The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (7 page)

Her fridge was nearly empty. I suspected that she'd cleaned it out for my visit, but she insisted that wasn't it; she was going out of town the next day. On first inspection, it appeared immaculate save a few organic condiments, a half dozen eggs, and a solitary green pepper.

In a dairy drawer, she had the remnants of a large package of feta cheese. She sniffed. “Ewww. Okay, this cheese is probably bad. That's the problem with bulk, right? It's cheaper to get a big thing than it is to buy a small one at the co-op. So I get it, eat part of it, and then the rest goes bad.” She closed the fridge door and shook her head. For a moment, her permanent smile faded. “It makes me feel terrible.”

“Hey, you know, food waste is really common,” I said. “They say that people waste a third of what they bring home.”

Dri pulled her mouth to one side. “It's not very sustainable behavior, is it?” she said flatly. She spent a quiet moment in self-judgment. Then she brightened. “Want to see the freezer?”

She pointed out artichoke hearts purchased months ago for a recipe that she never made. “I'm not sure what to do with them now,” she mused. She had organic hamburger as well as individual chicken breasts wrapped in plastic sleeves and several bags of random food that she didn't recognize. As with other people we visited, the freezer often became The Land of Food That Time Forgot. “I like leftovers for one day but I don't want them on day two. So I think, I'll freeze them. And then they just sit in there until I move or the next millennium rolls around.”

We moved on to a cupboard featuring what she referred to as her meager baking supply area. “I bake so infrequently that I forget that I have stuff and buy it again.” As if to prove her point, she uncovered fifteen pounds of white sugar.

For dinner, she decided to make a staple meal: spaghetti with a jar of tomato sauce. That's what she ate at least a couple of nights each week. As she waited for the water to boil, she explained that while growing up, her mom's cooking repertoire had relied heavily on pot roast and taco salad. “We ate a LOT of taco salad,” Dri said. “We often had fend-for-yourself kinds of nights. Dad was a contractor, so we had very irregular hours.”

It wasn't until she moved away from home that Dri realized her mother's food was, well, boring. “If she went crazy, she used a bit of Lawry's seasoning salt. She doesn't believe in garlic, which I now believe is critical to life. Depending on where our family was financially, she would use stuff like powdered milk. I remember there would be times when she canned fruit and cooked much more from scratch. But there were a lot of frozen things in our lives.”

Dri put the pasta into a bowl, a portion large enough for at least three people. “You know, I fall back on pasta because, well, it doesn't take long, I can't screw it up, and I don't have to plan for it. But I want to have more options. I want to feel like I'm an adult who can feed herself. Sometimes I still feel like a kid in the kitchen; I'm just not sure what I'm doing. I mean, what am I going to do with those artichoke hearts in my freezer?”

To me, Dri represented someone who was relying on old behaviors (shopping at a warehouse store when she lived alone) and couldn't stick to new ones that she wanted to adopt (eating more vegetables, cooking more often). There's nothing wrong with either, but how could she find strategies to do both and still fit in with her personal philosophies around sustainable food? I wondered.

A cute Japanese American with a quick laugh and a dimpled smile, Jodi lived in a comfortable split-entry house on a quiet suburban cul de sac. Her house was among the more upscale I visited, with expensive overstuffed furniture and a kitchen equipped with marble countertops and stainless steel appliances. At five feet two inches, she weighed about 135 pounds. “I could probably stand to lose fifteen or twenty pounds,” she admitted. “It's funny, in America, I look pretty normal. But I went to Japan to visit my relatives recently. They all say”—she did a fairly pathetic Japanese accent here—“ ‘You so fat! You just sooooo faaaat!' ” They took her shopping and nothing fit. The shopkeepers looked at her and shook their heads. “She too fat.”

Jodi purposely never learned to cook. “My mother has spent her life basically being my father's slave. It's part of Asian culture. So I figured that if I couldn't cook, then I couldn't be forced into that role.” Jodi grew up with wildly conflicting maternal advice. The expectation cycle went something like this: Study hard, get good grades, get a good job, then get married. Wait, now you're married, why are you still working? My grandson is in day care? You're a horrible mother! You should quit your job.

