Best Food Writing 2015 (6 page)

Kids These Days
Kids These Days

B
Y
S
ARA
D
ESERAN

From
San Francisco Magazine

          
We all know them, don't we?—and it's no surprise that they abound in the Bay Area's rarified food culture.
San Francisco Magazine
editor-at-large Sara Deseran, who's also a co-owner of the restaurants Tacolicious and Chino, is a savvy observer of the foodie kid phenomenon, with three children of her own.

My nine-year-old son, Moss, has been exhibiting signs of food snobbery for a while now. The other day, he refused some Jell-O chocolate pudding as if it were beneath him. He lobbied for months to eat at the “real” Delfina—not just the pizzeria. And he asked me to buy him a foam charger after watching David Chang wield one on
The Mind of a Chef
. “What the heck are you going to do with a foam charger?” I asked. “Make Ferran Adrià's microwave cake,” he replied.

And then there was the time that I took him to the Divisadero Popeyes, whose rumored closing had sparked in me a nostalgic desire for one last taste of deliciously fried commodity chicken. I assumed that my boys would find it exhilarating to be allowed a normally verboten lunch of fast food. But instead of getting high fives, I got judged. While his 13-year-old brother, Silas, gingerly nibbled on a drumstick, Moss flat-out refused to ingest even a biscuit crumb. “I don't want to get diabetes,” he said staunchly, on the brink of calling child services. “Who told you about diabetes?” was the only response I could muster. It's a strange feeling to see the values that you've been attempting to instill in
your child come back to bite you. It makes me wonder: Have I created a wunderkind or a monster?

The boys' father, a juice-cleansing chiropractor, might be responsible for their overt health consciousness, and I, a professional food writer, and their stepdad, a restaurateur, are probably to blame for Moss's culinary effeteness. But we are far from the only culprits. The Bay Area as a whole is a fertile breeding ground for juvenile foodies who are abnormally nutrition-minded. Inspired in part by the Edible Schoolyard Project, public and private schools alike proudly trot out garden programs intended to educate kids about the glories of freshly harvested chicories and undervalued root vegetables. The San Francisco Unified School District Wellness Policy forbids schools from selling junk food in their cafeterias and vending machines—not to mention serving soda and potato chips at class parties.

On the epicurean side of things, our shores boast at least a dozen cooking programs for kids (Junior Chef Stars, based on the Peninsula, starts teaching kids knife safety at age three). And then there's TV: On Fox's
MasterChef Junior
, 8- to 13-year-olds compete for $100,000; the Food Network, not to be trumped, launched
Kids Baking Championship
. The underage foodie obsession has spread to higher-brow realms, too: The cover of the
New York Times Magazine
's 2014 food issue featured Flynn McGarry, a 16-year-old, home-schooled fine-dining “chef” who conjures dishes like seawater-brined uni with carrots and coffee. In January he presented a $160 nine-course pop-up at San Francisco's Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn. It sold out.

Moss, meanwhile, is transfixed by
MasterChef Junior
—to the point of referring to our kitchen counter as his “station.” Ever since Gordon Ramsay submitted the young chefs to a fried egg challenge, Moss has been practicing making flawless eggs every morning before school. He's also starting to define himself by his palate, serving as my companion for Korean barbecue and Indian thali. At the sushi bar, he's the weird child kneeling on his stool so that he can peek over the glass to watch the chefs make nigiri.

Yes, Moss can be a bit insufferable (if cute). But given that we live in a city where good food is often conflated with existential enlightenment, I have to ask myself: What, exactly, is the problem? What's so off-putting about a pint-size epicure?

Perhaps it's an issue of privilege and perspective. I like to think that my obsession with good eating is the kind that stems from a relatively deprived upbringing backed by years of culinary bootstrapping. I grew up in Baton Rouge in the '70s, well before grocery stores started selling lemongrass and gorgonzola. Gumbo aside, my hometown was an average place to eat, and while my parents were great cooks, we didn't bat an eye at having Popeyes for a treat. The most worldly restaurant exposure I had before the age of nine was eating a strip mall lunch of Lebanese shawarma.

