Crunchy Food

So, let's start with what I kind of liked about Crunchy Cons. The chapter on food was probably my favorite, mostly because I am (like most people, I think) obsessed with food. Mr. PL can tell you all about the way I go on and on about perfecting my tortilla-making skills, getting my hands on fresh parsnips, or comparing the merits of biscuit-type to noodle-type dumplings. The interviews with local organic farmers are interesting (and it's true of the book in general that the interviews are the best part) and Dreher's critique of industrialized food production is compelling. I guess I just can't whip myself in to a frenzy of despair about the future of American homecooking.

Like Dreher, I was delighted to discover the joys of locally grown produce and am now addicted to the intense, fresh flavor of the fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and meats I can obtain at my local farmers market. Also like Dreher, as I get older, I take cooking and eating much more seriously as both a social activity and an expression of love.

Unlike Dreher, however, who laments the loss of home-cooking knowledge because of his mother's generation's interest in better food through science (where science is just a term for pre-processed, pre-packaged, commercially-made, flavorless slop designed to further the interests of the food industry), I did receive some traditional culinary wisdom from my own mother (and still do from her and my mothers-in-law). My mother cooked her family things that her grandmother made, exotic things (especially for Texans of Austrian descent) like pasties. Sometimes we made homemade jam or ice cream (events that I look back on very fondly and hope to repeat with my own children) and my father grew tomatoes, peppers, and giant pumpkins in our backyard. The vast majority of our meals were home-cooked by one or both of my parents and my family was not exceptional.

I guess this is a problem with anecdotal evidence. Clearly, while growing up Dreher knew a set of people who had abandoned homecooking for the sterilized world of pre-packaged food. Now, I'm a little younger than Dreher (although by his reasoning I should have had even less real food, not more), but I take it we're from the same economic class and pretty much the same part of the country. I don't think that my experience was terribly exceptional. My husband is right between Dreher and I in age and is from (gasp!) the North (okay, the upper Midwest) and his mother and stepmother (not to mention his aunts) are exceptional cooks.

I know that I, for one, have succumbed to the self-congratulation that comes with cooking my own family healthy, delicious, inexpensive meals from local, fresh, socially and environmentally responsible foods. Sometimes I feel like I've discovered a great secret that no one else knows. Then I talk to other people and find out that I'm really not as special as I thought. Sadly, I think this is the difference between Rod Dreher and me - I've realized I'm not as exceptional as all that. Oh, and he wrote a whole chapter in a book about it.