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Saturday ABC broadcast a show, new to me, narrated by a chef I had previously watched on morning news. Seeing most of one episode convinces me the series is a long-due address to the first of the three basics: food, clothing, and shelter. It looks as if Chef Oliver is poised do for the table what Ms. Winfrey did for domestic abuse: shine a light on problems and present a solution to millions of people.
A dear older friend lost her mother when she was seven, and grew up without female supervision when gender roles were rigidly defined. Her house was a good place to visit, but the kitchen lacked even a sharp knife. To cook a steak, she set it in a cold frying pan and turned the heat on high. This approach was a surprise, and I noticed that she could have gotten much more out of the tools and ingredients she had to work with. It seemed a needless waste.
A few years later, another friend who had done social service in Appalachia told me about a meal he had been served: four courses of badly managed starch. He was culture-bound, well-intended, scornful, disturbed, and unaware of the limits of communication in back woods areas.
Those were the culinary low points I knew about when I was younger, and unconsciously I assumed things could not get worse. President Johnson’s administration made huge efforts to educate and nourish low income citizens. The federal home economy publications from this period are a gold mine of value. At the same time, the women’s movement advocated working outside the home. One of the nineteenth-century sources cited in support of women entering the paid work force proposed that central kitchens prepare and distribute food.
I suppose this is an example of being careful what one wishes for.
Chef Oliver has established a cooking facility in a southern storefront. He visited a local elementary school, selling his approach to the table. The first scene I stumbled across showed him addressing a first-grade classroom. He held up vegetable after vegetable, potato, tomato, eggplant, cauliflower, beet, and none of the children recognized or could name any of them. They readily identified pizza, hamburgers, and fries, though.
It’s not clear how much art went into editing this production, but the result is a stunning inditement of the de-skilling of the culture. A scene in the school kitchen showed Oliver discussing the presentation of the next meal. He suggested providing the kids with a knife, fork, and spoon-it’s hard to imagine anything more fundamental-and ran into a stone wall.
Surprised that the school did not offer basic cutlery, the fundamental tools of Western etiquette, Oliver was driven, in shock, literally against the wall, after commenting that English schools always provide those amenities. A hard-eyed woman looked him straight in the face and said, “Do you have any documentation on that?” and repeated the statement when, incredulous, he asked what she had just said.
The race to the bottom began a long time ago.
The Christian communion service is a haiku version of a meal. Embedded in the ritual are the procurement, preparation, and sharing of food and drink.
In the Book of the Eskimos, Danish anthropologist Peter Freuchen writes about a people in the darkest, most bitter reaches of the north who lacked certain skills. They survived the winter without mittens. Frostbite reduced their hands to blackened claws. Hunting and butchering prey were even more difficult for them than for other groups in slightly more benign regions of the Arctic.
The school Oliver is visiting is administered by people who care about the children. Oliver got cutlery into the lunchroom and went around the tables showing the kids how to use it. The principal, an honest man, picked up the dialogue and made the rounds of the tables himself.
Domestic systems are a fragile collection of links that is protected by custom. Using a knife and fork trains fine motor skills and protects against hand-borne pathogens. When the early two-pronged fork came to England from Italy during the Middle Ages, there were problems with violence at the table. Barons found the new tool good for stabbing and would settle their differences on the spot. It took a while to work out the wrinkles in the system.
When Chef Oliver proposed setting out knives for the children, the staff said, “Knives?!” as if they were dangerous. Oliver might not have been aware of Columbine, but a table knife is less dangerous than a sharp pencil. Really, the point is to keep one’s mind sharp, and nothing keeps it sharper than a good meal.
In the Fifties, nutritionist Adele Davis published a series of books. She mentions that the determining factor in a child’s intelligence is the quality of the grandmother’s nutrition. Messing around with diet is a high-stakes game with long-term social and military consequences. For the past hundred and twenty years, society has known that home nurture is the foundation of a vigorous nation. A small investment in time and minor know-how allows one to turn the time, fuel, and cash it takes to run for take-out from a loss to an hourly task worth hundreds of dollars in health and education.
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