But Moss is growing up in a horn of plenty, a city where farmers' markets abound, restaurants sling everything from $2 tacos to $42 steak frites, and city government is a vocal proponent of good nutrition. Many Bay Area kids, it's true, don't have access to sufficient food, healthy or otherwise—but for those fortunates whose parents are able and willing to make eating well a priority, good food is here for the taking. And take I have, creating in the process this heirloom tomato–sniffing child. So it's incumbent upon me to keep him grounded—to make sure that he has an appreciation for the incredible privilege he enjoys, but also some humility. And in that, I fear, I'm failing.

Daniel Duane, the Bernal Heights author of
How to Cook Like a Man
—and an obsessive eater since his birth in Berkeley—shares my anxieties. He and his wife have two daughters, one of whom has taken to cooking out of the El Bulli staff-meal cookbook. “I started thinking about this when my eldest, Hannah, was really little,” Duane says. “I'd take her to the farmers' market, and she'd scream, ‘They have channies!' which meant chanterelles, and I'd find myself feeling this mixture of pride and profound embarrassment.”

Of course, you don't need to be a food writer to raise this kind of kid. My friends Julia and Charlie work in law and tech, respectively, and their son, Zach, now 13, has simply followed in their food-loving footsteps. “We went to our friend's house, and they made mac and cheese for the kids and quiche for the adults,” Julia says. “Zach asked for quiche, and the adults were like, ‘Whoa, we've never seen a kid who will eat quiche.'” While Julia delights in Zach's tastes, she is also keen that he not be rude to kids who don't share them. “It's super fun and exciting when you have a child who's open to trying different food,” she says. “But it's also important that he be sensitive to the politics of it.”

For some perspective, I turned to Karen Rogers, the founder of Sprouts Cooking Club, a kids' cooking school that's been around since 2005. I figured that she'd seen it all, and she has: from the disadvantaged kids to whom Sprouts provides scholarships—some have never heard of an eggplant—to the, well, less disadvantaged. “We were doing a market cooking class at Oliveto in Oakland,” Rogers comments, “and a kid comes up to me and says, ‘I'm training for
MasterChef
.' And we said, ‘When are tryouts?' And he said, ‘Two years.'”

When I tell Rogers of my anxieties about Moss turning into some kind of pompous braggart, it's clear that she thinks I'm overreacting. “It's such a beautiful movement,” she says of the increasing number of children interested in cooking. “We're empowering kids to preserve their health. I think it's awesome that we're so focused on the next generation, even if it's a trend that we're seeing largely with parents who have the means and knowledge to take the time to teach their kids.”

For my part, I've started a program for Moss that I'm calling Unlearning Food Snobbism (named after the Unlearning Racism workshop that I was required to take at UC Santa Cruz). Its edicts: No criticizing another person's cooking; no snubbing your friend's Lunchables; and, most of all, no showing off. Suffice it to say, it's a learning process. The other night, I dined at Ichi Sushi with my sons, Julia, Charlie, and Zach. Within seconds of the menu's presentation, Zach exclaimed, “Okonomiyaki! I love that!” Moss, of course, echoed his enthusiasm for the Japanese pancake. Meanwhile, Silas took a look at the menu and paused for a second, his eyebrows scrunching in honest confusion. “What's sake?” he said, rhyming it with “cake.” Zach and Moss looked at him, slightly appalled, while I noted that when it comes to nature versus nurture, the jury is still out. As part of his unlearning, Moss was told to cool it. “Silas,” Zach said. “It's
saké
. Not sake.”

At that moment, though, I was delighted with both of my kids: Silas for being unwittingly, and refreshingly, normal—a kid who appreciates food as just food, not something to be intellectually consumed by. And Moss for knowing what sake is, 12 years before he can legally drink it. For a parent, balance is everything.

How to Get People to Cook More? Get Eaters to Complain Less
.
How to Get People to Cook More? Get Eaters to Complain Less
.

B
Y
T
AMAR
H
ASPEL

From the
Washington Post

          
In her monthly
Washington Post
column “Unearthed,” Tamar Haspel writes about the intertwined issues of food policy, health, and the environment with a lively, funny, pull-no-punches style. She's equally plain-spoken here, on the vexed issue of why Americans don't cook more.

