Absolutely spot-on.

Want to laugh.....My neighbor says to me while we are talking one day....I mentioned I had to get back in the house to tend to the oven. "she says you cook?" WTH?? Of course I cook, don't you was my reply? She says no I don't! This is a woman with 2 kids and a husband? Makes you wonder what they are eating....or NOT eating?

Total excuse. Even before LC I cooked and brought my lunch to work. I devote Sundays to cooking stuff for lunches, and I have a kick-a$$ thermos so I can bring hot meals with me. Then again I've had people say to me, "Well, you don't have kids so you have the time." My mother had four kids AND worked full-time and STILL cooked dinner every night ... until my siblings and I were old enough to pitch in, that is.

Well, nobody ever taught me to cook. My mom died when I was 9. My stepmothers felt that assigning me every household chore including the kitchen somehow counted. I moved out at 15 and was working full time (illegally of course, teen hours are supposed to be limited) to support myself before 17, and by the time I was an 'adult' I had two jobs (occasionally 3 with a weekend job) and no time.

I had learned to make some mexican food when I was 8, mom was dying of cancer and not real energetic so I'd take food stamps and shop and make her a morning burrito, guacamole or whatever to go with it, but that's all I knew when I hit adulthood.

I didn't start cooking until I started lowcarbing, which is about age 40.

I know at least a dozen women who basically cook maybe once a week, often something from a box, and the rest of the time what they eat is frozen or they go somewhere or it's just sandwiches.

Honestly I've sometimes wondered if we have half a generation of women who just don't know anything about cooking at all. When I got into gardening and started reading on canning and such, I began to realize just how much basic survival knowledge has been lost from most of our culture.

You don't need to learn to cook in today's society. Every place you go, if I pick up gas, I can also nuke a burrito or grab a hot dog or get a package of donuts or whatever... which is what I did for most of my life, which explains why by the time I came to low carb's door I weighed nearly 500#, I suppose.

The effort it takes me to do even minimal prep feels like a trial and tribulation. I recognize the sheer laziness here, and am constantly working to push myself.

I'm not necessarily that lazy about other things. But with food, I never once had to do ANYTHING for it. If I wanted it, it was there. It was instant. It was sweet and yummy. It had the overwhelming cleaning chore of 'throwing something away'.

Now, I go in to make a dinner for me and the kid, and I'm just stunned at how much TIME it takes me. Clean and chop the scallions then the mushrooms then the garlic then the bell pepper then saute them until ready then do the eggs or meat then mix stuff together and get the plates and when it's done then there's all these dishes to wash. Intellectually, I know this is laughable -- I have ONE child and don't do extensive cooking -- but subjectively, I feel like it's this incredible demand on my time and burden.

So I understand the "too much trouble" excuse. I don't usually make it -- I usually say 'not enough time' which is not excusing bad eating, merely excusing NOT eating usually -- and that's as pitiful an excuse as any other, since I know now that if I want to make time I will.

but I do think that maybe culturally we are more different than we realize. Maybe some people honestly never DO have to do chores, never learn to cook, etc. and it really IS a vastly more demanding 'change' and 'effort' for them, than for people who grew up doing chores and cooking and it's a totally normal part of life.

rightnow, I knew you were raised on a different planet than I was but I can not fathom people who can't cook. Not cooking isn't part of my world view and I don't emotionally understand how it can be daunting. Your explanation helped a bit but...wow.

Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE in my family cooks. The joke on my mom's side of the family is "there might not be enough food" (if the entire russian army stopped by unexpectedly). They cook tons and everyone one is good at some portion of it. Even my grandfather, who doesn't cook, per say, made his own lunches and regularly had charge of grilling meat over the fire.

My dad and his side all cook too.


Inconceivable!
But I think you're probably right.
Its so weird. Its like telling me a whole generation of people never learned to breath or something.

Some days I think we all feel this way....for me, when that "ugh I gotta make dinner hits" (and I do admit, it's not that often since I do like to cook and have since I was a kid) I try to think of the blessing it is to have good wholesome food to make my family, and that the time it's taking is an investment in our well-being....not always easy, but it also helps to think of it as an act of love - your time, effort and skill is making something nutritious for yourself and your child (and with us, hubby too) and you do it because you love them!

RightNow, I am so sorry that you lost your mom so very young. My heart goes out to you. I'll bet she's looking down right now and feeling very, very proud.

And not only that - but there are a lot of men who don't know how to cook either.

