The Motivation

Cooking and baking everything we eat, from scratch, with the best quality ingredients we can use, is the best possible investment in our health and quality of life.

This is my consumption true north, the way I can rate my decisions. This is a deeply personal stance, yet there are phrases like 'health begins in the kitchen' that are commonly used, yet rarely acted on. Let me ask you, do you really think that any business (which exists to make profit) really has your health at the core of the decisions for the food it produces? The only way forward, is to exert as much control over what you eat as possible, and the most control comes from going all the way down to the basics.

Its still an ideal though, not really a standard I measure myself against. I want to make better decisions, I don't worry about making the best ones. We still eat out sometimes, we do have a few snack foods at home for treats, traveling (especially for work) is its own set of challenges, I can wander off the path a little, but the north is always there.

Over the last few years, I've had the privilege to help a few friends start to take steps on this journey. The motivation for them pretty much always comes down to wanting to take control over what they eat, but whats really struck me over that time is how hard this is for people to pick up, I've started to suspect the block isn't exactly where you'd expect.

Between entire cable networks, umpteen streaming shows, the ever popular food social media activity, and the (thankfully) continuous stream of cookbooks still being released, you would think we were in a golden information age for food. I suppose from a consumption of content point of view, you'd be right, but there is the troubling point that few people spend time cooking for themselves.

Everyone has to eat, clearly there is interest abound in the production of food as entertainment, and a generally shared understanding that the complete outsourcing of our food is bad for us, and yet, very few people spend any significant effort on their own food. So what gives?

The standard wisdom has it that it's the business of modern life. I'm not going to write that off, its surely a contributing factor, but I think there is something else; a skills gap.

Now, I don't mean a skills gap in terms of the fundamental things you have to do to be able to pull a meal together (chopping an onion, mincing garlic, etc etc). I mean how do you fold cooking into your life when you finish a 12 or 14 hour day and would rather hit yourself over the head with a skillet than put it on the stove and add a little more work to the day, so a bucket of chicken or pizza it is.

Put another way, how can we combine our time to accommodate work and personal obligations with shopping and cooking to secure a food supply where we've maximized the quality of what we eat?

Think about all that food entertainment on tv, it might show you how to make some dishes, it might inspire you to want to cook, but only a few shows have offered ways that this can be folded into modern lifestyles. While I love cookbooks (seriously I do, I have a borderline addiction to them, I have way too many and can't stop buying them), I've only stumbled across a couple that are much help here. Too many start out with a big list of equipment, and a 4 page pantry list of staples needed for what comes later, which is far too intimidating when you don't know the basics of cooking, making your way through all of that, plus learning all the techniques is just too high a mountain for most of us.

So over the coming weeks and months I'm going to talk about some of the things (strategies, methods, and yep, even recipes) I use to go about this, review some things along the way, and hopefully we can start a conversation where other people bring their methods out. The more people we can get cooking and baking, the better living we'll have.