What’s for Dinner? Guilt, myths, and American ideals, that’s what.

Dutch publishes book on home cooking and modern culture

From the childhood obesity epidemic to the demise of the nuclear family, modern approaches to cooking in America are fraught with angst. Do it wrong, and you could be risking your loved ones’ health--physical, mental, and spiritual. Food writers, cookbook intros, and marketers are all repeating the same message, says Dr. Jennifer Dutch, associate professor and chair of the department of English at York College: “Nobody cooks in America anymore! If only we could go back to the way things were in the kitchen X years ago, it would solve all of our problems!”

Dutch pushes back on this idea in her recently published book Look Who’s Cooking: The Rhetoric of American Home Cooking Traditions in the 21st Century.

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“The conversation needs to be more nuanced,” said Dutch, noting that this nostalgia for the way Americans cooked and ate in an earlier era glosses over inequalities experienced by women and minorities, who were often the ones doing the cooking. This narrative is also just not very helpful. “It causes a lot of pressure on families,” said Dutch. Ultimately, she argues, “You make the choices that are best for your family,” not marketers, not cookbook writers, and not researchers. “There’s so much out there making people feel guilty about not cooking at home. But the reality is there’s a lot of diversity in the way we cook and eat. There’s not one right way to do it and you don’t have to feel guilty about occasionally making sloppy joes.”

Home cooking--what is it, exactly?

Dutch’s book breaks the idea of ‘home cooking” down to its elements: planning menus, shopping for ingredients, preparing and assembling ingredients (“from scratch” or fresh ingredients, not processed), cooking the food, and eating it at home. What she found was that ‘home cooking’ today comes in many forms, as one or more of those elements of home cooking are often outsourced. Dutch looked at meal delivery kit services, which deliver fresh, pre-measured and prepared ingredients and recipe cards; ready-made meals in the freezer section of the grocery store; and “Dream Dinner” businesses, where consumers have all of the ingredients at workstations in a store that looks like a restaurant kitchen, then assemble the meals and take them home to have ready to go into the oven throughout the week.

Is it still ‘home cooking’ if you don’t shop for or prep the ingredients yourself? What if you don’t prepare the food in the home, merely heat it up there? Is it ‘home cooking’ if you primarily use a microwave? Dutch explores the idea that perhaps ‘home cooking’ isn’t really in as great of decline as the marketers would have us believe. Perhaps we simply need to redefine what we mean by the term.

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As part of the research for this book, Dutch watched hundreds of YouTube cooking videos and was heartened by what she saw. Cooks on YouTube invite you into their sometimes messy, very real home kitchens to show you their favorite, go-to recipes. Sometimes the ingredients are fresh, other times they are pre-packaged. Sometimes they include their favorite ‘hacks’ as they demonstrate the real ways they feed themselves and their families. They’re a more accessible version of ‘home cooking’ than what you see on The Food Network or read in Bon Appetit magazine and they refute the notion that ‘nobody cooks anymore.’

Part of the reason for Dutch’s interest in this topic is that she does not consider herself a good cook. “I felt like it was my guilty secret, that I didn’t know how to cook the ‘right’ way,’” she said. This research reminded her that there isn’t one. 

In the end, Dutch asserts that ‘home cooking’ is a powerful vessel that Americans fill with meaning because it represents both the continuity of the past and adaptability to the present. Home cooking is about much more than what is for dinner; it's about forging a connection to the past, displaying the self in the present, and leaving a lasting legacy for the future.
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Dutch completed the research for this book during her graduate studies at Penn State University, where she graduated with a PhD in American Studies in 2013. This fall marks her sixth year with York College. 

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Look Who's Cooking--About the Book

Home cooking is a multibillion-dollar industry that includes cookbooks, kitchen gadgets, high-end appliances, specialty ingredients, and more. Cooking-themed programming flourishes on television, inspiring a wide array of celebrity chef-branded goods even as self-described "foodies" seek authenticity by pickling, preserving, and canning foods in their own home kitchens. Despite this, claims that "no one has time to cook anymore" are common, lamenting the slow extinction of traditional American home cooking in the twenty-first century.

In Look Who's Cooking: The Rhetoric of American Home Cooking Traditions in the Twenty-First Century, author Jennifer Rachel Dutch explores the death of home cooking, revealing how modern changes transformed cooking at home from an odious chore into a concept imbued with deep meanings associated with home, family, and community.