In Which America is Awesome

Ok, so it's still a cesspit of classist, sexist, racist, hypocritical warmongering irrational policies, but I have Noam Chomsky to explain these things in detail.  The point is, as far as the infrastructure and privilege available in America (for those with privilege, let's not pretend everyone has equal access), it is unbelievably amazing.  I received a care package recently filled with candy, which is the sort of care package that makes my little heart flutter and other volunteers flock to my house with hopeful hangdog looks.  As a friend of mine said, on being offered a white chocolate Reese's, "I didn't even know these existed, America is awesome!"

Indeed.  And one of the things I am dreaming about in moving to a new site is a kitchen that is more like an American kitchen, because I cannot cook in a traditional way at all.  I do the spoiled volunteer thing of using an electric hotplate.  Which possibly explains why when I ran across this article, I choked on the inherent privilege of the author claiming she cooked in a low tech way.   She has colanders, which I've only ever seen in country in the really expensive places in Dar, likewise whisks, and I'm willing to bet she has a stove that she can just turn on and it will just work regardless of electricity problems and if it's gas she never has to figure out how to get the propane tank refilled, and it's a stove on which she can cook more than one thing at a time.  That steel knife she lovingly talks about is probably stainless steel and neither rusts nor loses an edge quickly.   Her pots and skillets are probably not battered, thin aluminum and quite possibly non-stick and easy to clean.  Now if she was cooking over charcoal, and not the nice treated American charcoal that lights easily, and had one dull knife, no cutting boards, or counters for that matter, and was just having to sit on a stool outside with the charcoal stove, old aluminum pots and using whatever thin piece of cloth is available as a hot pad, and she has to do this every single day because she doesn't have a refrigerator to store food, she would probably not be quite so fast to dismiss modern cooking technology.  Actually, she probably wouldn't be so fast to dismiss it if she was even making her noodles herself; I've heard that's kind of hard.

I like cooking, I really do.  I also like having the option of not cooking, or of reducing my cooking time by storing foods in a refrigerator.  Having to cook every day, even in a modern kitchen (old-fashioned does not mean "lack of $600 gadgets," our author's kitchen is modern) takes a lot of time and energy and is one of the many reasons that strict gender roles hurt women.  When cooking in the home is non-negotiable women's work, women then are forced to spend their time rather than being able to spend time socializing or going to school, or having hobbies, or staring at the internet, or whatever.  For those who are cooking because they have the leisure and inclination, that's great.  If they can make money off it, even better.  I read cooking blogs, and I sometimes watch cooking shows.  But let's not descend into snobbery where not taking the time to grind things with a mortar and pestle means abandoning the household god of cooking, whatever that means.   (Just to continue bragging about how much worse I have it than the author, I'm betting that her mortar and pestle doesn't have termites living in it.)

I am actually kind of excited by the modern cooking that our author so casually dismisses. Using cold as a way to fry things without grease?  That sounds like it could make the lives of fast food workers so much better, since standing over a fryer sounds disgusting and not that much fun.  Granted I am getting this impression from the season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy goes to work for minimum wage in a generic fast food burger place, and one of her coworkers tells her that he periodically has to have the balled up grease in his ears removed so he can even hear, and after she works there for a while vampires refuse to even try biting her because she smells bad.  Regardless of the not overly credible nature of my source, cooking with cold instead of heat sounds, just offhand, safer, both through reduced risk of grease fires and by not tempting people to keep reusing frying oil because oil is expensive.   The diarrhea I get from fried foods here is just disgusting.  The fact that cooking without heat is even an option (albeit for the very rich, who is she friends with that has this stuff? or for evil corporations offering food-like substances for low prices, which is where I could really see this technology being used), is awesome.

Finally, the digital age does offer us a lot with cooking, it offers us knowledge!  When cooking is something passed down from mother to daughter only, there aren't going to be many innovations in food.  For example, something that is not part of the cultural knowledge in Tanzanian cooking is preprocessing beans, by which I mean letting them soak for a while rather than trying to just cook them.  Just doing that makes cooking beans so much quicker, but how does one know that if it isn't part of the transmitted cultural knowledge?  Likewise, I've discussed my love of cheese with a Tanzanian lady, who told me that it isn't that people don't like cheese, they just don't know what to do with it, because no one ever cooks with it, so how are they supposed to learn?  In the US I tried a lot of new recipes, some of which I got from books, but most of which I found on the internet. While here, I can figure out how to do things like make wine in buckets and roast my own coffee because I have the internet. That in itself is a huge privilege not to be underestimated.  With food preparation, as with so many other things, the digital age gives us access to more information than some people see in their entire lifetimes, and that can't and shouldn't be casually dismissed for the sake of a kitchen that smells exactly the same as one's progenitor's.