

America: Too Stupid To Cook - tptacek
http://blog.ruhlman.com/2010/01/america-too-stupid-to-cook.html

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Semiapies
Meh. People aren't afraid to cook. There's a whole _industry_ centered around
convincing people that cooking is easy and fun.

Many people just aren't _interested_ in cooking, out of laziness, busyness,
and/or simple disinterest. I like cooking now and then, but some people don't
find it enjoyable to do, and that's no crime.

~~~
tptacek
Did you read his post closely? On closer examination, the whole industry seems
to be centered around convincing people that there are thousands of modern
shortcuts people can take to get complicated-sounding recipes executed in less
than 30 minutes. The industry is simultaneously complicating cooking and
dumbing down cooks.

~~~
makmanalp
As a sidenote, his book "Ratio" he mentions is exactly the opposite and has a
nice methodological way of explaining cooking which gives a lot of insight
into how everything works as opposed to blindly following recipes. Great for
engineers and tinkerers.

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jdminhbg
I love to cook, make my own stock, roast my own chicken, etc. But articles
like this always rub me the wrong way. I imagine the all the articles I don't
read that are about me:

America: Too Stupid To Change Its Own Oil

America: Too Dumb To Paint A Room

There's only so many hours in a day, and we all have different priorities. A
rotisserie chicken is nice for people who don't work from home, don't want to
eat at 9pm, and don't want to pick up KFC. Get over yourself.

~~~
tptacek
End of the article (read all of it): yeah sometimes cooking is a pain in the
ass, last night I got Chipotle for the kids so I could play an extra game of
pool.

The title is _sarcastic_. It's making fun of the notion that America would
think it is too stupid to stick a chicken in the oven for an hour and then put
it on a platter.

~~~
jdminhbg
Yeah, I got there.

The problem with his premise that lots of cooking is just as simple as the
"convenience" option is that it assumes away the time involved in obtaining
the knowledge of how to roast a chicken or bake a cake.

~~~
tptacek
Rest of the end of the article (read all of it): turn oven to 450, salt
chicken, stick lemon in hole (note: optional), put chicken in oven, wait one
hour, rest off heat 15 minutes. How long did that take you to read? That's the
amount of time he assumed away.

(You don't _really_ have to make yourself a drink or go have sex during the
hour the chicken is roasting. The chicken will taste better if you are
slightly buzzed and freshly laid, but it will still taste pretty good if you
aren't.)

~~~
jdminhbg
Again, I read it. Again, I am the sort of person who would read an article
about how to roast a chicken.

Time spent reading his roast chicken recipe: 10 seconds

Time spent reading cookbooks/articles/magazines/blogs so that I knew that
roasting a chicken is easy and good and so that I knew that Ruhlman's blog or
book might be a good place to find out how to do it: 8 years

Like the apocryphal story about the itemized index: <http://www.ruqus.com/the-
red-x>

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JoeAltmaier
Can't just throw a chicken in the oven, unless there's a chicken in the
fridge. Can't always have them in the fridge - they go bad in 2-3 days. Don't
have the family together reliably enough, half of them will go bad. Freeze
them? Add 15 minutes to defrost, up the mess factor by X2, include shopping
and freezing the chickens, dividing the chicken into portions, repackaging the
leftovers, remembering to reheat the leftovers, time spent cleaning the fridge
of month-old disgusting forgotten leftovers. Doesn't Stoeffers have a chicken
TV dinner? Sigh.

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mikeryan
In the US Gordon Ramsey is mostly known (unfortunately) for his vapid Hell's
Kitchen show. But when I was working for home for a while I got hooked on his
show "the F word" (BBC America). Part of that show is about how people no
longer cook anymore and he takes it upon himself to get people cooking at
home. Tons of simple home cooked "fast food" recipes. Really interesting show
too. He takes home different livestock (Turkeys, pigs) raises them in his
backyard with his kids and slaughters them at the end of the season for a
holiday meal. He's of the opinion if he and his family is going to eat them
they're damn well going to know where they come from. It sounds a bit more
graphic then it is. Great show.

Also a plug for my favorite simple roast chicken is the SF based Zuni Cafe's
(you can do it with or without the bread stuffing)

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4401342>

~~~
jamesbritt
"In the US Gordon Ramsey is mostly known (unfortunately) for his vapid Hell's
Kitchen show. "

But I _like_ that show!

OK, I agree it's heavy on the vapid drama side. Still, it's oddly
entertaining, and it got me somewhat interested in cooking.

One big complaint I have with Hell's Kitchen is that it fails to show enough
about the food and cooking techniques. I bet lots more people could be tricked
into cooking if such a show would mix in a bit of how-to and here's-why with
the yelling and blustering.

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balding_n_tired
"Of the top five books on the NYTimes advice and how-to bestseller list, half
are about cooking"

There are 2.5 books? Lord knows I've read novels with gratuitous cooking
scenes, but I wonder whether that's what he means. One should also consider
that cookbooks are a handy gift--about the right cost and heft.

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tptacek
Worth it for "The World's Most Difficult Roast Chicken Recipe" alone (step 6
[of 8] of which is "have sex").

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jacquesm
With the chicken ? Man, that's sick.

~~~
tptacek
You mean "delicious".

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lmkg
My dad was a chef, so I'm used to cooking. I've taught several friends how to
cook. Universally, the feedback is "I didn't know cooking was this easy." It
really doesn't take much more than 15 minutes and basic literacy to make
dinner for yourself, plus it's cheaper and healthier.

~~~
tptacek
It's not really cheaper unless you make an effort to be cheaper (by making
rice-and-beans style food, or by being careful with portions and leftovers).
It definitely tastes better and it's probably healthier.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Most of the ostensible value of prepared food is made possible through the
false economy of massive public subsidies for the commodity crops that make up
the bulk of manufactured food products.

