of Australia, explores the contours of food media, looks at the ways in which we might engage children in food and cooking and the extent to which men are stepping up when it comes to everyday food preparation. Cooking matters but not the kind of cooking that will win you first prize in a reality TV show. Instead, we need to cultivate a fundamental curiosity about the food we eat, an appreciation that is not about glossy photos and new ingredients but is about a daily shared dedication to cooking fresh, simple, tasty meals that get people around the table and that are made from ingredients we trust and understand.