In honour of tuna casseroles

Sometimes when I'm in a nostalgic mood, I grab one of my old cookbooks from the 60s and pick a recipe. To get the maximum nostalgia kick, I follow the recipe exactly: tuna casserole made with cream of mushroom soup, chicken pot pie with biscuits on top. Eating that stuff is like crawling into a time machine. Suddenly you're a young woman again, on your own for the first time and teaching yourself to cook; or you might even find yourself back at the table in your mother's kitchen, wondering what's for dessert.

Of course, back then, growing up in Toronto, we had never heard of brown rice or tofu or bok choy, to say nothing of cholesterol or soluble fibre or trans fat. We weren't aware of all the nutritional booby traps lurking in our food, and there was much less variety at the grocery store. We thought very differently about cooking and eating in those days. Most women, though not many men, could do basic food preparation. Cooking was just another household chore, not a big deal. You could make a lot of simple dishes with just a few ingredients, and as long as you cooked it properly, it tasted fine. We didn't expect to be entertained by our food, didn't need exotic ingredients or constant novelty or dramatic presentations. The cook's ego and reputation weren't on the line with every meal.

There's so much glitz and flimflam in the food industry now: celebrity chefs, food entertainment shows, fancy cooking equipment that people display in their kitchens but never use, menus boasting ganaches and reductions and coulis, fast food everywhere, fruits and vegetables grown not for their flavour or food value but for their ability to survive a cross-country trip in a boxcar. Many people don't know how to cook, or they confuse home cooking with the food entertainment industry and are too intimidated to try. For Pete's sake, it's just food. Make a salmon sandwich, munch an apple. Don't let the food marketers win.