In her article entitled Preparing a Meal, Ms. Springer dicusses just that: preparing a meal. The meal she reports on making was homemade pizza for her family. Now, unless she has fine Italian familial roots (and maybe she does, but for this point, we’ll pretend not), I can make a prediction that the materials she needed for the pizza (and rest of side dishes) were already packaged, already ready items that just needed to be put together like legos to make the regular Joe feel like he actually accomplished the task of making a homemade meal. For instance, the crust was either dough bought, or an already ready crust that was just waiting for the preservative laden canned mush called sauce and low moist, non-fat, pasteurized, machine shredded mozzerella cheese to be placed on top before the Frankenstein could be brought to life by the oven. I will coin the term home-frankenooked for the kind of meals we claim to home cook. By this I mean we take separate packaged items we buy at the grocery store – things that came from “body parts” of deceased food – to make a new monster. I think Polan would agree with me, Springer goes on to talk about his chapter about processed food, in that our food today uses the remnants of real food to make the artificial crap that tastes appeals more to our senses. All in all, I apologize if it seems I think Ms. Springer is not a legit culinary wizard, she probably is, but I do have a problem with “homecooked meals” when all the ingredients come from a can.
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