Today the Washington Post has an article about how people are culinary illiterates.

At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like “dredge” and “sauté.” Betty Crocker recipes avoid “braise” and “truss.” Land O’ Lakes has all but banned “fold” and “cream” from its cooking instructions. And Pillsbury carefully sidesteps “simmer” and “sear.”

I’m all about mocking stupidity, but really, is it a surprise that people who get their recipes from the side of the biscuit package are having trouble with technical cooking terms?

It does seem that there has been a decline in cooking knowledge - the article mentions that The Joy of Cooking has trouble figuring out what level to write at - and there’s no doubt what the reason is supposed to be:

For many people, cooking classes like his compensate for what they did not learn at home. “Food companies have to acknowledge that there used to be a level of teaching in the home by moms and grandmas that is not as evident today,” said Janet Myers, senior director of global kitchens for Kraft Foods who has been creating and testing recipes for the company for 30 years.

A survey of women in their twenties and forties for Betty Crocker showed that 64 percent of women in their twenties had mothers who worked full time, outside the home, during their childhood, compared with 38 percent of those in their forties. The group in their forties primarily learned to cook from their mothers and at school; the younger women also learned from their mothers, but more of them learned from their fathers, television chefs, or on their own.

No wonder people are ignorant today! They learned to cook from their fathers and everyone knows men can’t cook!

Then there’s this, which I’m still puzzled about:

A survey conducted by Betty Crocker Kitchens in 2004 showed adults don’t even realize how cooking-challenged they’ve become. The national survey of 1,500 adults found that 70 percent rated themselves “above average” in cooking knowledge, even though only 38 percent scored above average on a 20-question cooking-skills quiz. [emphasis added]

I guess a whole bunch of people must have scored exactly at whatever the average was, which doesn’t imply that the quiz was very well written.

Posted by Amanda in Food |