6 ms·

I frequently read this kind of articles on the web, and every time I'm amazed by it. Preparing food yourself is the rule in my corner of the world (the Netherla

I frequently read this kind of articles on the web, and every time I'm amazed by it. Preparing food yourself is the rule in my corner of the world (the Netherlands) - going out for dinner an exception. And up until a few years ago you'd be hard pressed to find a public place that actually served breakfast. Of course, not every Dutchmen is a great cook (to say the least ;-) but I think you'd have a hard time to find a Dutch adult who doesn't have the means or is not able to prepare (much) more elaborate meals than discussed in this article. And probably this holds true for most of Europe as well. Maybe even for the rest of the world except the US? Having said that though, I feel that the situation is slowly changing in recent years - primarily for the wealthier part of the population, but still. Kind of makes me sad if I see products in the supermarket which are 'ready made' and 4 times as expensive as the individual ingredients, while knowing that making the same dish from scratch would hardly take longer than preparing the 'ready made' variant and be healthier and cheaper to boot.

dhughes 16y ago
> Maybe even for the rest of the world except the US? No, Canada is pretty bad too. I don't know anyone under the age of 30 who cooks, all they do is eat out every single day for every meal. If they do cook at home it's a frozen pizza or a packaged pasta such as Kraft Dinner. You're right it's very expensive, I don't know where they get the money. That $10 burger and fries could buy enough food for a few days such as rice, potatoes, pasta.
- ramchip 16y ago
  I wouldn't generalize so fast. I live in a student dorm in Quebec where everyone is under 30, and everybody I know cooks themselves. At least basic stuff like toasts or pasta. It's not really practical to eat out every meal in the first place, given the walking distance to the nearest restaurant. Every young adult (~20 years) in my family cooks and owns a set of pots and pans. YMMV.
jerf 16y ago
"Having said that though, I feel that the situation is slowly changing in recent years" You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth. (Put aside the question of how well for a moment, please.) For instance, it turns out that the US did not have uniquely bad dietary habits around flour and sugar, it's just that the US was the first to discover people really like to eat that crap and could afford the infrastructure to deploy it; now the bad diets and the consequences are spreading like wildfire as the requisite level of wealth is spreading. (dhughes says Canada is there too, certainly they have that level of wealth too.) Correspondingly, it is hard to know whether the rest of the world cooks their own meals and don't eat out much because of some sort of intrinsic betterness or culture, or because they simply can't afford it yet. Once people can afford it in more places they may be more inclined to eat out. And if they do, they'll start losing the ability to cook overall. Culture may induce some lag but there's no particularly compelling reason to think that more countries won't follow along.
- demallien 16y ago
  You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth. Not so much, see here: http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/mint-map-global-wealth-distribution/ http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/mint-map-global-wealth-distr... Most of the "western" countries are ahead of the US for distributing wealth amongst the population.
  - jerf 16y ago
    Yeah, that's the wrong stat to use. The US has had a healthy middle industrial-age middle class for longer than anyone else, and even if it is ailing today (which is debatable and subject to rapid change with notice in either direction), my points still stand. It also has a higher average income level than most if not all, along with a higher median and a generally larger "social wealth", even if, again, we may be letting some of that slip. A well-distributed wealth of $15K a year will not show you how that country will necessarily behave when it has a spotty-but-$42K-average wealth. I suggested strongly that the point not be missed, I guess I should have just cut straight to spelling it out even if it would have broken the flow. You point is not relevant to my point at all.
julius_geezer 16y ago
My sample of the US is not large, say between 50 and 100 households in a country of 300 million persons. It tends to be skewed towards the more educated middle to upper middle class. (That is, towards more or less the NY Times demographic.) But the great majority of those households have at least one adult who cooks decently. The person I can think of who goes through the most carry-out lives the sort of frazzled suburban life where the kids have lessons, practices, etc. at frequent intervals, requiring a lot of driving. And somebody seems to be cooking in the poorer neighborhood a short walk away. The grocery stores have fresh vegetables, meat, 10-pound bags of rice, and so on, along with the canned stuff. I wonder whether the article isn't aimed at readers in their 20s, on their own for a little while, but not really accustomed to a settled life. (After looking at dhughes's post: my sample is also skewed toward the baby boomers. Caveat lector.)
Create 16y ago
In the U.S.A. entire generations have given up on cooking (mainly for apparent comfort), and therefore have forgotten about it. Literally. Even worse, they are therefore incapable of passing on this cultural "rule" either. These kinds of articles are weak window-dressing attempts. Processed food lobby is far more powerful[1,2] (though I suspect Dutch know about industrialized food), so the NYT article is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html And the tragedy is, that Jamie Oliver has failed to bring in change in schools in in the U.K., so he went off for a larger market (U.S.A.). It is a niche area. [1] http://www.foodincmovie.com/ http://www.foodincmovie.com/ [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/panorama/2010/12/supermarkets_what_price_cheap.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/panorama/2010/12/supermarkets_wha...
