"If someone—Jamie Oliver, for example—devised an appealing mass-market food product that was better than Taco Bell on the taste/price/convenience dimension but also healthier, well that would be an excellent thing for the world. And maybe someone could do it … Jamie Oliver could do it. Mark Bittman could do it. Michael Pollan could do it. And it would be more likely to succeed than an endless procession of NYT Magazine articles hectoring people about how they should cook more."
Matthew Yglesias, What The World Needs From Its Celebrity Chefs « The Internet Food Association
OH GROW UP and cook your own food already. I really have no other response to this other than: if you’re interested in eating good food, it’s your responsibility, as a member of the human race, to select and prepare that food yourself. It is not the responsibility of the celebrity chef, who, I might add, is already down with the select-and-prepare it yourself philosophy. That’s why they write cookbooks. And have cooking shows.
The celebrity chefs of the world aren’t “hectoring” you. They’re reinforcing the knowledge that the ability to cook food for ourselves is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. I’m not saying that you should never eat out. I’m not saying that you need to prepare every meal at home. But you should be more interested in where your food comes from, and how it’s prepared. And you shouldn’t expect other people — from the corporate chef at Taco Bell to the prepared foods staff at Whole Foods to the thousands and thousands of chefs championing regional cuisine made with local ingredients — to do all the heavy lifting for you.
Take some agency in your life. Make some decisions about what you put in your body. Educate yourself about the way that food production works in America. Don’t have food guilt. Don’t have arbitrary rules surrounding what you can and can’t eat. And for goodness’ sake, cook some of that food yourself.
xoxo, c. hotpoint
