started falling for the overblown seductions of food efficiency.
Was it in the era of TV dinners? Of instant mashed potatoes? All I can tell you is that at some point we fell so hard for
the pitch that we lost our capacity to do common evaluative comparisons. Microwave popcorn. Hmmm. Three dollars and three
minutes. Regular popcorn. Hmmm. One dollar and three minutes. Of course, I would be an idiot if I wasn't a fan of laborsaving
devices. I support improvements on the butter churn. But there were inventions along the way, one suspects, between the butter
churn and organic butter-flavored spray-on Canola oil that could have ended the labor issue in a satisfactory way. Cut blocks
of butter on sale at the market would suffice, I would think, without plunging everyone's lives into perfidy and ruin.
Similarly, I don't want to keep egg-laying hens in my yard— how awkward— but still I have to say: Innovators, calm down. It
isn't that arduous to drop store-bought eggs in boiling water and then peel them. I'm not convinced by the new Burnbrae Farms'
offering of already boiled eggs, now available by the half-dozen in the dairy section of my local supermarket. The pitch is
elusive. No pot of water necessary! No peeling! Simply "rinse eggs before using."
Thanks, but no.
Tempting as it may be, I would have to be unconscious or hog-tied to benefit from that level of convenience in my kitchen.
On the other hand, in the name of journalism, I decided to see if I could, in fact, prepare an egg salad sandwich while lying
facedown on the floor. So I took those already boiled eggs home and mixed in mayo from my new squeeze bottle of Hellmann's—
no need for a knife! Just flip the cap open with your teeth, squeeze onto rinsed eggs, plant your face in the bowl, and stir
with your nose! Eat with your mouth!
Too lazy to cook with pots? Afraid of microwave flavor vapors? Try our new, precut roast chicken in a thermo-lined sack! Just
tie to your head and slurp!
There is a conflagration in the marketing, you have probably noticed, between the idea of efficiency and the myth of being
on the go. Marketers don't want to suggest that people are lazy, so instead they characterize us as cheerfully active. Too
busy and hurried to eat the old-fashioned way. Need feed bags now. No time for utensils. Gimme one of those yogurts in a tube.
This is how we arrive at oatmeal that is no longer merely instant but also portable, in the form of "Oatmeal to Go Breakfast
Bars," currently being advertised on TV by depicting someone jogging while eating a bowl of hot oatmeal. Like they can't get
up five minutes earlier to turn on the kettle? Or consider Kraft Foods' latest innovation, Easy Mac. Kraft long ago usurped
the world's simplest dinner, of boiled macaroni with cheese sauce. But wait! It turns out that maybe Kraft Dinner was too
time-consuming. So the kitchen geniuses at Kraft slaved away, sensitive to the harried lives of working mothers and tube-fed
teenagers, and came up with EasyMac. Save minutes! Just stick the ingredients together in the microwave!
Not that they are abandoning their original KD. Far from it, there is a new ad campaign for that, too, where teens toss KD
into a blender and then slurp the liquefied results from a tube.
To Market, to Market, 'Cause I'm a Fat Pig
A few years ago, pundits like me were warning of the logical extremes to which health fanaticism would lead. "What's next?"
we demanded. "Lawsuits against the purveyors of fattening foods?"
We were merely being rhetorical. We certainly didn't hope to be prescient. So it was with some alarm that I reported the launching
of a class-action lawsuit in New York in 2002 by a gaggle of plump people with heart disease, against a group of fast-food
franchises that stood accused of giving them heart disease by making them plump.
Burger King, Wendy's, KFC, and McDonald's were being sued for failing to inform people that their burgers,
Was it in the era of TV dinners? Of instant mashed potatoes? All I can tell you is that at some point we fell so hard for
the pitch that we lost our capacity to do common evaluative comparisons. Microwave popcorn. Hmmm. Three dollars and three
minutes. Regular popcorn. Hmmm. One dollar and three minutes. Of course, I would be an idiot if I wasn't a fan of laborsaving
devices. I support improvements on the butter churn. But there were inventions along the way, one suspects, between the butter
churn and organic butter-flavored spray-on Canola oil that could have ended the labor issue in a satisfactory way. Cut blocks
of butter on sale at the market would suffice, I would think, without plunging everyone's lives into perfidy and ruin.
Similarly, I don't want to keep egg-laying hens in my yard— how awkward— but still I have to say: Innovators, calm down. It
isn't that arduous to drop store-bought eggs in boiling water and then peel them. I'm not convinced by the new Burnbrae Farms'
offering of already boiled eggs, now available by the half-dozen in the dairy section of my local supermarket. The pitch is
elusive. No pot of water necessary! No peeling! Simply "rinse eggs before using."
Thanks, but no.
Tempting as it may be, I would have to be unconscious or hog-tied to benefit from that level of convenience in my kitchen.
On the other hand, in the name of journalism, I decided to see if I could, in fact, prepare an egg salad sandwich while lying
facedown on the floor. So I took those already boiled eggs home and mixed in mayo from my new squeeze bottle of Hellmann's—
no need for a knife! Just flip the cap open with your teeth, squeeze onto rinsed eggs, plant your face in the bowl, and stir
with your nose! Eat with your mouth!
Too lazy to cook with pots? Afraid of microwave flavor vapors? Try our new, precut roast chicken in a thermo-lined sack! Just
tie to your head and slurp!
There is a conflagration in the marketing, you have probably noticed, between the idea of efficiency and the myth of being
on the go. Marketers don't want to suggest that people are lazy, so instead they characterize us as cheerfully active. Too
busy and hurried to eat the old-fashioned way. Need feed bags now. No time for utensils. Gimme one of those yogurts in a tube.
This is how we arrive at oatmeal that is no longer merely instant but also portable, in the form of "Oatmeal to Go Breakfast
Bars," currently being advertised on TV by depicting someone jogging while eating a bowl of hot oatmeal. Like they can't get
up five minutes earlier to turn on the kettle? Or consider Kraft Foods' latest innovation, Easy Mac. Kraft long ago usurped
the world's simplest dinner, of boiled macaroni with cheese sauce. But wait! It turns out that maybe Kraft Dinner was too
time-consuming. So the kitchen geniuses at Kraft slaved away, sensitive to the harried lives of working mothers and tube-fed
teenagers, and came up with EasyMac. Save minutes! Just stick the ingredients together in the microwave!
Not that they are abandoning their original KD. Far from it, there is a new ad campaign for that, too, where teens toss KD
into a blender and then slurp the liquefied results from a tube.
To Market, to Market, 'Cause I'm a Fat Pig
A few years ago, pundits like me were warning of the logical extremes to which health fanaticism would lead. "What's next?"
we demanded. "Lawsuits against the purveyors of fattening foods?"
We were merely being rhetorical. We certainly didn't hope to be prescient. So it was with some alarm that I reported the launching
of a class-action lawsuit in New York in 2002 by a gaggle of plump people with heart disease, against a group of fast-food
franchises that stood accused of giving them heart disease by making them plump.
Burger King, Wendy's, KFC, and McDonald's were being sued for failing to inform people that their burgers,
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