CONVENIENCE FOOD STAYS
I've had a huge revelation in the last two weeks: convenience is here to stay.
The biggest error I've ever made in predictions was 30 years ago when I routinely told media interviewers that local food and eventually Michelle's White House garden and the "know your farmer, know your food" movement were ushering in a new domestic culinary era. I predicted that within 30 years the local food and relational provenance themes would drive Americans into their kitchens in droves.
We'd be cooking from scratch, from locally sourced single ingredients, yadda, yadda, yadda. I couldn't have been more wrong. I was 180 degrees wrong. Instead, we have Hot Pockets, Lunchables, and 75 percent of food Americans eat is ultra-processed. Cooking from scratch has never been easier. We have ice cream makers, bread makers, timed bake, Instapots, crock pots, blenders, slicers, dicers and every techno-glitzy culinary contraption you can imagine. But we've never been this profoundly separated from participatory provenance.
Why? TikTok cultures and Instagram addicts don't have time for domestic culinary arts. We don't have patience to cook. Kitchens can't compete with gaming, gambling, and going. Our frenetic frenzied hurried harried pace embraces Aldus Huxley's Brave New World, where the number one fear is being alone. Everything is about efficiency and constant activity. That world is here.
Those of us in the local clean food movement have been preaching "get in your kitchen" for decades now and to no avail. Convenience food overtook the American food system like a tsunami. Here's my revelation: quit preaching that sermon.
Instead, let's embrace convenience foods, but let's discuss how to have GOOD, NUTRITIOUS convenience foods. In other words, the convenience horse has already left the stable. We aren't going to catch it or pull it back. What we want to do is ride it to a good place and not off a cliff.
The MAHA movement has addressed and exposed the devastating results of a convenience food culture that laces all this processed food with 10,000 questionable additives from industrial sources. Full of antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides and devoid of nutrition, this debauched processed food system fills our hospitals with its results.
What we desperately need right now is to open the flood gates of GOOD convenience food. A chicken pot pie does not require monosodium glutamate (MSG) to be tasty. It simply requires good ingredients. So how do we flood the market with authentic convenience food?
My answer: A FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. If two people exercising freedom of choice as consenting adults want to engage in a voluntary food transaction, they should not have to solicit government permission. Period and amen. You and I should have agency over our microbiome.
Unshackling our enslaved food and farming sector from the plethora of industrially-scaled food regulations would enable thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurial farmers and their culinary craft sidekicks to bring choice to the table. Eaters don't have choice at WalMart--it's different labels on the same stuff from the same processing plant. Where's Aunt Alice's chicken pot pie? Uncle Harry's homemade summer sausage?
Historically normal food is illegal to sell in America. That's a fact. Our food system is enslaved by scale-prejudicial licenses that criminalize the sustenance that fed generations for millenia. I'm not an abolitionist asking to prohibit Monsanto and glyphosate and Tyson. I am demanding a functional Underground Railroad to enable people who want to escape the shackles of the industrial system to be able to do so.
We must yield to the convenience food culture. But in doing so, we must launch a new option: GOOD convenience food. That won't come from Nestle's or Kelloggs and their repurposed tobacco company laboratory cohorts. It'll come from thousands of neighbor-minded producers and kitchen crafters who care more about their community than New York's bankers.
Are you in?