You were saying...



These would be my stepkids. The youngest is about to turn 23 in a couple of months, and he does not know how to cook at all, and refuses to have anything to do with anything that isn't microwaveable - unless someone else makes it. Will not do dishes either. It's that 'throwaway' idea - if it can't be microwaved in a disposable container, then it's $ for fast food.

I think you're onto something here PJ - talking about culture, and about having to make a major effort to 'work for food' as you once so eloquently put it.

Oh, I guess I never answered the question.

Well, for me it's weird. I always did cook, but I have always been BAD at it. And I love to do it! Go figure. I mean how is this possible? My mom was a working mom, but every time she so much as went near the kitchen I was right there, asking to help. The thing is that she probably cooked the same 3 or 4 meals over and over and over again. She used a lot of boxed sides. Maybe she just couldn't really cook either? I never thought of it that way at the time. I thought her meals were pretty good.

I swear I have been cooking for at least 35 years, in one way or another, but am still so horrible at it. I have often put together prepared meals just to spare my family. I do my little experiments and I see the looks on their faces, the frozen false smiles as they chew carefully so as to keep their tongues as far away as possible from the food. And they look at me and smile in frozen fear as my husband chokes, "Oh! It's...good, honey." Then he's mysteriously done after three bites but I hear him rustle-rustle-rustling into the Milky Ways in the freezer all night...

I now eat Atkins style but still often serve my family at least semi-prepared stuff, so that they don't wither away and die from lack of nutrients.

OMG! LOL!!! I just told my husband, "I think I might like to take a cooking class." And he asked, "Tomorrow?" in this really hopeful way. I rest my case!

My poor family.

Bats, you know that movie "Mermaids", with Cher and Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci?

The mother didn't cook at ALL. The only thing she ever did was make sandwiches and use cookie cutters to make cute shapes, and stick finger-foods on toothpicks. They ate sitting on counters and the table, when they ate together at all. That was normal for them.

This seemed perfectly normal to me, until the scene where the high school girl is serving this big cooked dinner at mom's boyfriend's house, and mom's eyes were huge, and then they're sitting there talking animatedly while serving themselves and the mom is like, WHAT IS GOING ON?!

I cracked up. That totally resonated with me.

this is kind of a side topic, but relates in a way to cooking and food. Until I was 13, dinner was a war zone in my house. A nightmare. A forced period of time to endure in the devout prayer that despite the odds against it, things might go well, and there would be nothing to be in trouble for, to end up on the floor backhanded for, etc. I never wanted to eat because dinner was just miserable and a feeling of dread.

So when I got older (dad married again, that was the 4th one), and nobody was interested in dinner most of the time, I considered that a GOOD thing. Every dinner I didn't have to eat or clean up from, was that much more safety from imminent doom.

I know a lot of people who've told me their dinner was warzones with dysfunctional families, and then by the time the kids weren't so young as to "actively need feeding" anymore, the woman of the family just up and quit doing anything at all, and if there was a dad, just worked out something for him and her.

I mean I always thought my family was really, really unusual and then I began studying family systems psychology and discovered we were totally predictable, embarrassingly so, and about a zillion other people had the same story, to the point that the "case studies" in my textbooks seemed like pages out of a secret diary someone must have found and published LOL!

Anyway so I'm just thinking that maybe part of the serious degradation in cooking (and cleaning, I might add, and other related things) skills in "some" families is actually just a side-effect of dysfunction in families. When your whole connotation with food is negative and fearful and you really just want to avoid eating at all (DAMN IT I did not mean to trip over that answer when I wasn't expecting it, in a public post! LOL!), when there is no "mom-daughter time" spent learning to cook and doing things together etc., I can see that total ignorance might be the result.

My daughter went to a friends house recently and said, "Her mom never cooks. NEVER. EVER. Everything they eat is something canned or frozen she heats up." Apparently she got this new state of mind to notice it because of hearing me talk to friends about trying to COOK and how much more work it was than nuking a soup or a pizza.

On the bright side she kinda wants to learn to cook so I'm gradually having her help.

Now if she'd only learn to clean decently.... :-)

PJ

I know, I know, I know...

I get up at 4:45 a.m. (Yes, there IS a 4:45 AM!!) to be at the gym around 5:00. Get back home, shower & get ready for work, walk the dogs, cook breakfast (real food), pack my lunch & snacks and head off to work in a medical clinic. Lunch is sometimes 20 min, sometimes 45...depends on patient flow but it's okay because I have all my tasty foods ready in the kitchen.

