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• Monday, March 27, 2006 12:33 PM

  Mixed blessing

  I am the half of our household that cooks. I enjoy it, and it's something of an avocation for me, and my husband is definitely very appreciative. (He does all the laundry, vacuums, changes the litterboxes, and mows the lawn. I call it a fair deal.)

  So I'm kind of of two minds about these meal assembly centers. It's not that I'd ever begrudge another woman something that saved her time and energy. Not everyone likes to cook, or can cook well, and these places provide a way to prepare a foolproof, healthy meal. And even I don't prepare a five-course dinner every night. (Usually only on weekends, actually.) In my refrigerator I routinely keep lots of bags of veggies and meats that have been presliced and diced to save time, bags of prewashed salad, shredded cheeses, etc. And on weeknights I tend to do a lot of cooking a l'anglaise (which is French for: boil/steam vegetables until tender, then toss with butter and serve). I'm fine with shortcuts as long as quality and nutritional value are not compromised.

  But it kind of bothers me to think that maybe some useful but simple skills might disappear, like preparing and roasting a chicken with giblet gravy, or cooking beans from scratch (remembering to soak first and not add salt until the very end) or poaching fish (the very best way, in my opinion, to eat salmon or sole. But with mercury scares and threatened supplies, maybe this last is moot). And it's expensive. I could easily see a family's weekly food budget adding up to $100-200, but it sounds like using meal assembly centers would cost that much just for dinners.

  And, too, why is this targeted primarily at women? Where are the men? Why should women always be the ones responsible for cooking or procuring food? Why not teach one's spouse to prepare meals and expect his assistance two or three nights a week? Many guys already do this, and guess what? THEIR PENISES HAVEN'T SHRIVELED UP AND DISAPPEARED!

  And what about teenaged children? Yeah, yeah, extracurricular activities and getting into The Hot College of the Year and all that, but that's one of those valuable skills that children--female and male--need to learn, along with doing laundry without turning all your underwear pink. I'm sure they could even get an application essay out of it: "All I Need To Know About Life I Learned By Making Chicken Soup," or something like that.

  So if women want to do this to assuage their guilt about not being able to cook while holding down a necessary job and, hell, having the same kind of career that their husbands are expected to have, I'm not going to point any fingers. It sure beats fast food, pizza, and frozen burritos eaten standing at the counter because there's no one else around to sit down and have dinner. And in the end, the community a meal provides is just as important as the meal itself, and both are much more important than the meal's provenance.

  —Marianna Trench Read Marianna Trench's other letters
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