I'm a twenty-something person who grew up enjoying a healthy (at least in the ‘robust’ sense of the word) rotation of fast food, “all-American” meat and potatoes, and sprinklings of 20th-century versions of traditional Mexican and Eastern European fare throughout the year.What I’ve gotten out of this upbringing is the following:
- I never know what to eat for dinner. And, more than that, I’m not confident in my cooking skills. I open the fridge and all I see are obtuse raw foods that my brain has a hard time imagining as anything remotely tasty. I look at cabinets of simple staples, like rice and beans, and my eyes glaze over. Like many of us, I come home from work with a mean appetite, but lacking a plan. It seems to me that preparing one’s own meals is about as primordial a skill as you can get, yet I am grossly underdeveloped in this arena.
- I eat things ‘as-is’, not so much out of appreciation for their natural state, but more so out of sheer laziness. I used to refer to this eating style as grazing to make it sound more respectable, but there’s not a ton I respect about myself when I’m sitting on a couch in my sweatpants alternating bites of cheese, then cracker, then cheese again, instead of taking the time to simply slice the cheese into reasonable pieces and place them on the cracker like a reasonable person.
- The repertoire of recipes, if you can even call them that, I call on is far, far too thin. I don’t try to cook enough new things to find those winning recipes that work their way into my meal cycle. Instead, you can rest assured you will find me eating grilled cheese sandwiches, pasta added to canned soup, and re-cooked sausages at least once a week, and restaurant leftovers the rest of the time.
- I see the value, in so, so many ways, of diverting from this lifestyle. It helps that I spent a few years studying the intersection of food, agriculture, society and the environment, I admit. I grew up in the Bay Area, after all. I’ve seen first hand what happens when first generation immigrants switch from their traditional diets to the ultra-processed versions we offer on the cheap here. Almost everyone on my dad’s side of the family has type II diabetes, and my aunt passed away directly because of it when she was 30. How could I not worry about this, at least some?
Then there’s the heavy, beyond-me stuff: I’ve been blindly supporting a food system that breeds government involvement in what we eat, degradation of culinary knowledge and the environment (to name a few), and which ultimately reinforces unhealthy food choices and the status quo.
The status quo is a fair portion of what got me to be points one through three, above. Here’s what I’m going to do about it:
Goal 1: Start cooking. The easiest thing to do is jump right in, right? My plan is to cook at least twice a week with a seasonal recipe in mind beforehand. This means I have to think about what flavors I’m looking for, use my slim wallet to purchase ingredients and just try it. My focus will be on dishes that can be crafted to reflect the local bounty of special foods available to me, don’t use an unnecessary number of ingredients, and which build skills. How about instead of buying pre-made pasta sauce and lumping it on a bowl of noodles, I actually put some of the tomatoes I froze from my garden to good use?
Goal 2: Try at least 50 different varieties of produce and meats by the year’s end. Part of this plays into the big picture of appreciating the food I’m eating, which means appreciating the seasonality that the special California Bay Area climate offers me here. It means taking a hard look at the flavors offered to me and comparing them so I have a wider array of building blocks to choose from, and so I’m not always thinking “pasta” when I’m starving.
Goal 3: Simply put, eat better. Better for my body [i.e. more fruits and veggies], better for my wallet [i.e. eating out less], better for my friends who are farmers, and even better for anyone who wants to eat dinner with me.
Let’s see how I do.