- jemfinch 16y ago
  > In the U.S.A. entire generations have given up on cooking (mainly for apparent comfort), and therefore have forgotten about it. Literally. Even worse, they are therefore incapable of passing on this cultural "rule" either. This is exactly it. The marketing power behind processed foods has kept generations of Americans from realizing that they're even able to do things that every household did itself when our great-grandparents were alive. In our home, I bake our sandwich bread. Even my grandmother marvels that I do so, but with a KitchenAid it takes me hardly any time, costs practically nothing ($0.44/loaf) and produces far better bread than any I've found in a store. When my kids begin to need lunchmeat, I'll roast our own turkey and beef: it'll be cheaper, it'll taste better, it won't have preservatives, and my kids will learn from me what I never learned from my own family: that we can feed ourselves.
- tptacek 16y ago
  You know, this sounds truthy, but as much packaged food as the supermarket does sell, just by store volume, it seems like most people are still cooking. The meat section at my local Safeway-affiliate is, for instance, larger than the frozen meal section.
araneae 16y ago
I guess it's partially ignorance. For years I was making "instant" pudding, which was a packet combined with milk. It turns out that you can make homemade chocolate pudding with only one extra ingredient; cocoa powder, cornstarch, and milk. (A pinch of salt usually improves it, though.) I still buy rice pudding, though. I've tried making it and it always turns out awfully.
- oiuytyuioiuy 16y ago
  Stovetop rice pudding is easier than a can. One cup arborio rice 3 cups milk (or one cup cream/half-half and 2 milk) Teaspoon of vanilla if you like Put in non-stick pan Bring to boil Turn down to lowest setting for 25mins When it's done (depends how sticky you like it) Stir in a spoon of sugar and a spoon of butter if you're feeling decadent - or jam or maple syrup or whatever
- jules 16y ago
  Ah, that reminds me that nowadays "homemade fries" are frozen fries put into your own fryer ;) > I still buy rice pudding, though. I've tried making it and it always turns out awfully. Here's grandma's recipe how to make rice pudding. Ingredients: 1 liter of milk, 1 or 2 eggs, about half a cup of dessert rice, half to a whole cup of sugar, cinnamon, salt. Bring the milk to a boil. Put in rice and sugar and a pinch of salt and cook with a lid for about 20 minutes (or whatever the package says). Make sure it doesn't char. In the meantime split the egg yolks from the egg white. Add some sugar to the egg white and whip until creamy with a fork or with a mixer. Add some sugar to the egg yolks and stir until white and creamy. When the rice is ready put out the stove, and add some of the milk to the egg yolks and stir. Then slowly add the egg yolks to the pan while stirring. You need to stir really well otherwise you get bits of solidified egg yolk in your pudding. Next add the egg white and stir. Put in a bowl, cover it with cinnamon and then sugar. Let it cool down for a couple of hours. My grandma used to say it tastes as if an angel is peeing on your tongue. I can guarantee that it tastes so much better than rice pudding from the supermarket. Many dishes have a kernel, the essential thing that makes that dish that dish. For puddings it's stirred egg yolk and whipped egg white. Next time you make instant pudding use a little bit less of the instant pudding powder, and add egg yolk stirred with sugar and egg white whipped with sugar in the same way as for the rice pudding. This will improve the flavor and change the texture from a gelatiny pudding to something more like a real custard. Like chocolate pudding, caramel pudding is just a small variation. Put sugar and a little bit of water in a pan, and heat until brown (not black!). Then add milk or water and dissolve the caramel, and add this to the pudding. Nice with whipped cream.
bambax 16y ago
Yes, absolutely. I live in France, I'm 40, and I don't think I've ever met anyone since I was born, who doesn't know how to do basic cooking. Over here people invite their friends for dinner all the time, and it would be beyond unacceptable to serve anything not prepared by the host/hostess. Reading the great Tony Bourdain I learned that what happened in the US happened after WWII; before that time the US was a pretty "normal" country, food-wise.
- jvdongen 16y ago
  Interesting data point - discussing this over dinner made us arrive at France as the only suspected exception in Europe, but apparently it's not. Did Tony indicate what initiated the change?
  - bambax 16y ago
    Exception in which way? The Germans seem to do a lot of cooking too, from what I know, as well as Spaniards or Italians.
    - jvdongen 16y ago
      Exception in the way that we suspected that if there would be a european country where eating outdoors would be more common than a home cooked meal, it would be France. But that was mostly based on observations during business trips to France - which most likely skewed our arguments quite a bit.
oiuytyuioiuy 16y ago
Although to be fair the Dutch diet is not exactly the most extravagantly adventurous in europe - you pretty much only need to be able to cook 3 things
ry0ohki 16y ago
Given the prices I see for eating out in Europe (I remember a chain pizza place in London was like 20 pounds for a single pizza), it's probably more out of necessity, we also have lost most of the cultural trappings of a slow meal. In America there are tons of places offering instant meals for a dollar. Fine cuisine and the time honored art of dining (as they experience in France on every meal) is lost. Food is fuel, and you can get a salty, satisfying meal for only a few bucks here which leaves more time to go watch TV, play WoW etc...
hysterix 16y ago
I just got back from Holland about a month ago and this is something I very much disliked about your country. There pretty much is no such thing as breakfast. Breakfast in America is something of a tradition to eat a large one. I walked around many mornings looking for something to eat, and the best I could find most of the time was a sandwich.

