CIY Project: The Detailed Why

Oops, I forgot to publish this on Friday, in which I explain why I've undertaken the Cook-It-Yourself Project.

My dirty not-so-secret is that for how much I really enjoy cooking, for how much I spend on the groceries to make my own food, for the abundance of cookbooks and Eating Wells and Cooking Lights and Cook’s Illustrated currently taking up residence in my house, I’m frankly a bit Princess-and-the-Pea about making my own food.

If there’s the slightest bobble in my day, the teensiest smidge of stress, the slightest hint of being overloaded or even just scheduled-up chock-a-block, I throw up my hands in defeat at the idea of cooking and run out to have somebody else do it for me. Maybe it’s not always literally Fast Food (although it is, more often than I’d care to admit), but it is certainly not something that I made myself

And maybe if I didn’t end up wasting groceries because I didn’t cook what I wanted to cook because I didn’t “have time,” if it weren’t so expensive, if prepared food (which is ergo packaged) didn’t create so much trash, if it didn’t require a needless expenditure of fossil fuel to go get it, if it were always healthy…maybe if all of those things were true, I wouldn’t be so bothered by this tendency of mine. 

But I think I still would because in addition to all of those bad things (expense, waste and health aspects) I think I’m like emotionally addicted to it.

When you have the kind of life I am living right now, which is pretty balls-to-the-wall all-work/no-play, on-my-grind-like-all-the-time, without a lot of time or opportunity for, as an Oprah-type might say, self-nurturing, getting food someone else took the time to prepare is like a faster, less-damp version of a Calgon moment. 

I don’t know if that will make sense to anyone, but I guess it’s some kind of mutation of the concept of people feeding you to take care of you or to express that they want to make you feel good.  I realize this probably sounds like a stretch, the leap from Grandma’s Chicken Soup making you feel better because SHE made it in addition to the soup itself to buying a can of Progresso soup even though I have the ingredients to make it myself. 

And in my armchair psychoanalysis of myself, I might actually be wrong.  But I think somewhere in my lizard brain, there is some deep connection between having food somebody else made and feeling good that goes beyond just the normal (and healthy) pleasure everybody takes in eating.

The thing is – like most addictions, after a while, it’s totally useless.  Because the addiction is always a stand-in for something else, you’re still not giving yourself what you actually need.  So then you’re still not really satisfied, but now you have this deeply ingrained habit of doing things a certain way every time you feel that itchy vague feeling of lacking. 

So basically, what I want to do is a) stop doing something that no longer really truly makes me feel deeply better, b) stop doing something that wastes like way too many resources, c) start – as part of an ongoing Total Life Overhaul I started about four years ago – find some productive and/or more enriching ways to deal with feeling that itchy vague lack and d) start doing something that I really really like. 

Because, of course, the irony OF my reliance on prepared/processed/fast food is: I LOVE TO COOK.  Um, der!! 

It’s a racket, this modern life.  (Okay, brace yourself for some hippy-times talk, I don’t like it any better than you do.) The Man keeps you so whipsawed that it can be hard to take back the reins of one’s own life, step off the hamster wheel of consumer culture and make decisions about how one wants to live and spend one’s day. 

We have a culture that deifies the folks who are too busy to eat, to read, to sleep, to cook, to clean, to play.  How many times have I participated in conversations where we played one-upmanship of Things I’m Too Busy for?  And sometimes, if you’re doing something you really love, it’s okay to be that focused on it.  And I’m, personally, moving closer and closer to spending more of my, say, work time, doing things I really love. 

But there’s still the rest of my life, and so I guess I’m seeing food as the next frontier of this.  Rather than be driven by my own compulsions, laziness, and bad habits, and rather than buy into this mythology we have in our culture right now about How Busy We All Are and How There’s No Time, I want to make a conscious choice about what and how I’m eating, and base those choices on what brings me deep pleasure rather than transitory immediate gratification. 

Comments

[kayko]

Well written piece Leslie! Brave and insightful, I think we can all relate to your words.