I had some extra time last week to skim through a few food blogs in search of inspiration and ideas for this week’s meals. Fortunately for me, I stumbled upon this one from Simply Recipes. This recipe gets high marks in all categories. It’s healthy, it tastes wonderful, it’s simple, the ingredients are things I generally have around anyway (although, I substituted tarragon for the parsley), and the amount of dishes used to prepare it are minimal.
While I would like to praise the fact that, from start to finish, this meal takes fewer than 30 minutes to prepare, I’m hesitant. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how the quick-to-make meal is an idea that I think is too readily consumed as intrinsically good. I’m certainly not the first to have these thoughts; there is an entire movement devoted to slowing down when in comes to food, after all. My concerns are on the forefront of my mind because I read that this week is, according to some groups, National Turn Off Your TV Week (or some other long title desperately in need of a clever acronym). The statistic being pushed is that people in this country watch, on average, 35 hours of TV a week. If you can do basic math, you know that’s 5 hours a day. Five hours a day!
I have always had a feeling that I watch more TV than a lot of my friends, so I am somewhat sympathetic to the glut of TV watching in people’s lives. I have a lot of friends who don’t even have TVs (and, I sense, experience a smidgen of self-righteous pleasure when they have the opportunity to let you in this fact). There was even a time when I one of them; now I have a fancy (but small!) TV. And cable. Oh, the self-loathing this graduate student of humanities should experience but does not! I have an almost embarrassing addiction to the Real Housewives of NYC and recently was able to overcome a short-lived fascination with the Kardashians. I’ve long stopped feeling guilty about my TV watching and no longer hide issues of Entertainment Weekly under year-old copies of the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly. A guilty pleasure TV is not; I consider it just a pleasure.
But 5 hours a day? Who has that kind of time?
Rather than go on about how horrible this statistic is, because that is a no-brainer, I would rather muse about how strange it is that in order to convince people to cook, the push from a certain food television network, many magazines, and household oriented blogs is for quick and easy meals. See, I understand the need for easy. My husband raves about one cook book we have because it so clearly spells out what to use (both in terms of ingredients and cookware), what to do and when. He’s not a natural cook, but the more and more he tries “easy” recipes, the more confidence he gains.
It’s the “quick” part of the equation that perplexes and even troubles me. I realize that I am in a position to be able to spend an entire day of the weekend devoted to making tamales. I don’t have kids, and while I have a part-time job and am in a demanding grad program, I still find it possible to avoid take-out and prepare healthy, delicious, and even slightly time-consuming dinners at home. I am also especially considerate of the fact that it is take-out, pre-packaged dinners at the grocery store, and quick-and-easy recipes that have allowed for women to more confidently enter the work place. With the social and often familial (extended or nuclear) pressure to single-handedly manage domestic affairs and her own career, it is completely understandable that getting a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the table is not where one wants to spend all of her “excess” time.
I know that people are busy, and I know that the majority of those who are busier than ever are women. The push for quick meals is then understandable, but like so many things in contemporary society, such recipes are only a band aid to what I perceive as a much larger problem: too often there is only one person in a household who carries the weight of all the domestic responsibilities, and too often it is a woman.
Which brings me to I suppose is the thesis of this blog post, and perhaps this entire blog (or at least the idea behind its name). I recall my mother’s voice every evening after supper chirping one of her favorite proverbs as we cleaned up the kitchen, “Many hands make light work.”
I could never get my arms around that TV statistic. How do people have the time to spend that many hours in a week watching TV? Maybe people watch TV while they cook? wake up to it? go to sleep to it? And this is an average? I do have one friend with a TV in her kitchen who watches it as she cooks and eats, so maybe that counts for the hours, sort of background noise.
As for quick recipes, I do think it is helpful to have several of those in one’s repertoire for the daily meals when one is too busy or too tired to spend a lot of time cooking. I’ve seen how my working women friends with kids truly have very little time for anything (including TV). They have to be ultra-organized to put out tasty, nutritious meals for their families day after day. I do wish I observed more couples sharing in this work, but the reality is most of it invariably falls to the woman.
Glad you liked the recipe!