What’s for dinner?

What did you have for dinner when you were a child? In our house, it was usually variations on the theme of meat, potatoes and another vegetable. The meat was often hamburger, which cooks quickly. The vegetables came from a can. We hardly ever went to restaurants. There weren’t many convenience foods. My mother never heard of quinoa or kale. She worked full-time and didn’t have much time or energy to spend cooking dinner. She was cooking from scratch under stress.

Fast-forward to 2019. Lots more choices now: many more imported foods, convenience foods, fast food, ready-made meals, frozen dinners, meal kits, take-out. More cooking tools: slow cookers, microwaves, food processors. So cooking should be easier now, and less stressful, but it isn’t. Now there’s a food culture, a heavily marketed industry that has turned food into fashion: cooking shows, celebrity cooks, magazines, cookbooks and food blogs that create trends and focus on novelty and exoticism and a touch of snobbery. Here’s a simple recipe, they say: just pick up some black sea salt and yuzu juice, make a balsamic reduction, cook the meat sous vide. If you have people over, you have to provide alternatives for your friends on a gluten-free diet, or vegan, or Paleo. Eggs are bad for you – no, wait, that was last year. Don’t eat red meat, eat lots of red meat. All carbs are bad, some carbs are bad, complex carbs are great, no they’re not. Tuna casserole? Hang your head in shame.

And then there’s that dirty little secret that nobody wants to say out loud: all that grocery shopping, slicing and dicing, washing and cleaning up take time and effort. Cooking is work. And as we seniors struggle with our waning strength and energy, we just want to uncomplicate our lives, simplify and streamline whatever we can. We’re not alone in this. For working people and families with small children, dinner is a daily hurdle to jump over when they’re already tired. A few years ago, some British researchers ran a survey to find out how people really cooked at home. Guess what? Sixty percent of Brits eat the same seven meals every week. One in four British adults even cooks the same meal on the same day every week. Only four people in ten know more than nine recipes, and one in four can only cook three. The three most popular dishes were bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes), beans on toast and spaghetti with meat sauce: traditional comfort foods. People wanted meals that are cheap, tasty, easy to prepare and foolproof. They just wanted to get dinner over with. But they had been affected enough by the food industry hype to feel guilty about it.

Don’t feel guilty. Just pick your own tried-and-true favourites and make them as often as you like. Try to choose foods that fit in with Canada’s new evidence-based food guide. Novelty in the kitchen is overrated. Ignore the hype; it’s not your job to prop up the fashionable food industry. And if you want to sneak in the occasional tuna casserole, I won’t tell.