dhughes 16y ago

> Maybe even for the rest of the world except the US? No, Canada is pretty bad too. I don't know anyone under the age of 30 who cooks, all they do is eat out every single day for every meal. If they do cook at home it's a frozen pizza or a packaged pasta such as Kraft Dinner. You're right it's very expensive, I don't know where they get the money. That $10 burger and fries could buy enough food for a few days such as rice, potatoes, pasta.

ramchip 16y ago
I wouldn't generalize so fast. I live in a student dorm in Quebec where everyone is under 30, and everybody I know cooks themselves. At least basic stuff like toasts or pasta. It's not really practical to eat out every meal in the first place, given the walking distance to the nearest restaurant. Every young adult (~20 years) in my family cooks and owns a set of pots and pans. YMMV.

jerf 16y ago

"Having said that though, I feel that the situation is slowly changing in recent years" You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth. (Put aside the question of how well for a moment, please.) For instance, it turns out that the US did not have uniquely bad dietary habits around flour and sugar, it's just that the US was the first to discover people really like to eat that crap and could afford the infrastructure to deploy it; now the bad diets and the consequences are spreading like wildfire as the requisite level of wealth is spreading. (dhughes says Canada is there too, certainly they have that level of wealth too.) Correspondingly, it is hard to know whether the rest of the world cooks their own meals and don't eat out much because of some sort of intrinsic betterness or culture, or because they simply can't afford it yet. Once people can afford it in more places they may be more inclined to eat out. And if they do, they'll start losing the ability to cook overall. Culture may induce some lag but there's no particularly compelling reason to think that more countries won't follow along.

