In addition to pretending to be a chef on the weekends, I also like to pretend to be a musician from time to time.  I’ve been in a few garage bands and played a few small concerts. I’ve realized that my love of serving good food comes from a similar place as my love of performance. There’s nothing quite like the rush of being on the stage and having people applaud your musical creations, and similarly, there’s nothing quite like serving chicken to a dinner guest and having them say “this is the best chicken I’ve ever eaten”. I have a tendancy to invite people over for dinner on the weekends, and this is exactly why. It gives me a chance to perform.

I suppose that might sound narcissistic, but I promise that I’m not egotistical about my food. I’m proud of my creations, for sure, but the more I learn about food the more I feel like I’m just getting started. But, just like a musician tries to make every show better than the last, I’m in a constant pursuit of making better food.

This pursuit of excellence forms the basis of my personal “food philosophy” and drives everything I do where food is concerned. This is why I buy better ingredients, and more expensive brands. This is why I scour the internet looking for recipe ideas and video tutorials. This is why my Amazon wish list is filled with kitchen gadgets. This is why I was taking pictures of the meals I make long before I actually had a food blog.

Pondering about this topic has really opened my eyes to how much my personal food philosophy is at odds with the typical American kitchen. According to Mario Batali, in Italian cooking part of the base food philosophy is that they have a God given right to always have the absolute best of whatever is for sale at the market. This contrasts sharply with the American food philosophy which has nothing at all to do with the flavor of the food. It can be summed up in one word: Convenience.

I’ll give you an example. I recently bought a camp style dutch oven. The walls are nice and thick, and it’s designed in a way that makes it easy to put hot coals on the top and the bottom so that you can slow cook your food at an even temperature for hours. The dutch oven is the quintessential slow cooking tool and in my mind comes with images of rich stews, camp fires, and a time when cooking was an all day process.

When I got home I eagerly tore open the box and started the process of curing my new pot. When it was all set I took some time to read through the booklet that came with it. It was filled with dutch oven fun facts and other such nonsense that I could just look up on Wikipedia, so I skipped to the part that I really wanted to read, the recipes. Imagine my horror when I saw that nearly 2/3rds of the recipes in the book had the word “easy” in the title! It had such gems as “Easy Peach Cobbler” which literally had three steps: 1) pour in a few cans of peaches 2) pour on a box of yellow cake mix and 3) cook for an hour. Say WHAT?! That’s the kind of thing I would expect from a freaking Easy Bake Oven, not from the very icon of slow cooking.

This sad sad tale, is a great illustration of what I see all around me in American cooking. Value is placed on how fast a dish can be prepared, how little effort it takes on the part of the ‘cook’, and how cheap it can be purchased for. This is the reason behind the rise of fast food chains, as well as such monstrosities as “American Cheese”. Why is American cheese popular? Because it comes individually wrapped slices so that you don’t have to be bothered to use a knife. This was such as success that someone decided that peanut butter should be individually wrapped too. After all, who wants to dirty a knife, just to make a sandwich? And if you’re too lazy to open TWO WHOLE JARS for your lunch, you can buy your peanut butter and your jelly squished into a single jar. In the words of comedian Brian Regan “if you need to zap-fry your breakfast in three seconds, you might want to lighten up your schedule”.

So I invite you to take a few moments and think about your own personal food philosophy. Some people value being ‘green’ and organic. Others are Vegan, with all that entails. What is it that you value in your food? And is what you are regularly eating in line with what’s actually important to you?