7
More About The New Kitchen
Imagine a world where it’s no big deal to cook with healthful, safe, sustainably grown foods. Not only is everyday healthy meal making a natural and normal part of our lives, it is enriching, creative, fun and satisfying. So we all enjoy the wonderful health and energy that come from eating good food.
Creating that kind of world is what
The New Kitchen is all about.
Squandered Opportunity
The “New Kitchen” approach is a response to the kitchen’s diminished role in modern culture.
For many millennia, humans engaged in back breaking labor to grow and produce food and very often suffered from food scarcity and famine. Mercifully, twentieth century technology brought us a food supply marked by incredible bounty and convenience. Yet the opportunity to feed the population adequately and well has been largely squandered.
The food industry moved quickly beyond simple foods conveniently prepared to highly processed packaged foods. In so doing, the role of food as life-giving connection to the earth was severed.
Instead, foods were designed, manufactured and marketed as profit-producing consumer goods, not unlike laundry baskets, garden shovels and children’s toys. Added sugar, salt, transfats, colorings, additives and chemicals created unnatural appeal that led not only to increased sales but overeating, obesity and, eventually, the health crisis we find ourselves in today.
While this sad progression is becoming common knowledge, not nearly as well-known or acknowledged is the damaging effect prepared food has had on cooking and the kitchen. As convenience became king, cooking increasingly came to be viewed as tediously time-consuming, old-fashioned and unnecessary.
Eventually, many of us abandoned the kitchen mostly, if not entirely, and the time-honored activity of preparing a wholesome, life-sustaining meals was lost to a generation or more. This development has landed us in a difficult position:
While convenience eating over several decades has left
us in precarious health, we have lost the
ability to reclaim our health by preparing our own
meals from wholesome, real foods.
Hence the need for a new view of the kitchen and cooking, as the vital, critical source of our good health.
Time for Renewal
Now is the perfect time for a new view of the kitchen. The early 1900s saw a movement to ennoble cooking by transforming it into a scientific endeavor and enfolding it within the scientific discipline of home economics. Now, with the dawn of the 21st century, we are ready for a relaxation of this scientific bent in favor of greater creativity, comfort and nurture. And our health demands a migration away from scientific food formulations to real, whole foods.
A New Kitchen Culture
The New Kitchen seeks to help ignite this movement, by revitalizing our attitudes toward cooking, showing how it is compatible with 21st century lives, and reestablishing its absolute worthiness within our culture. As importantly, we share a new experience of the kitchen as the source of delicious, comforting food that nourishes the soul, families, friendships and community. Read more about The New Kitchen Culture that we advocate.
Frying Pan Salvation
Odd as it may sound, the humble frying pan may be our best tool for alleviating everything from chronic disease, childhood obesity and runaway health care costs to environmental degradation, unraveling communities and the loss of small farms.
That’s because three times a day, seven days a week, every man, woman and child eats a meal. Each of those instances presents an opportunity to contribute to our individual health and the health of our families, communities and planet, if we choose to cook meals from healthful, local, sustainably grown foods.
I hope your visit to this site will inspire you to see the kitchen in a new light. Not as just a treadmill that you jump on, stressed and overwhelmed, just long enough to throw together something to stave off hunger until the next meal, when you jump on the treadmill yet again.
Can you instead see the kitchen as a vital pathway to good health, a place where we can regain control of our food lives, eat in a way that serves our best health and supports the passions and contributions we have to offer
Can it also be a place where we make wonderfully satisfying meals that nurture and nourish, where we can even have a little fun, exercise a little creativity and gain a sense of deep connection to the very foundation of our entire lives. By way of the humble kitchen and a friendly frying pan.
