Amanda Hesser Points Accusatory Rolling Pin at Michelle Obama, Needs to Take Big Step Back

A lot has been made of Michelle Obama's organic vegetable garden at the White House.  Big-eyed, righteous foodies are all a-twitter about how the Obamas will usher in a new era of enlightened eating, eager to use the first family as a springboard for fantastic, hazily-formed food ethics.

So when I read Amanda Hesser's Op-Ed this morning in the NYT, passively cajoling our First Lady to get back in the kitchen, I wasn't overly surprised.  But I was most certainly irritated.

I do agree with the Hesser's basic message; people SHOULD be cooking more--particularly parents--to instill healthier eating habits, manners, family values and culture into themselves and their children.  Absolutely!

But, take a BIG step back...did a cooking blogger, a mega-liberal food columnist from the NYT, just tell our First Lady that she should pretend that she cooks, for the good of our children???

FOR PHUCK'S SAKE.

Do people WANT to be lied to?  How in the HELL can a First Lady (and before that, the wife of a prominent politician) be expected to be a domestic goddess? 

On the campaign trail, when Cindy McCain was asked what her favorite recipes were, her asinine interns forged "McCain Family Recipes" right off the Food Network website. Ya know why?  Because beer heiresses don't FN cook. 

Apparently, that's not what liberals OR conservatives want to hear.

I'd much rather hear that Michelle just doesn't have the inclination to cook than be spoon-fed some nonsense about how someone with a 12-hour day MAGICALLY produces a gourmet meal for her two kids and her husband, the President of the United States.

Hesser presents an unrealistic, misguided standard to hold mid-recession American families to.  More than ever, parents are working long hours to put food on the table at all--many of them single parents.  Will you judge them for using packaged greens, and jarred sauces?  Shouldn't you be glad that a meal is being prepared at all, and eaten in concert? 

The fear-of-food-miles organic I-bake-my-own-bread-churn-my-own-butter camp would LOVE for each of us to grow our own food and prepare everything from scratch.  Newsflash, geniuses, producing one's own food is costly and irrevocably time consuming, ipso facto IMPOSSIBLE for a working parent, short of a novel tomato and handy hobby herbs.  It's just not going to happen.  It's elitism in hippie clothing.

Pick your battles.  A growing percentage of convenience foods are geared specifically toward people who want to eat better, but are short on time.  Hesser vs. Paul Newman, Earthbound Farm, and Whole Foods?  WHY?  If people can pay "at least $1.50 a pound more" for washed romaine hearts, LET THEM.  She's missing the key point--that they're eating romaine, not chicken fingers or Pop Tarts.

"Getting people to buy local ingredients is a relatively simple matter of changing purchasing behavior; getting them to cook will require a role model who really seems to mean it."  

Really?  As Hesser herself points out by quoting statistics of purchased prepackaged food, there are too many American families who are opting not to change their purchasing behavior.  Do we want to alienate them further by pushing an impossible model of virtuous family eating? 

We haven't even BEGUN to talk about those who simply can't afford the foods that Hesser would approve of; local or otherwise, romaine is not an option for many low-income families.  Not terribly grassroots of you, Hesser. 

So shut the phuck up about how prewashed romaine is the death of traditional foodways; if you want to save our souls, figure out a way to get quality whole foods to the people who need it most, at a price they can afford, from farms that are more than willing to grow it.  Figure out a way to for the government to stop feeding kids government subsidy trash at public schools.

A task force of young chefs???  REALLY???  (Has Hesser ever tried to get a room full of young chefs to do ANYTHING???  It's like phucking herding cats!)  Nonono.  Chefs, like most wannabe celebrities, have their own agendas to push.  We don't need another platform for blowhards to show us their talent for bringing a privileged few another $28 plate of sautéed heirloom mushrooms.  People don't want and don't need to be talked down to about eating better.

You need people who are approachable, who are not afraid of taking the time to make a meal, not a showcase.  We need home economics teachers, better school lunches and after-school cooking programs--if Top Cheffers and their ilk feel like getting involved, more power to them.

Strangely enough, cooking bloggers fit the bill.  They tend to be untrained home-cooks--they're highly personal, highly regional, and therefore more likely to be using whatever their audience can find in their own markets.  It's up to those who have made eating well a manageable, everyday task to teach those of us who have not. 

While there will always be the kind of food blogger who wants to wow us with their rustic I-make-my-own-yogurt antics, but more often than not, they are mothers, fathers, singles, and working folks themselves, eager to eat well and simply, not fuss and preen.

People DO need to understand more about what they eat--where it comes from, who grows it, how it effects personal nutrition, and how best to prepare it--but the idea that the person to teach us is the First Lady is effing Recipe Redux Retro Retarded.  What Amanda Hesser is proposing should be her own job, not the First Lady's.

Comments

[ana]

Hear, hear! What a ridiculous notion that the First Lady should be leading the way in showing the rest of us what to do. Uhm, the White House has had a personal chef for, oh forever. 'No, no, I can't meet with the head of 'insert-non-profit-group-here' to discuss how to improve 'insert-needed-program-here', because i have to go and make a full lunch of organically grown products for my two little girls. I mean, pick your battles. I'll be happy if oh, i don't know, the president gets programs approved to improve the subsidized lunches in the public schools or, gasp, change the long established subsidies to American farmers so we produce more varied products.

[EF]

you know my OTHER favorite part of all this? Hesser does suggest those things...but divides them by gender roles:

"Her involvement might also focus the energies of her husband’s cabinet — his secretaries of agriculture, education and health, say — to embrace the cause."

So, wimmenfolk can influence policy, by cooking and teaching to cook, rather than getting in there themselves and tackling agribusiness and education head-on.

Superty-dooper. NYAGH!!!!!!!! ;P

[from b e h i n d]

nodnod, "wimmenfolk"'s place is in the kitchin! With some b r i n e.