I agree with a passage in the second paragraph on page five.
In this paragraph, Michael Pollen talks about an episode of The French Chef where Julia Child was making a plate-sized potato pancake and when it came to flipping the cake she had some troubles and everyone saw because it was on live, uncut, unedited tv. In response to this incident, Child responds with “when I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.” I found this passage to be important because it showed everyone that was watching that it’s okay to mess up and that professional chefs do it too. She then followed this statement by saying that “If you’re alone in the kitchen, WHOOOO is going to see?” I thought that this was an awesome thing to say to the audience because so many people watch these cooking shows and are afraid to try these new meals because they think they will mess up or won’t be great, but Julia is telling them that everyone messes up and that you need to try in order to succeed and have confidence in yourself.
I agree with a passage in the first paragraph on page seven.
In this paragraph, Michael Pollen talks about how back then on cooking shows everything used to be made strictly from scratch, but now a lot of television chefs make meals from premade meals that already contain a lot of other ingredients like frozen vegetables or even powdered sauces. “Processed foods have so thoroughly colonized the American kitchen and diet that they have defined what passes today for cooking, not to mention food” (Michael Pollen). I thought that this was an important passage because this statement has become so true. Nowadays it has become all about saving ourselves time and finding easy solutions to make everything more convenient. Now even chefs are incorporating these quick solutions into their recipes and fewer people are making things from scratch and just heading to the store to purchase processed foods. This has become such a large part of meals now that even the definition of what cooking is has been made broader.
My view is complicated about a passage in the third paragraph on page fourteen.
“It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the workforce is responsible for the collapse of home cooking” (Michael Pollen). I think this passage is important because back then stay at home wives were responsible for cooking meals for their husbands and kids, but nowadays it is way more common for women to have jobs so there is less time in the day spent cooking meals. But needless to say, I wouldn’t say it is entirely the women’s fault for cooking coming to an end. There are a lot of people nowadays that don’t know how to cook which has a large play in this, but also people have become so lazy and would rather take the easy root of purchasing microwavable meals. Also, another thing that was mentioned by Pollen was that more people are picking up longer work shifts so there is less time for meal prep, especially for meals that are made from scratch.