Jodi married a good-looking, strikingly tall Thai American man with a flair for cooking. From the very start of their relationship, he cooked most of their weekend meals and dinner once a week. The rest of the time, they ate out or ordered takeout, an arrangement that satisfied them both—until she was laid off from her job with a high-tech firm. Suddenly, they had half the income, plus a fussy three-year-old who refused to eat much of anything. Newly unemployed, tight for cash, and at home all day, she felt that the least she could do was to cook her husband dinner and feed her kid. They had long shopped at warehouse stores for food, where the savings held huge appeal. As a result, they bought a second fridge for their garage.

“All this food takes up so much space!” she lamented, as food items fell out of her freezer when she opened the door. We pulled it all out: a vertical stack of twenty-plus breaded chicken cutlets, steaks of multiple shapes and sizes, a vacuum-packed whole beef tenderloin, dozens of individually wrapped boneless chicken breasts, and catering-sized bags of frozen vegetables.

A closer inspection told an interesting tale. This penchant for bulk buying was not a new habit; a few steaks were four years old, and the chicken breasts had a sell-by date of two years prior. As she dug farther, she found whole salmon fillets and ribs bought for a camping trip three years earlier. “Oh, wow, I forgot we had these!”

Jodi and her husband infrequently made anything from the freezer, yet they kept buying food to put into it. Only two items had a good rotation: fish sticks and breaded chicken cutlets, both items her son would eat, and she could cook them easily on a tray in the oven. Their fridge was similarly packed. They purchased most condiments in industrial-sized jars. The mayonnaise in a hearty gallon jug had a sell-by date of a year earlier. “I hate to throw it out, though, there's so much left. I guess we don't really eat that much mayonnaise.”

The crisper drawer had three browning heads of iceberg lettuce. “Oh, I hate it when this happens,” she said. “We always throw out lettuce. It's hard to go through it. They come five to a pack where we shop.” Then she led us to the pantry, a closet larger than the kitchen of either Dri or Sabra, and we found it stuffed floor to ceiling with enough boxes and cans to last through the start of a nuclear winter: cases of soup, canned vegetables, boxed pasta dishes, instant ramen noodles (“kid food”), microwavable cups of mac and cheese, and a twenty-pound sack of white rice. “There's more in the garage, too,” she said.

Many of her evening meals consisted of the “brown and stir” variety, some kind of sauce that involved adding a protein, usually chicken. For lunch, she worked up her most ambitious dish: cooked strips of chicken and chopped-up onion and red pepper in a skillet, flavored by adding a cube of “golden curry” seasoning. “This is a Japanese household standby,” she said, showing off the shimmering brown, gelatinous cube before she dropped it into the pan. She added water and stirred. Like a miracle, it thickened and created a thick, shiny brown sauce. She boiled water for Minute rice. “I'm such a bad Asian! But our rice cooker has been broken for ages,” she confessed.

“So how often do you eat rice?” I asked.

Jodi cocked her head to one side, stirring her dish. “Pretty much every day,” she said thoughtfully. Then she laughed. “I guess we should fix it, huh?”

I looked at the golden curry package. One serving, a mere quarter cup, contained 41 percent of the recommended sodium intake. The cube's flavor came primarily from monosodium glutamate. I told her it affects many people like a toxin. “It's funny, now that you mention it, I always get a headache after I eat this stuff,” she said. Although the package claimed five servings, Jodi said that she and her husband usually split a package—each eating two and a half servings. Or 120 percent of the recommended daily sodium intake and 60 percent of the recommended daily fat intake, which didn't include the oil needed to stir-fry the chicken and vegetables. As she sat at the table, she fell into her chair with a heavy sigh.

“I didn't know all that. I guess I shouldn't make it anymore.” But what would happen to the six packages in her pantry? Plus the curry remained one of the few things that her son, Koji, would eat. “He will eat a little of the chicken and sauce sometimes, but not the rice and definitely none of the vegetables,” she said. Like many toddlers, Koji was a wildly fussy eater. He eschewed vegetables. Unpleasant scenarios occurred when they tried to force him to eat anything other than chicken nuggets, pizza, fish sticks, or mac and cheese. “It all started with day care. That's what they feed him there. Now he won't eat anything else. I worry about him. I mean, that can't be healthy, right?”

Research studies have found that an increasing number of American children may get enough food to eat yet remain undernourished due to overreliance on foods that are high in fat, salt, and sugar yet lack the fundamental nutrients. A 2004 study found that nearly a third of the calories in a typical American child's diet came from junk foods, defined as ultraprocessed foods with little nutrition.

It's hard to blame kids, according to Dr. David A. Kessler, the author of
The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.
Many of the foods on the common kid-food list—chicken nuggets, powder-based mac and cheese, fish sticks—have been engineered to stimulate pleasure centers in the brain. Studies found that as a result, rats can become addicted to junk food in the same way that they do to cocaine or heroin. Just as with drug addictions, rats often reject their standard “rat chow” and starve to death when denied junk food. That may explain the difficulty—or sometimes impossibility—of trying to force broccoli into a four-year-old in place of dinosaur-shaped pizza bites.

An acquaintance of mine took her fussy, plump toddler to the doctor when she noticed he had become grumpy and started to gain weight. The doctor described his condition as “a sort of starving.” He was dehydrated, an unsurprising fact given that he shunned water and insisted on sugar-spiked fruit juices or flavored milk. When she tallied up his collective meals from day care and at home, she was horrified to realize that he was subsisting on juice boxes, chicken nuggets, cheeseburgers, French fries, and hot dogs. She couldn't place the last time she had been able to make him eat a vegetable. I told Jodi that story.

“It's not like she was a bad mother,” I said. “She started realizing that wherever they went, the children's menu invariably included mac and cheese, fries, pizza, hot dogs, and hamburgers. It gives people the message that that's how kids should eat.”

The normally bubbly Jodi stared at the counter. “That pretty much describes what Koji eats, too.” She stared into her coffee. “I'm the one who is supposed to take care of him. I know that I shouldn't give him that kind of stuff. Sometimes, though, I come home and I think, I will make him eat a healthy dinner. I look in the cupboards and the fridge and pull out some vegetables and think, I don't even know how to actually cook these. Do you boil them?” She appeared suddenly defeated. The golden curry had seemed like a good option because at least it wasn't breaded or fried. “I never even thought to look at the label. Is that something you could make without a cube?”

Terri was a soft-faced, strawberry-blond-haired forty-six-year-old who had ditched a law career in the wake of a crumbled marriage and battles with alcoholism a dozen years ago. She managed a small tourism business from her one-bedroom condo. Due to the sedentary nature of her work, plus a recent broken ankle, she figured she was forty pounds overweight. She was battling high blood pressure, among other health problems.

Accumulated papers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, bills, and unopened junk mail rose like a small mountain off her dining room table, with a portion of the pile cascading like a glacier into a puddle on the floor. Her kitchen remained pristine. “That's because I don't use it that much!” she said, laughing nervously.

Terri struggled to find the motivation to cook for herself. Dinner tended to be takeout oriented. “I rely on Chinese food and baguette sandwiches from a local bakery,” she said. “I make far too many runs to McDonald's and Jack in the Box for burgers, shakes, that sort of thing.” Most weeks, she ordered a large pizza and ate it over the course of two or three days.

“The thing is that I like vegetables, but I don't feel like I cook them very well. I also tend to go overboard at the farmers' market and then I find all this stuff dead in my fridge.” The previous summer, she had signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) basket filled with fresh produce direct from a farmer. “Even though I got it every other week, it was still too much for one person. I felt even worse when that went bad.”

Her fridge was a graveyard of expired condiments, a heavy vine of aging grapes, and a container of Greek yogurt with an eightmonth-old expiration date. She pointed to a few jars with unidentifiable goo in them. “Attempts at making vinaigrette,” she said, nodding. “I make too much so it stays in there forever.”