Wasteland or Wonderland?
An imagined assessment of 21st-century food media from a 19th-century expert
In her 1841 opus, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, the writer and educator Catharine Beecher imagined a future in which formalized and highly regarded domestic knowledge would flow freely across all segments of American society, and a time when the perception of household labor as unceasing drudgery would finally come to an end. Such a shift, she declared, depended on the reframing of domestic labor as something worthy of study and personal investment, especially by ladies of significant means and refinement. “Wherever ladies of refinement, as a general custom, patronize domestic pursuits,” she opined, “then these employments will be deemed lady-like … every American woman, who values the institutions of her Country, and wishes to lend her influence in extending and perpetuating such blessings, may feel that she is doing this, whenever, by her example and influence, she destroys the aristocratic association, which would render domestic labor degrading.” Beecher hoped that aristocratic and plain women alike would find meaning and purpose, as well as a sense of genuine edification and intellectual engagement, in basic tasks such as cleaning, mending, and cooking. Finding meaning in a subject was a precursor to its formalized study, and Beecher was certain that attitudes about cooking as necessary but meaningless had led to many aristocratic families avoiding its study altogether. “It is now often the case,” she wrote with indignation, “that young ladies rather pride themselves on their ignorance of such subjects; and seem to imagine that it is vulgar and ungenteel to know how to work. … [Yet] let the young women of this Nation find, that Domestic Economy is placed, in schools, on equal or superior ground to Chemistry, Philosophy, and Mathematics, and they will blush to be found ignorant of its first principles, as much as they will to hesitate respecting the laws of gravity, or the composition of the atmosphere.” Beecher put greath faith in the pedagogy of domestic labor and dedicated her life’s work to encouraging the American public to do the same.
Yet even with her great appreciation for the domestic arts, Beecher might be startled to encounter the food landscape in twenty-first-century America—and the multitude of spaces in which food culture is anchored less in the principles of culinary practice than it is in the debates, contestations, and promotions of new techniques, tools, and ingredients to cure whatever ails us. Beecher would never have imagined a universe in which food advertising, and the media that depends upon it to push their reviews and recipes into the public eye, in January 2023. She would never have believed that by 2024, 91% of millennials and 89.57% of Gen Z consumers preferred to make recipes they encountered via social media, rather than television or print platforms for renowned chefs. Perhaps she would be most surprised to hear that pleasure, rather than a sense of moral or familial obligation, would drive the actions of most home cooks, and indeed fuel the broadest experience that the public has with food culture. In under two centuries, the pursuit of gastronomic or gastronomic-adjacent experiences—growing food, cooking, and dining out—shifted entirely out of the realm of duty, and into a space of gratification and delight.
Granted, Beecher was never writing in the realm of pleasure; as an unmarried and deeply religious woman (her father was the renowned Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher), she did not have the luxury or means to do so. She wrote in a different, more restrained channel of the food world than the male gastronomes of the age such as Jean Anthelme Brilliat-Savarin (The Physiology of Taste, 1826), Thomas Walker (Aristology; or the Art of Dining, 1835) or William Makepeace Thackeray (The Book of Snobs, 1848), and she had little to no interest in debating the merits or pleasures of eating. She was a purist in her culinary pursuits, focused entirely on what women might do in their home kitchens to ensure the physical and moral safety of their families. Yet she believed that framing such labors as arduous, as back-breaking, as draining of both body and spirit, would never draw modern women to pursue the domestic arts, and that a culture too disposed to avoiding labor would suffer immeasurably. “Shall we form our customs on the principle that labor is degrading, and indolence genteel?” she pondered. “Shall we assume, by our practice, that the interests of the great mass are to be sacrificed for the pleasures and honors of a privileged few?”
And yet Beecher might be startled to realize that, for all the proliferation of outlets for food appreciation and education in twenty-first century America, the focus of food media remains generally directed towards that privileged few. As Sarah Elliot, Joslyn Benton, and Sinikka Elliott wrote in their marvelous 2019 book Pressure Cooker, for some women “the kitchen restores her dignity and her confidence. But it doesn’t solve her problems.” The authors note that the kitchen as a site of potential societal reform and salvation is alluring, but often framed “not as a culinary choice or a hobby, but as an issue of morality,” especially for those who need the greatest support in getting a home-cooked meal to the table. What is required to put a home-cooked, IG-worthy meal on the table is often elided by the ad copy that fuels the food media industry—the wherewithal to identify recipes and shop for meals, the logistical resources to do so within a reasonable time frame and distance, and most significantly the time to prepare meals from raw ingredients are rarely factored into the suggested dish in question. Cooking may carry symbolic weight, good and bad, for those who take it seriously, but promoting cooking rarely comes with meaningful caveats about the resources required to do the job “right”.
