Agriculture Forum: We must overcome our fear of cooking

We’ve lost touch with our food.

That’s no longer a novel idea — in fact tides are shifting in great ways — but there is still a lot of work to do.

Knowing where our food comes from and giving people access to good, healthy food are just two — albeit very, very important — pieces of a larger puzzle. What shouldn’t be overlooked, though, as we reshape our food system, is the necessity for celebrating food as a conduit to community and building comfort and excitement around cooking.

Gathering around a table like we did on Thursday is a great way to build connection around food. That’s why Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. At mealtimes it often happens innately that we come together. But that isn’t always the case. Once good, healthy food makes its way to the table, it’s important to also encourage personal connection in order to glean the food’s full meaning.

The feeling we get when we make or strengthen relationships with other people is powerful: It’s about support, understanding and love.

These relationships are so easily built around the table — and we can tie that powerful feeling to the good food we eat. Good food is valuable, but good connection is emotional and we are emotional beings. The term comfort food is often associated with something unhealthy (high levels of carbohydrates or calories) but instead consider this: Comfort food can be sharing food that nurtures us with people that do the same.

By that definition, our value for eating well and connecting with good people is heightened and hard to forget. I believe that by strengthening the idea of connecting around good food, we celebrate and add emotion to eating well, and this makes the behaviour more sustainable.

Eating well can be scary, But not because we’re afraid of nutrition. Instead, I think we’re afraid of cooking.

During the last 50 years we lost our connection to real food, and therefore most of us don’t know what to do with it. Cooking with whole foods can be intimidating, I remember clearly feeling this way myself not too long ago. That lost connection is why educating people in basic cooking skills and whole-food preparation is critical to whether or not they will embrace eating well in the long term.

We’ve seen this first hand, with a number of different local initiatives aimed at providing people with improved access to healthy, local foods.

At first the novelty of this fresh food, or the incentivized behavior, may catch on. But it doesn’t last unless education — and specifically culinary and nutrition education — follows. Preparing food by heat or fire (cooking) is an activity that is uniquely human. We need to help people reconnect to this, to help them feel comfortable and enjoy cooking, in order to sustain the behavior of eating good, healthy food.

So, what do we do next?

We celebrate good food culture. We consciously notice and engage in the emotional, personal connection that happens around food. And we reconnect with the basic but revolutionary human achievement of cooking. We do all of this to make sustainable local food system change happen, and frankly we do it because this is what makes good food so worth eating.

Tricia Phelps is the CEO of Taste the Local Difference, Michigan’s Local Food Marketing agency. TLD serves local farms and food businesses by connecting them to new market opportunities and building the consumer demand for local food statewide. Contact with her at tricia@localdifference.org.

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