Did I mention that I have 4 kids still at home (ages 18 down to 7)? It's totally do-able.

Sometimes we eat out (again, totally do-able on low-carb). I do buy some "convenience" foods such as bagged ready-to-eat salad mix, deli meats for "sandwiches", the occasional rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, etc. But we also spend most weekends in an RV that's parked at a lake over 1 hour away from home and I manage there as well.

Now...ask me how many excuses I can come up with for not getting my house clean and I'll be able to make your head spin! Everything in life comes down to priorities...

That's hilarious!

Well it might be fun, though, ya think?

I wish there was something like a cooking class around here, I'd take it. Sounds great.

When I was in jr high school I had a cooking class. We learned to:

1. take biscuit dough out of the cheap little cans, pull a hole in it and drop it into a deep fryer. Then shake it in a bag of cinnamon-sugar. Yum. You can sho' nuff keep a man on that kind of dinner.

2. take hot dogs and grill them. take buns and toast them. Put them together. Now I can compete with 7-11!

3. pick weevils out of flour. Oh, that isn't a food? Well that's what we did one class. I swore I would never go near flour again.

You know, I think that is just about it. Oh, I remember!

4. make fantasy fudge, you know, where you dump in the marshmallow cream and chocolate chips and so on. Yummmmmm.

I suppose if I'd taken a class in high school it would have been more advanced. But I only had two electives, and choir and journalism were givens. Ah well.

I also failed spectacularly to sew myself a lovely gunny-sax designer dress around the same age.

I taught myself to crochet. Unfortunately my work looks like a 5 year old did it.

Maybe the whole feminine skills thing is just beyond me! :-)
.

Wow, what a crappy home ec class. I feel for ya.

I was lucky, my mom could have made Martha Stewart look like a piker. NO meals out of the house unless it was some holiday (which was usually camping and she cooked constantly).

It was expected I know how to prepare food, freeze, can, sew, decorate, entertain, volunteer, and work out of the house.

She was a war bride, and kept it front and centre how lucky we are to not have to line up for rations and paint stripes on our legs to pretend we had stockings.

Yes, we had our own 'victory garden' right through to the 80s.

I do have to think further than what pre-prepared meal can I get my hubby to toss in the oven so it's ready when I get home (I'm gone from 5 am to 7 pm every day).

I was tired before... now I'm not. The only difference is my woe.

I took Home Ec too (now called, what...Domestic Arts?), in the eighth grade. Boys and girls alike were required to take cooking, sewing, mechanical drawing and wood shop, one class per quarter.

I don't remember what we made for cooking class. I just remember it was only one food and we worked all quarter on it. Something bad happened every single week to keep us from our goal. One week something had leaked from the ISP (introductory physical science) room and we weren't allowed to start the burners in the cooking room. Another two weeks, our teacher was ill with something major and didn't attend the class, so we had a sub who probably had us make potato chip dip or something. Anyway, whatever it was that we were making, I remember it involved heating butter, and the teacher came over to me and screamed, "YOU'RE BURNING IT!" and I freaked out and shut off the burner, fast. She bellowed, "You ruined the whole dish!" It's okay. I did realize even at the time that she was a little imbalanced.

For sewing I made pillows of the letters of my nickname, M-E-L. That went okay. For mechanical drawing I silk screened a Snoopy on a T-shirt, and for wood shop I made a tiny cute replica of a Model A Ford. Unfortunately, people can't eat T-shirts or tiny wooden cars, so my family's future culinary misery was set in stone for them way back when I was in the eighth grade.

Edit: Oh, I should add that it's not like I'm proud of my lack of cooking skills or anything. And I'm definitely not spoiled, and never was. I'm just trying to be light-hearted about it. I have always maintained my home with cleaning, small repairs, etc. In fact, I was doing all these things even in my parents' home, as a youngster. We had our regular chores from the age of seven, including laundry, vacuuming, dusting, dishes and the garbage. I still do all that stuff. I did it while I was working full-time and a single mother for 11 years, I did it when I was working full-time but married, and I do it now, while I've been home trying to straighten out my son's issues (autism) by hooking him up with the proper therapies and classes.

Just didn't want you all to think I'm laughing gaily at my total lack of domestic skills...cooking is the only one I really fall down on. I do take my family's happiness seriously.