Food, Glorious Food

This Sunday morning, I picked up my copy of the Weekend FT and started to read Tim Bradshaw’s Tech World — Notes From A Digital Bunker piece about how food delivery apps could change the way we eat.

Bradshaw begins the piece, explaining how he and his wife ‘did something unthinkable’. Instead of watching a movie on Netflix, they physically went to a movie theater. He found the experience fulfilling, on many counts.

Bradshaw then writes, “What Netflix has done for movies, food-delivery apps are starting to do for our dining habits.”

Good on you Tim, I thought. Food delivery apps are terrible. They take away one of the basic pleasures of eating — preparing and cooking your own meal. I But here, Tim threw me a curve. He said in place of services like Deliveroo, Uber Eats and DoorDash, among others, “but though we gain in convenience when our dinner is handed to us from the back of a scooter, we lose in other ways”….he advocates going out for dinner.

No Tim!

Close, but no.

For ten years, I was married to a woman who not only refused to cook, but who also had little idea of what a kitchen was for. The large cabinets seemed ideal, to her, for the storage of her rather massive sweater and clothing collection, which had long ago outgrown our bedroom closets and shelves.

In the decade we were together, we never once prepared a single meal at home. No breakfast, no lunch and no dinner.

Living in Manhattan, I can assure you, were were not alone in this. Many, if not most people, don’t cook any longer. This is a tragedy.

“Why cook yourself when you have some of the best restaurants in the world within walking distance,” she used to say. I would add, parenthetically, that having breakfast every morning at Lou’s Coffee shop, just across the street, did not really qualify as world’s best, but that is another story.

My mother was a terrible cook, a product of the Campbell’s tinned soup and Swanson’s TV Dinner school of culinary delights, so I knew nothing.

When that marriage mercifully ended, I was, like many a Manhattan bachelor, living alone in a high rise in Midtown, still taking my meals out, or delivered. It made no difference.

Then, when Lisa, (my wife now) moved in with me, she suggested that she might cook a dinner for us at home.

This was revolutionary! And a bit unsettling. I mean, restaurants know what they are doing. They are professionals! When I need a dentist, we don’t do that at home, do we.

But after six months of living together, I relented.

“OK, let’s give it a go.”

Before we could start, Lisa had to make a quick trip to Bloomingdales to buy all the necessary gear for home cooking — pots, pans, spoons, plates, cups, forks, not to mention the food part, which Whole Foods just down the street seemed to supply.

When the meal was served, I was just blown away.

It was not just the food, which was extraordinary. (You can see her culinary skills here — TheLisaDiet.com — ), but it was, more than the eating, the process — the shopping, the selection of the raw materials, the tactile and physical act of preparing the meal, the utter satisfaction of eating something that you had actually prepared with your own hands.

That was more than a decade ago. Today we live in a small village in the English countryside. We often grow our own food. What we don’t grow, we get where we can from local farmers. We frequent farm shops. We prepare and cook together. We have a very direct connection with what we eat.

Human beings have been living like this, with a direct connection to their food for thousands of years. There is something basic, fundamental, organic in the most literal sense of having this kind of connection with the food that you eat. And it is something that has very much been lost.

For millennia, parents taught their children how to grow food, how to prepare it, how to integrate it into their day to day lives. This is all being fast lost.

And going out to a restaurant does not being to touch on the magical experience that food can be.

So sorry Tim. Go out not for dining but for shopping. Then come home and enjoy one of the great human experiences of life.