Gaia Permaculture

Michael Pollan writes a lengthy NYT magazine article on more and more Americans are watching cooking shows on TV while less and less are actually cooking ... In a fabulous expose of cooking shows, cast in the light of the release of the movie Julie & Julia and the evolution of the meaning of the word 'cooking' since the 1940s, Pollan points out some rather shocking statistics: 

• the food network is now in over 100 million American homes;
• that Americans work more than any other industrialized nation (adding 167 hours since '67 and that figure gos up to 400 more hours when you take into account time spent at work each year and households where both parents work)
• "the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating."

Read this fabulous article ... here is a wonderful excerpt about Julia Child:

“You know what I love about cooking?” Julie tells us in a voice-over as we watch her field yet another inconclusive call on her headset. “I love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I mean nothing — you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends — assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.

and

"Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself."