Fire and Knowledge

I think that there’s some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don’t have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television — we’ve turned cooking into a spectator sport. We’re terrified to play tackle football too when we watch how it’s played on TV — we’d get killed. But cooking’s a whole lot easier than it appears on Iron Chef.

We cook every night here. My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table. [But] when you create this image of people as being hurried, and harried, and of course you need TV dinners, that kind of sinks in. They kind of flatter us by telling us we’re too busy and that we have such rushed lives, but in the end we find time for what matters. In just the last 10 years we’ve found, what, two or three hours a day to deal with the internet? It’s a matter of priority, it’s not really about ability. Some people are very intimidated about cooking and I think that’s a shame, and I think we have to help people get over that by teaching them how to cook, teaching kids how to cook in school.

–Michael Pollan in “A Conversation with Michael Pollan,” Grist Magazine.