A plea for contemporary cooking

July 15th, 2013

With eating habits rapidly evolving from home cooking to out of home eating, it is tempting to look back to the old days, when carefully prepared family meals were still made of locally grown ingredients. This nostalgic trend was sparked by influential icons like Michael Pollan, who recently published his new book ‘Cooked, a natural history of transformation’. And admittedly, it is an appealing line of thinking to relate many contemporary problems to our lost connection with food and food production. Many of the changes in eating pattern and food production in the recent past  have not exactly been contributing to healthy diets. Low quality food is dominating, people have little notion of what they eat and overconsumption is easier than ever before. Treats that used to be reserved for special occasions now appear in kids lunchboxes on a daily basis. So clearly, putting together a healthy diet has become a real challenge, in different ways than before. 

But while trying to reestablish our connection with food may help in some way, the real societal challenge cannot be faced by lengthy nostalgic reflections and time-consuming recipes. More importantly, we should think about how to mix all the ingredients of modern society into a healthier recipe. While nostalgia is tempting, it is also time-consuming. And as time is a scarce commodity these days, let’s move on. 

For a start by making the healthy choice easier, but also by making the easy choice healthier. People shop in supermarkets, so can we help them to find the healthier products in the supermarket? Cooking magazines and TV-programmes are extremely popular, so let’s use this to teach people how to prepare healthy meals that suit modern lifestyles. People are eating out more often, so let’s educate and motivate chefs, caterers and school cafeteria to cook and serve healthier meals. In this context, a great example is the fact that Dutch, Argentinean and Singaporean logo organisations are applying nutrient profiling systems (such as the Choices criteria in case of the first two), to out-of-home catering. 

Lotje van de Poll

Scientific expert, Choices International Foundation