demallien 16y ago
You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth. Not so much, see here: http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/mint-map-global-wealth-distribution/ http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/mint-map-global-wealth-distr... Most of the "western" countries are ahead of the US for distributing wealth amongst the population.
- jerf 16y ago
  Yeah, that's the wrong stat to use. The US has had a healthy middle industrial-age middle class for longer than anyone else, and even if it is ailing today (which is debatable and subject to rapid change with notice in either direction), my points still stand. It also has a higher average income level than most if not all, along with a higher median and a generally larger "social wealth", even if, again, we may be letting some of that slip. A well-distributed wealth of $15K a year will not show you how that country will necessarily behave when it has a spotty-but-$42K-average wealth. I suggested strongly that the point not be missed, I guess I should have just cut straight to spelling it out even if it would have broken the flow. You point is not relevant to my point at all.

julius_geezer 16y ago

My sample of the US is not large, say between 50 and 100 households in a country of 300 million persons. It tends to be skewed towards the more educated middle to upper middle class. (That is, towards more or less the NY Times demographic.) But the great majority of those households have at least one adult who cooks decently. The person I can think of who goes through the most carry-out lives the sort of frazzled suburban life where the kids have lessons, practices, etc. at frequent intervals, requiring a lot of driving. And somebody seems to be cooking in the poorer neighborhood a short walk away. The grocery stores have fresh vegetables, meat, 10-pound bags of rice, and so on, along with the canned stuff. I wonder whether the article isn't aimed at readers in their 20s, on their own for a little while, but not really accustomed to a settled life. (After looking at dhughes's post: my sample is also skewed toward the baby boomers. Caveat lector.)

Create 16y ago

In the U.S.A. entire generations have given up on cooking (mainly for apparent comfort), and therefore have forgotten about it. Literally. Even worse, they are therefore incapable of passing on this cultural "rule" either. These kinds of articles are weak window-dressing attempts. Processed food lobby is far more powerful[1,2] (though I suspect Dutch know about industrialized food), so the NYT article is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html And the tragedy is, that Jamie Oliver has failed to bring in change in schools in in the U.K., so he went off for a larger market (U.S.A.). It is a niche area. [1] http://www.foodincmovie.com/ http://www.foodincmovie.com/ [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/panorama/2010/12/supermarkets_what_price_cheap.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/panorama/2010/12/supermarkets_wha...

jemfinch 16y ago
> In the U.S.A. entire generations have given up on cooking (mainly for apparent comfort), and therefore have forgotten about it. Literally. Even worse, they are therefore incapable of passing on this cultural "rule" either. This is exactly it. The marketing power behind processed foods has kept generations of Americans from realizing that they're even able to do things that every household did itself when our great-grandparents were alive. In our home, I bake our sandwich bread. Even my grandmother marvels that I do so, but with a KitchenAid it takes me hardly any time, costs practically nothing ($0.44/loaf) and produces far better bread than any I've found in a store. When my kids begin to need lunchmeat, I'll roast our own turkey and beef: it'll be cheaper, it'll taste better, it won't have preservatives, and my kids will learn from me what I never learned from my own family: that we can feed ourselves.
tptacek 16y ago
You know, this sounds truthy, but as much packaged food as the supermarket does sell, just by store volume, it seems like most people are still cooking. The meat section at my local Safeway-affiliate is, for instance, larger than the frozen meal section.

araneae 16y ago

I guess it's partially ignorance. For years I was making "instant" pudding, which was a packet combined with milk. It turns out that you can make homemade chocolate pudding with only one extra ingredient; cocoa powder, cornstarch, and milk. (A pinch of salt usually improves it, though.) I still buy rice pudding, though. I've tried making it and it always turns out awfully.

