Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food Read Free Page B

admit, even when confronted with hard data. See the interview with Brian Wansink on the next page for a story about his graduate students and Chex Mix to get a sense of just how far this denial goes!

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    Brian Wansink on Cooking Styles
    PHOTO USED BY PERMISSION OF BRIAN WANSINK
    Brian Wansink is a professor at Cornell University, where he studies the way we interact with food. His book, Mindless Eating (Bantam), examines how we make our choices about how much and what kinds of foods we eat.
    Tell me a bit about the styles of cooking that you have found.
    We find that the nutritional gatekeeper, what we call the person who purchases and prepares the food in their home, controls about 72% of all the food their family eats. They do it either positively or negatively: positively if they serve fruit bowls, negatively if they serve candy dishes.
    We did a study of 1,004 North Americans. These were good cooks , people considered by themselves and by at least one of their family members to be a far above average cook. We asked probably about 120 questions of all different aspects. We found that about 80% to 85% could be categorized in one of five different ways.
    The giving cooks are the people who see the food they make as giving love. They tend to be great bakers, very traditional in the recipes they make. There’s not a lot of changing or tweaking of the recipes. They’re the ones who all the families go to on Thanksgiving or Christmas.
    The second one of these good cooks is the healthy cook . This shouldn’t be that surprising, but these are the people who will sacrifice taste to make something healthy. They eat lots of fish and tend to be most likely an exerciser of all these groups. They’re more likely than the others to have a garden as well.
    The third group is the methodical cook . The methodical cook can pretty much make anything, but she or he has to have that cookbook right in front of them the entire time. After they finish making something, it’s going to look exactly like it looks in the cookbook. Their kitchen is going to look pretty much like Iwo Jima. They have some of the skills, but they don’t have the familiarity, the “second nature” of cooking that would make them facile in the kitchen.
    The fourth group is an innovative cook . They cook by second nature. They seldom use cookbooks and if they do they just look at the picture and say, “Yeah, I can do that!” These people are pretty creative in a lot of other areas of their life, too. Cooking for them is almost like painting might be for an artist or messing around with music might be for a musician. It’s not just a hobby; it’s sort of an expressive release. Innovative cooks are interesting, because very little of their ego is involved in the food they make. If something goes wrong, they’re not going to be shattered and cry in the corner for the rest of the day. They’re just going to be like, “Eh, tried it and it didn’t work, no big deal.”
    The fifth group of good cooks are also very fun. These are competitive cooks . They cook to impress other people. You can kind of consider them to be the Iron Chefs of the neighborhood.They’ll try new things. They’ll try weird things, but not because they like new weird things; they want you to leave that night going, “That guy is incredible! Man, that was great!”
    If you have two people who are in a relationship, I have to imagine there are combinations of style that lead to some amount of conflict, like a giving cook baking for someone trying to get fit. Do you have any advice for couples or families where the nutritional gatekeeper is doing something that’s antagonistic without knowing it?
    In most people’s lives, about five meals per week can cause conflict. First, breakfasts are eaten at staggered times and since they’re kind of low-prep things, the person can do whatever they want to or skip it. Lunches are often eaten offsite and you can pack your own. The action is usually