Home-cooked meals: engaging with Marcotte

Last updated on: March 1, 2015 at 10:19 pm by Jane the Actuary

Home-cooked meals: engaging with Marcotte 2015-03-01T22:19:59-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Look, I know I’m late to the party. Everybody’s been busy mocking Amanda Marcotte for her piece in Slate calling for everyone to abandon the ideal of home-cooked meals because it’s too hard on the women who usually end up being the cooks of those meals. Everyone correctly observes that (a) cooking isn’t that hard if you have a basic understanding and some key go-to recipes and prepare in advance and (b) it’s healthier and cheaper than fast food, even in the worst-case scenario of buying semi-prepared convenience foods from the grocery store.

But Marcotte doesn’t actually say, “everyone should go buy fast food instead of cooking at home.” And she doesn’t say, “food stamps should cover the cost of eating out every night so as to not burden poor women.”

In fact, she doesn’t actually say what she thinks should replace home-cooked meals at all!

But she’s not completely crazy.

(Let’s bracket the “poor families” issue.)

A while back, one of the employee benefits that regularly appeared in lists of “Work/Life Balance” benefits (back in the days when employers competed to recruit the best staff, rather than the approach, in 2014, of “your benefit is that you have a job, take it or leave it), was take-home meals. The idea is that a cafeteria wouldn’t just provide lunch meals, but would offer employees the opportunity to take an entree home to serve to the family after work. Maybe you had the salmon for lunch, but for dinner you bring home a family-size container of chicken parmesan, for instance. Presto! Just as you’ve outsourced your daytime childcare to KinderCare, and you have a lawn service and a housecleaning service, you can just as easily outside your meal production without needing to hire a personal chef, or getting McDonald’s every day.

But this never really took off. According to the executive summary of Working Mother’s 100 Best Companies in 2011 (I didn’t see a more recent version online), 43% of the “100 best” employers offer take-home meals, but only 3% of employers in general do so.

Why not?

I can imagine a number of reasons. Cost, of course — and the types of entrees that I imagine could be most cost-effectively produced family-style, casseroles and pasta dishes, like the traditional tuna noodle casserole that’s a staple of cafeterias everywhere, have fallen out of favor, with the cafeteria at my workplace, when I venture out of the house, having much more of an emphasis on freshly-prepared items, whether it’s a stir-fry, a choose-your-fixings wrap or sandwich, or cooked-to-order burgers, though there’s still some traditional “cafeteria food” on offer as well. The more a “take-home meal” concept starts to resemble in cost carryout from a full-service restaurant, the less appealing it is to people looking for an alternative to home-cooked meals.

Besides that, we’re fairly accepting of a one-size-fits-all child daycare center — or at least recognize that we can’t pick and choose the curriculum at a center, if our budget doesn’t permit a nanny — but even if “take-home meals” from our workplace cafeterias offered quality food at a reasonable price, I would expect there wouldn’t be many takers, since we generally want a choice of more than two or three entrees for our evening meals, and many of us have specific dietary restrictions or, at least, strong preferences (low-carb, low-fat, gluten-free, “I don’t like fish,” etc.).

In fact, Boston Market tried to market itself to families as the place to go for dinner as a family, as a replacement for a home-cooked meal. And, for us, in the early 2000s, when we had two small children, we patronized them fairly frequently. But they had to scale back their ambitious expansion plans, and the location we went to is now a cell phone store; plus, they’ve raised their prices considerably since then as well — in other words, there were not as many families looking for “home-cooked” meals as they hoped.

Besides which, of course, low-income families receive child care subsidies in order to be able to manage the costs — but not in a million years would we be willing to subsidize carry-out meals, or provide doubled or tripled food stamps.

So here’s my solution:

For a family where mom and dad work, and the kiddos are at a school or daycare with a hot lunch during the day, eat the home-cooked family meal at dinnertime. But do as the Germans do: “eat cold.” Germans will typically eat a warm, cooked meal at lunch, whether at home or at a cafeteria, and then, for dinner, get out the bread (hearty, dense German bread), butter, and cold cuts. It’s called “Brotzeit” — literally, “bread time,” and it simplifies the evening meal considerably.

(Of course, the reliance on bread and cold cuts would violate one of the other sacred tenets of the left, that all food must be fresh, freshly prepared, minimally-processed, organic, and pretty much as close to its raw state as possible, while at the same time richly varied from day to day. And, yes, if you raise your demands on home cooks, then this does become “tyrannical.”)

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