Just saw a cartoon that featured a can labelled “Dehydrated Water. Empty contents into a gallon of water and stir.”
We’ve come a long way in attitude from when the first processed foods hit the shelves.
Cake mixes originally listed water as the only needed ingredient but back in the fifties housewives were suspicious.
It just didn’t feel right to only add one ingredient...and for it to be water no less! The company reissued the mix, this time asking the consumer to add an egg as well.
The mixes sold like hotcakes. And soon there were mixes for hot cakes as well.
And biscuits and muffins and, well, you know the rest of the story.
Along the way we lost confidence in making things from scratch.
Never mind most of these things only require flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs and milk and you’re already adding the eggs and milk anyway.
And then there are hash browns.
If you’re ever bored you should read the ingredients on a package of those babies.
Or you can read them right now. Here goes: Potatoes, Partially Hydrogenated Canola And/Or Soybean Oil, Beef Oil, Dextrose, Sodium Acid Phosphate, May Contain Modified Potato Starch, Modified Cornstarch, Wheat Flour, Rice Flour, Tapioca And/Or Potato Dextrin, Sunflower Oil, Corn Flour, Cornstarch, Salt, Baking Powder, Glucose Solids, Autolyzed Yeast, Corn Syrup Solids, Natural Flavouring, Xanthan Gum, Modified Cellulose, Guar Gum, Colour, Thiamine Hydrochloride, Triglycerides, Smoke Flavour.
Phew!
Quite the mix of ingredients considering the homemade version consists of the following: Potatoes.
Of course if you want to go all culinary you could toss in some olive oil or butter and perhaps a sprinkle of salt or some herbs, but still.
I wonder if in those so-called simpler times housewives enjoyed preparing food.
Or was it more like the story Helen Nearing tells in her quirky cookbook titled Simple Food for the Good Life about a farm woman who spent her days preparing food for half a dozen farmhands until she went ‘quietly crazy’.
As she was being led to the wagon that would take her to the psychiatric ward she kept repeating, “And they ate it all in twenty minutes. They ate it all in twenty minutes.”
In her cookbook Helen recommends keeping things simple both for physical and mental health.
Instead of spending an hour making an apple pie, set out a bowl of apples.
Instead of boiling, mashing and dicing, toss whole potatoes in the oven to bake.
Today, a walk through the produce section reveals even the basics are being prepared for us.
Peeled baby carrots, foil wrapped potatoes and soon pre-cut apples.
Called Arctic Apples they have been genetically modified to prevent browning when exposed to air.
This means they can now be sold to consumers already sliced. Anyone who has worked themselves into a state of exhaustion cutting up their apple can now breathe a sigh of relief.
As for putting ourselves—or God forbid our children—through the horrors of exercising jaw muscles by eating the fruit whole (not to mention the stress of figuring out what to do with the leftover core) well, forget about it.
All we’ll have to contend with is what to do with more plastic packaging.
The trees are already being grown and marketed in the U.S. and Arctic Apples plans to do the same in Canada, pending CFIA regulatory decision of course.
But once they complete the government review processes our orchards will be filled with non-browning apples and our grocery stores filled with pre-sliced apples.
When did cutting up our own vegetables and fruit become so much work we needed to outsource it?
If you’re feeling judged or thinking I have never bought a bag of precut carrots in my organic life, you’re mistaken. Baby carrots were a staple in the crisper during my children’s school years.
I well remember being so tired I envied The Jetsons and their pill popping meal plan (for those who might not know, The Jetsons were a futuristic television cartoon family whose meals came in the form of pills served by robots).
If I couldn’t have the full meal pills, a robot in some factory slicing and washing my carrots for me sufficed.
The only reason that changed was because I started growing enough carrots to store over winter and they taste SO good they can’t be replaced, no matter how convenient the alternative.
But I still wouldn’t mind if a robot peeled them for me.
And that’s just sad.
Shannon McKinnon is a syndicated columnist from Northern BC. You can catch up on past columns by visiting www.shannonmckinnon.com