~~~
tptacek
Which has absolutely nothing to do with your monthly food budget.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Where do you think the money to pay for those subsidies comes from? (Note: the
response "my grandchildren" is technically correct but misses the point.)

~~~
tptacek
A lot of things are "cheaper" if by "cheaper" you mean "supports a political
viewpoint that asserts that things will be cheaper in some abstract future
where a critical mass of people adopt that viewpoint" instead of "cheaper". In
reality, when you cook, you're either (a) paying _much_ more for food by
buying local, humane, or organic, or (b) partaking in the same factory system
that McDonalds does.

In fact, McDonalds and Chipotle are doing much more to promote sustainability
than the _typical_ home cook is.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I'm not talking about some magical hippie love future in which everyone
chooses to go local, organic and vegan. I'm talking about material, measurable
public subsidies to specific agricultural practices that allow companies to
sell their products at far below the cost of production and hence distort the
market for those products.

~~~
tptacek
About which the only influence you have vis a vis _eating_ is to avoid the
foods that are a part of that system; I was careful to say "organic, local,
_or_ humane" (not vegan) to provide as many non-Food-Inc. options as possible.

I don't see what your point has to do with the cost of cooking in vs. cooking
out. At least 'kingkongrevenge has a meal plan to offer us. =)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Again, to clarify: I'm not talking about conventional factory farming vs.
organic/local farming; I'm not referring to the economies of scale realized by
industrialized farming practices.

I'm talking about massive, direct economic subsidies for _the kinds of crops
that tend to go into prepared foods_ vs. the comparative absence of massive,
direct economic subsidies for the kinds of crops that tend to be the
ingredients of home cooked meals. (The actual ingredients of home-cooked meals
vs. their prepared equivalents are rarely even remotely similar.)

I hope what this has to do with the cost of cooking ingredients vs. eating
prepared food is self-evident.

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RyanMcGreal
blog.ruhlman.com: too stupid to scale?

~~~
epochwolf
The problem with most blogs is they don't use static page caching. I'm willing
to bet this person didn't.

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smokinn
I like cooking something great, especially when I have people over or just
when I feel like eating something really good but I hate everyday cooking.
It's so boring. The processed foods you can just throw in the oven for 30-40
mins are getting so good nowadays that the reason I don't cook that much is
that it's just so much easier not to. Why spend hours to prepare a chicken pot
pie when you can just buy a frozen one for 8$? Same goes for shepherd's pie
and any number of others.

~~~
djm
_I feel like eating something really good but I hate everyday cooking_

Me too, but thats why god (or somebody godlike) invented freezers. The secret
to eating good food every day if you don't like to spend time cooking is just
to make stuff in big batches and preserve it.

Today for instance I spent 30 minutes or so making possibly the most delicious
stew man has ever tasted. I made enough for eight servings and am freezing
most of it. It would have taken me almost as long just to make one serving.

People make plenty of excuses about why they can't cook but it's rarely true.

~~~
smokinn
I do that a lot too. I have a lot of spicy chili in my freezer along with a
batch of rigatoni that I use mostly for lunches.

I also have a lot of small portions of meat (french steak, pork chops, etc)
that I just fry up with potatoes or occasionally bake in a shake'n'bakeish
spice mix.

I do cook a lot but I eat a lot of the prepared stuff too, just because it's
good and it's easy.

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brm
You find more of the problem when you read the comments on the post. What
America lacks are curious learners, what it has plenty of are 'experts' and
fearful novices.

~~~
tptacek
Which means you should love Ruhlman; his current major book is an
anticookbook, containing the ratio kernels of important recipes (X:Y fat/meat
= sausage; X:Y:Z flour/butter/salt = cookie) from which you can just improvise
your own dishes.

His blog is also excellent. For instance, duck confit from his blog: take 2
duck legs, salt them, stick 'em in ziploc bags overnight, rinse them, cook
them for long time in a pot of olive oil, cool and store. Missing from that
recipe: $40 worth of duck fat, complicated curing recipe, ceramic crock stored
under basement stairs.

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brown9-2
Has anyone bought/used Ruhlman's "Ratio" iPhone app?
<http://blog.ruhlman.com/ratio-app>

~~~
tptacek
I used it a bit over Chistmas, and I recommend it if you _don't_ own the Ratio
book, but the book is more useful than the iPhone app. The Achilles Heel of
the concept is that it is so effective that you can mostly memorize it, and a
single index card is a decent replacement for the app.

The one caveat in favor of the app is, at least twice I've totally fucked up
cookies by spacing out on math when scaling them up.

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JoeAltmaier
Conversation with Engineers about 10 yrs ago: Me: Nobody knows how to cook
anymore. Don: Yeah, my Grandmother was a great cook. She really knew how to
microwave a baked potato! Me: {jaw drops, dumb silence}

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pwnstigator
Too lazy to clean, as I don't have a dishwasher.

Cooking seems fun. I'd like to learn it, and will once I live (a) within
walking (or driving, outside of NYC) distance of a grocery store and (b) in an
apartment with a dishwasher. Unfortunately, these are not to be taken for
granted in NYC. Half the buildings don't even have laundry (I'm not joking).

~~~
goatforce5
Is washing dishes by hand really that hard?

~~~
sethg
It certainly is when you’re washing for more than one other person (e.g.,
children or guests).

