Millcreek, I think a lot of that has to do with how many people simply don't cook at all anymore. My mother-in-law heats things up from time to time and actually cooks a full meal maybe a half-dozen times a year. I have never known my father-in-law to prepare any kind of foodstuff more involved that a bologna sandwich (not fried, cold). When they eat at home, they toss an animal protein--pre-cut chicken breasts or pre-cut salmon fillets into foil and throw it on a propane grill. They open up a bag of salad, and that's dinner.
We've figured out that if we are going to their home for a meal we have to eat first and bring snacks. Nothing against them, at least not in this regard--they are mostly sedentary middle-aged people; I'm fairly athletic and have been lactating or pregnant or both for over four years now--just an illustration of how little importance they give to food and its proper preparation and service. Meals are over inside of ten minutes.
I've learned a whole lot about cooking, but already knew about eating. I was raised with a bizarre and kind of cool melding of middle-America+Ashkenazi Jewish folk cooking, where the folk part modifies both the American and the Jewish. I was also raised poor, and the kind of poor most Americans don't know from. We weren't completely dirt-broke most of the time, but because of the high cost of kosher food, we were food poor. The idea of making chili without beans is completely foreign to me, and a chuck steak serves at least six.
But, we had dinner every night. We had formal feasts twice a week. When my family eats, it takes at least an hour or so, and can last all afternoon or evening, and every time we show up (well, now, after those fun years of them not speaking to Ian) the table is set, tablecloth and all, and my mother starts cooking. The first time I cooked an Easter dinner I think I weirded Ian out a little bit. He was not remotely prepared for my idea of a festive meal, which involved four course totaling about ten dishes, every fancy wedding gift serving platter pressed into service, all of our friends invited, and each dish having some symbolism relating to Easter in some way. I didn't do it that well, but for me, it seemed the minimum one could or should do for something so momentous as our first Easter in our home.
For a long, long time, I luxuriated in the awesomeness of the cheap food that normal America gets. Meat that is six or seven bucks a pound for nice cuts, a whole block of decent cheese for three bucks! Astonishing. Way overdid it for a long time on the stuff I couldn't have as a kid. Twenty years of waiting all week for those three bites of real beef on the sabbath (as opposed to ground beef, which we had on weekdays from time to time) can really create one heck of a long-term craving for the stuff.
Now we're evening out a little, getting more balanced. We've started eating veggie meals from time to time, for no reason other than it helps keep us thinking about food and helps us avoid falling into the really boring meat+starch+vegetable=meal trap. My in-laws do think we're nutty to put this much thought into food, especially considering everything else we have going on in our lives, but I just cannot imagine a life where dried-out chicken breasts, pre-cut and packaged, are one's major form of nutrition, to be cooked and consumed in the space of about five minutes. That's just a travesty.
That doesn't make me a good cook, which I'm not, but all of it does give me and apparently now Ian, the motivation to learn to cook properly when he was raised without anything beyond quickie cream-of-X soup casseroles and scalped chicken breasts.
Wow, that was thread-drifty.
