In many parts of the world today, but especially in the United States, the most pervasive foods in our eating environment are ones that don't necessarily support our health. One of the proposed solutions that addresses the problem in both the short and long term is a return to home cooking. What if we were to re-allocate a small amount of our time to cooking our food at home, using whole food ingredients, instead of relying so heavily on the food industry to provide us with our meals? This may be easier than it sounds, and cooking may also have some side benefits. >> What role do you think that a return to home cooking can play as we try to promote the health of our nation? >> You would think it's about the food and not the process by which it's made, but in fact the process by which the food is made has a lot to do with our health. And so we do have research that suggests that families who eat food cooked by humans are eating a better diet and are healthier as a result. But many other things follow from the process of cooking. I mean, when you cook at home you will use the best ingredients you can afford. You will keep it really simple. You don't need the food to last six months on a shelf, and the odds are, whatever you eat, it will be better than processed food. There's something about the act of cooking that enforces, without us even being conscious of it, a healthy, wholesome diet. I think it's very hard to get fat on home-cooked food. Now, the other reason though that cooking is important, is that if you cook, you will have a meal, you will sit down at a table, with other people, with family, you eat together. And that has a lot of implications for our health too. Eating alone, snacking, eating in front of the television, all these things lead to a very different kind of food consumption. >> Micheal, what advice do you have for people who say they don't know how to cook or they don't have time to cook? >> Yeah. You know I hear that a lot. People think it's the hardest thing you could ask them to do, to start cooking a little bit more. And they don't have the skills or they don't think they do. And they don't have the time. There's a lot of obstacles to cooking right now and different people have to deal with it in different ways. Some people really don't have a lot of time. And perhaps they're living alone, or perhaps both partners are working, they have a long commute. That's a legitimate challenge. My advice is two-fold. One is, involve everyone in the family in cooking. We do not bring our children into the kitchen. And that is an enormous disservice to them long-term. Take turns with your partner or share the work. A lot of the problem cooking is the work has all been dumped on one member of the family, usually the woman. And that's not fair and it's not realistic now that women are in the work force. So, sharing the work is one very important way to reduce the time burden. Another is, and I find this very useful, is give a couple hours on a Sunday to preparing food for the week. Freeze a couple things, or make a dish that is going to produce lots of leftovers. When I was researching one of my books, I was soliciting food rules. I got a letter from a doctor, a transplant cardiologist. And at his last meeting with patients, he would take out his prescription pad. And they all thought he was writing a prescription for a statin or whatever it was. But in fact, he was writing a recipe for a roast chicken. And on the back he turned it over and it was a recipe for making chicken tacos. And he said this is what you need, not another drug, and the idea was that if you knew how to roast a chicken, which, believe me, is not rocket science, you had the makings of three good meals. One meal rolls into the others, so you have chicken one night, and then you have tacos, chicken tacos another night and then you make a soup from the carcass. We've lost those skills, we've lost that sense of how to maximize the value of food and minimize the time investment. We erect a lot of barriers to cooking in our heads and one of the reasons I wrote cook is to help people get over those barriers and realize too that we've been kind of brainwashed to think about cooking as drudgery. It's not. It's really satisfying. And more satisfying the better you get at it. I mean, to handle plants and animals and fungi and to learn how to manipulate them and make something delicious and if you approach it more as a pastime and less as a chore, you will enjoy it more. And you have to realize too, that we've been getting marketing messages that are designed to get us to go out to eat or buy processed food. And those marketing messages include a very strong message that this is really hard and really boring, and it's neither of those things. People over-complicate cooking. We live in a culture that celebrates cooking, but doesn't actually do it very much. We watch it on television, we watch it in restaurants where now the kitchens are all open. And we all think that cooking means restaurant food, and it's not. That's all special occasion food. Everyday home cooking is throwing a fillet of fish on the grill or in a pan. It's taking out a box of frozen spinach. Frozen vegetables is a very healthy choice, very easy choice. You don't have to wash anything, you can use your microwave for it. You can dress it up with some garlic or olive oil or lemon juice. There are a lot of really satisfying meals that you can get on the table in less than a half hour. Some of us don't know how to make them, and I think that that's a tremendous problem, because the cultural transmission of knowledge about how to cook, how to be resourceful in the kitchen has been broken by a generation that's not cooking. >> By reallocating a small amount of our time and energy to the preparation of simple home cooked meals, we become empowered as we take back control over the foods we eat. Cooking is a very practical solution to our modern health challenges that can be put into action almost immediately using whatever resources are available. In addition, cooking brings us closer to food rather than seeing food as the enemy. Cooking can protect our relationship with food and it may be one of the most powerful ways to protect our long term health. [MUSIC]