We're being told to cook. The benefits attributed to home cooking and its corollary, the family dinner, include lower weight, better diet quality and decreased risk for kids' smoking, drinking and using drugs. When health authorities tick off the factors leading to our obesity epidemic, the decline of home cooking is generally on the list.

Does that mean home-cooked family dinners make those good things happen? Or could it be that they're just markers for well-functioning families that succeed in other ways? We don't have enough research to know for sure, but even if a home-cooked dinner doesn't transform family life, there's still one strong reason to cook: If you're looking for an affordable, healthful meal, home cooking is your best, and sometimes your only, option. Every expert I spoke with agreed that home-cooked meals tend to be more nutritious and less calorie-dense than takeout, fast-food and restaurant meals.

Perhaps it's that health halo that imbues the act of cooking with a kind of mystique. It's not just the result, but also the process, that matters. In his book
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
, Michael
Pollan asks, “How many of us still do the kind of work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world that concludes . . . with such a gratifying and delicious sense of closure?” In his kitchen, “even the most ordinary dish follows a satisfying arc of transformation, magically becoming something more than the sum of its ordinary parts.”

In other people's kitchens, the magic isn't always apparent. A recent study of home cooking, published in the journal
Contexts
, had researchers from North Carolina State University interview the mothers in 150 middle- and low-income households and sit in on 40 of their family dinners. Their paper, “The Joy of Cooking?” painted a picture of harried women trying to shoehorn dinner into tight days and budgets. “I just hate the kitchen,” says Samantha, a single mother of three. “Having to come up with a meal and put it together. I know I can cook, but it's the planning of the meal, and seeing if they're going to like it, and the mess that you make. And then, the mess afterwards. . . . If it was up to me, I wouldn't cook.”

I suspect that most of us who cook sometimes feel like Pollan and sometimes feel like Samantha, but studies of family mealtime dynamics find a lot more Samanthas. Which leads the scientists, doctors and public health officials trying to improve the way Americans eat to focus on identifying, and then lowering, the barriers that stand between busy working parents and healthful home-cooked meals.

The focus has been on the cook. She (and it's almost always a she) doesn't have time, she doesn't have skills, she doesn't have access to fresh ingredients. But one line in “The Joy of Cooking?” jumped out at me. In all of the meals they watched, the researchers wrote, “we rarely observed a meal in which at least one family member didn't complain about the food.” And that's when there's an observer in the room! If you're one of those fortunate cooks who takes pleasure in putting dinner on the table for your family every day, ask yourself how long you would last if someone complained about the food at almost every meal. Me, I'd throw in the kitchen towel before the week was out.

Why doesn't some of the research on the barriers to home cooking take a look at the ingrates who are doing the eating, rather than the hard-working women doing the cooking? The book that describes the state of American home cooking isn't
Cooked
. It's Russell Hoban's 1966 children's classic,
The Little Brute Family
: “In the morning, Mama
cooked a sand and gravel porridge, and the family snarled and grimaced as they spooned it up. No one said ‘Please.' No one said ‘Thank you,' and no one said ‘How delicious,' because it was not delicious. . . . In the evening Mama served a stew of sticks and stones, and the family ate it with growls and grumbling.”

There's not a whole lot of data on why people complain at meals, but there are two trends that might be taking a toll on the dinnertime dynamic. The first is “kid food.”

According to Barbara Fiese, director of the Family Resiliency Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, many versions of foods, often sweet and calorie-dense, have been developed specifically for, and marketed specifically to, children. The industry recognizes kids' “pester power,” and its goal is to get the kids to persuade the parents—sometimes by the time-tested tantrum method—to buy the food. “Although there's not much data on how often kids get separate meals at the table,” says Fiese, “more parents are reporting that they feel pressure to prepare kids' meals.”

Sales data for kid food—the snacks, drinks, cereals and meals targeted at children—back Fiese up. In the United States, the category is estimated at $23.2 billion annually and is growing faster than the market as a whole. That's more than $500 for every kid under 10.

Kids have been taught that there is special food just for them, and Fiese says that 10 percent of kids will throw a tantrum if they don't get the food they want. It's easy to see how peace is sometimes more important than broccoli.

