Medium Raw

And I’m not going to tell you here how to live your life. I’m just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky.

And luck is not a business model.

6 Virtue

There is no debating that it’s “better” to cook at home whenever—and as often as—possible.

It’s cheaper, for sure. It’s almost always healthier than what you might otherwise be ordering as takeout—or eating at a restaurant. And it is provably better for society.

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m interested in whether we should cook as a moral imperative—as something that every boy and girl should be taught to do in school and woe to him or her who can’t. I’m talking about pounding home a new value, a national attitude, the way, during the JFK era, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness created the expectation that you should be healthy if you were a kid. That you should, no, you must be reasonably athletic. That at the very least you must aspire to those goals, try your best—that your teachers, your schoolmates, and society as a whole would help you and urge you on. There would be rigorous standards. Your progress would be monitored with the idea that you would, over time, improve—and become, somehow, better as a person.

With encouragement, of course, came the unstated but implied ugly flip side: negative reinforcement. If you couldn’t keep up, you were, at best, teased and, at worst, picked on.

So, I’m not suggesting we put kids who can’t cook into the center of a hooting circle of bullies and throw a fat rubber ball at them until they cry—which was the traditional punishment for perceived crimes of “spazdom” back in my time.

But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Back in the dark ages, young women and girls were automatically segregated off to home-economics classes, where they were indoctrinated with the belief that cooking was one of the essential skill sets for responsible citizenry—or, more to the point, useful housewifery. When they began asking the obvious question—“Why me and not him?”—it signaled the beginning of the end of any institutionalized teaching of cooking skills. Women rejected the idea that they should be designated, simply by virtue of their gender, to perform what would be called, in a professional situation, service jobs, and rightly refused to submit. “Home ec” became the most glaring illustration of everything wrong with the gender politics of the time. Quickly identified as an instrument of subjugation, it became an instant anachronism. Knowing how to cook, or visibly enjoying it, became an embarrassment for an enlightened young woman, a reminder of prior servitude.

Males were hardly leaping to pick up the slack, as cooking had been so wrong-headedly portrayed as “for girls”—or, equally as bad, “for queers.”

What this meant, though, is that by the end of the ’60s, nobody was cooking. And soon, as Gordon Ramsay has pointed out rather less delicately a while back, no one even remembered how.

Maybe we missed an important moment in history there. When we finally closed down home ec, maybe we missed an opportunity. Instead of shutting down compulsory cooking classes for young women, maybe we would have been far better off simply demanding that the men learn how to cook, too.

It’s not too late.

Just as horsemanship, archery, and a facility with language were once considered essential “manly” arts, to be learned by any aspiring gentleman, so, perhaps, should be cooking.

Maybe it’s the kid in the future who can’t roast a chicken who should be considered the “spaz” (though, perhaps, not made the recipient of a dodgeball to the head when he bungles a beurre blanc). Through a combination of early training and gentle but insistent peer pressure, every boy and girl would leave high school at least prepared to cook for themselves and a few others.

At college, where money is usually tight and good meals are rare, the ability to throw together a decent meal for your friends would probably be much admired. One might even be reasonably expected to have a small but serviceable list of specialties that you could cook for your roommates.