oiuytyuioiuy 16y ago
Stovetop rice pudding is easier than a can. One cup arborio rice 3 cups milk (or one cup cream/half-half and 2 milk) Teaspoon of vanilla if you like Put in non-stick pan Bring to boil Turn down to lowest setting for 25mins When it's done (depends how sticky you like it) Stir in a spoon of sugar and a spoon of butter if you're feeling decadent - or jam or maple syrup or whatever
jules 16y ago
Ah, that reminds me that nowadays "homemade fries" are frozen fries put into your own fryer ;) > I still buy rice pudding, though. I've tried making it and it always turns out awfully. Here's grandma's recipe how to make rice pudding. Ingredients: 1 liter of milk, 1 or 2 eggs, about half a cup of dessert rice, half to a whole cup of sugar, cinnamon, salt. Bring the milk to a boil. Put in rice and sugar and a pinch of salt and cook with a lid for about 20 minutes (or whatever the package says). Make sure it doesn't char. In the meantime split the egg yolks from the egg white. Add some sugar to the egg white and whip until creamy with a fork or with a mixer. Add some sugar to the egg yolks and stir until white and creamy. When the rice is ready put out the stove, and add some of the milk to the egg yolks and stir. Then slowly add the egg yolks to the pan while stirring. You need to stir really well otherwise you get bits of solidified egg yolk in your pudding. Next add the egg white and stir. Put in a bowl, cover it with cinnamon and then sugar. Let it cool down for a couple of hours. My grandma used to say it tastes as if an angel is peeing on your tongue. I can guarantee that it tastes so much better than rice pudding from the supermarket. Many dishes have a kernel, the essential thing that makes that dish that dish. For puddings it's stirred egg yolk and whipped egg white. Next time you make instant pudding use a little bit less of the instant pudding powder, and add egg yolk stirred with sugar and egg white whipped with sugar in the same way as for the rice pudding. This will improve the flavor and change the texture from a gelatiny pudding to something more like a real custard. Like chocolate pudding, caramel pudding is just a small variation. Put sugar and a little bit of water in a pan, and heat until brown (not black!). Then add milk or water and dissolve the caramel, and add this to the pudding. Nice with whipped cream.

bambax 16y ago

Yes, absolutely. I live in France, I'm 40, and I don't think I've ever met anyone since I was born, who doesn't know how to do basic cooking. Over here people invite their friends for dinner all the time, and it would be beyond unacceptable to serve anything not prepared by the host/hostess. Reading the great Tony Bourdain I learned that what happened in the US happened after WWII; before that time the US was a pretty "normal" country, food-wise.

jvdongen 16y ago
Interesting data point - discussing this over dinner made us arrive at France as the only suspected exception in Europe, but apparently it's not. Did Tony indicate what initiated the change?
- bambax 16y ago
  Exception in which way? The Germans seem to do a lot of cooking too, from what I know, as well as Spaniards or Italians.
  - jvdongen 16y ago
    Exception in the way that we suspected that if there would be a european country where eating outdoors would be more common than a home cooked meal, it would be France. But that was mostly based on observations during business trips to France - which most likely skewed our arguments quite a bit.

oiuytyuioiuy 16y ago

Although to be fair the Dutch diet is not exactly the most extravagantly adventurous in europe - you pretty much only need to be able to cook 3 things

ry0ohki 16y ago

Given the prices I see for eating out in Europe (I remember a chain pizza place in London was like 20 pounds for a single pizza), it's probably more out of necessity, we also have lost most of the cultural trappings of a slow meal. In America there are tons of places offering instant meals for a dollar. Fine cuisine and the time honored art of dining (as they experience in France on every meal) is lost. Food is fuel, and you can get a salty, satisfying meal for only a few bucks here which leaves more time to go watch TV, play WoW etc...

hysterix 16y ago

I just got back from Holland about a month ago and this is something I very much disliked about your country. There pretty much is no such thing as breakfast. Breakfast in America is something of a tradition to eat a large one. I walked around many mornings looking for something to eat, and the best I could find most of the time was a sandwich.