The second trend is like kid food, only for grown-ups: It's the processed, sweet, salty, calorie-dense adult foods that are convenient, inexpensive and ubiquitous. “It's so easy to get extremely palatable food that's been perfectly concocted to be absolutely delicious,” says Julie Lumeng, an associate professor at the University of Michigan Center for Human Growth and Development. And that makes it hard for a home-cooked meal to compete. “The expectation of how tasty dinner is going to be is out of control,” she says.

Prepared and processed foods are made by people whose job it is to formulate delicious dishes. In some cases, they devote vast resources to irresistibility. (Michael Moss's
Salt, Sugar, Fat
is an eye-opening chronicle of the process.) They don't care whether you eat your vegetables
or whether you're getting fat. Their job is to make you like what they cook. So the hard, cold fact of it is, as Lumeng says, “the food you cook at home is often not as tasty.” No one says “how delicious” because it is not delicious.

Of course, that's not always true. Some skilled home cooks turn out deliciousness night after night. And if you can do that, it's sometimes difficult to see how other people can't. As with anything else, once you get the hang of it, it's not that hard. But it's easy for those of us who do food for a living—by growing it, cooking it or writing about it—to lose track of how tough it is for people who do other things for a living to master home cooking.

And so, for too many people too much of the time, that home-cooked meal will not please those it has been cooked for, who go into it with expectations set by the many diabolically palatable meals they have under their belt. And those people complain. And the cook loses any inclination she might have had to spend yet more time in the kitchen to get better at this, and the dinner dynamic spirals downward.

How can we reverse the trend? Jayne Fulkerson, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Child and Family Health Promotion Research, has a suggestion: Get those ingrates, particularly the kids, into the kitchen, because “kids are more likely to accept a meal they've had a role in preparing.” She's working on a project that gets children involved in cooking and has found that “you can get the kids engaged in thinking of what they want to make, and pulling it off, and looking in wonder at what they just created.”

Hey, wait a minute! That sounds a lot like Michael Pollan's description. He gets criticized for being tone-deaf to the real-life constraints of working parents, but I think it's important to keep his version of cooking in our sights. On a good day, there is wonder in transforming humdrum ingredients into a satisfying, good-tasting meal; if kids see the magic, it's not just a manifestation of elite privilege.

Would that strategy work for adults? Fulkerson says “parents can be as picky as kids,” and she thinks the same principle applies. So, if you're an adult or a kid over about the age of 10 and you're guilty of complaining, grab an apron and see whether you can't do better.

I asked Daniel Post Senning, co-author of the 18th edition of
Emily Post's Etiquette
(and great-great-grandson of that etiquette icon),
about complaining at the table, a practice so brazenly discourteous that mention of its prevalence left him “slack-jawed.” When he recovered his wits, he had several suggestions for changing the family dinner dynamic. First, he seconded Fulkerson's strategy: “If you're not participating in the process, you don't always have standing to offer a critique,” he says. “Offer to participate in a meaningful way: planning and shopping, if not cooking.”

And even then, be careful. “The compliment sandwich—praise, critique, praise—would be appropriate. There's always something you can thank someone for when they've worked on your behalf.” Also, “have a solution.” Don't care for creamed spinach? Volunteer to try roasting cauliflower.

What you don't do when someone—probably someone you love—has made a meal for you is gripe about the food at the table. Just don't.

The Little Brute Family stumbles through a grim and joyless life eating sticks and stones until, one day, Baby Brute finds a daisy, and the daisy gives him a good feeling. That evening, at supper, “when his bowl was filled with stew he said, ‘Thank you.'” From that moment, the good feeling catches on. “When Papa Brute went out for sticks and stones the next day, he found wild berries, salad greens, and honey, and he brought them home instead. At supper, everyone said ‘How delicious!' because it was delicious.”

Okay,
The Little Brute Family
is a fable, and decreeing that, from this day forth, no one shall complain about dinner won't magically turn the home-cooking trend around. But, unlike most interventions, it doesn't cost us anything. And if home cooking is something worth encouraging, and I think it is, we all need to take a tip from Baby Brute. When someone cooks a meal for you, whether or not you found your daisy, here's an appropriate thing to say: Thank you.