Beecher would not be surprised to hear these many caveats about the requirements for good cooking—after all, she spent a lifetime trying to eliminate those challenges for American women, to acknowledge their labors as meaningful so that they would tackle them with greater intelligence and commitment. So perhaps Beecher would be most surprised to encounter me, someone who built a career in food (and is on the precipice of receiving a doctorate for studying it) without ever having experienced cooking as a form of drudgery. Because I have been raised and educated with abundant privilege, I never saw cooking as something that I had to do, but as something I wanted to do; for me, the meaning of cooking made the labor inherently lighter. The forces that draw me to the stovetop, both for personal and professional edification, have always been part of a larger pursuit of knowledge and gratification—a place where I am in control of my own productive and interpretative powers. Yet I also recognize how much my relationship to the kitchen is at a distance from the pedagogical goals that Beecher fought for in her work. She demanded that women find a renewed appreciation of cooking as a meaningful art, but she’d likely be disappointed that appreciation has come from a place of gratification rather than a place of edification. The contemporary food world might initially please her, but her reservations would still be numerous.
One of my favorite writers, the critic Adam Gopnik, wrote this about cookbooks:
The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. … The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!”
I think about this passage every time I encounter a recipe via social media (especially TikTok), in the rapid cuts of a video that elide the shopping time, prep time, and false start time that conditions almost every cooking experience. Are we being invited to master knowledge, or merely to witness it? Are we gaining genuine technique, or are we receiving impressions of how we are supposed to be? I don’t like to think of food media as an all-or-nothing pedagogical experience, where we either learn or we don’t, but I have to believe that every form of content constitutes an invitation to new mastery, new tastes, and potentially new sources of pleasure that aren’t at total odds with the necessity of cooking. As the great food writer Julie Powell once wrote, the best cooking challenges allow you to “remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life.” Whether we learn something along the way… well, that’s on us, and how much attention we intend to pay.
Recommendation: We started American Fiction this weekend, and though I need to rewatch the last third, I already know that I’m in love with it—and not just in a Stockholm Syndrome, former publishing assistant kind of way. Jeffrey Wright is magnificent in it (as he is in pretty much everything). But I also adored the rest of the cast, including Tracey Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown. My favorite detail in this is the perennial greatness of Miriam Shor, who is quickly becoming my favorite TV publishing executive caricature ever. Can’t wait to finish it and gossip about it with my crew of beleaguered former assistants.
The Perfect Bite: For our belated Valentine’s Day dinner, we had a lovely evening at Field & Vine, a terrific farm-to-table spot in Somerville with lots of delicious things on the menu (we sampled coal-roasted kohlrabi, black pepper cavatelli, and a surprisingly delicious batch of cheddar jalapeno cornbread). But I think my favorite treats of the night came before and after the dinner—first, a visit to Vera’s, the first place I’ve ever seen offer a martini with a sidecar portion on ice, ensuring that every sip of the well-balanced drink stays A) in the glass when intended and B) perfectly cold from beginning to end. Then after dinner and a frigid walk to Bow Street market, a petite cone of crispy french fries from Saus, complete with a side of curry ketchup. Perfectly balanced first and last courses for a night on the town.
Cooked & Consumed: Belated from last week’s cooking, but still a winner—I recently tried a recipe for chicken yassa, a dish I first learned about from food historian Jessica B. Harris. While you may know her best from her essential text, High on the Hog, she wrote more extensively about this dish, a staple of Senegalese cuisine, in The Africa Cookbook, especially as it was the first “sub-Saharan African dish that ‘clicked’” with her taste buds. Yassa, which comes from the Casamance region in the south of Senegal, is a dish of meat (fish or chicken most frequently) marinated and then braised with plentiful onions, lime juice, chiles, and copious spices. Maybe it was the aroma of caramelized onions and Scotch bonnets in the lime-vinegar mix, or its generous seasoning of cracked peppercorns, crushed ginger, and allspice, but it was one of the most delicious things I’ve made in months. Though I didn’t make Harris’ recipe, I’m more inclined than ever to pick up more cookbooks that focus on African cuisine and keep on cooking.
The martini sidecar is absolutely key - so much so we’ve started doing this at home, using little shot glasses in larger glasses of crushed ice!