Are cookbooks really the panacea for a food-illiterate society?

The most recent post from The Age’s food and lifestyle journo/blogger Paula Goodyer, “Who’s got control of your food?”, raises some interesting questions about the role of food manufacturers and food retailers in determining Australians’ eating habits.

‘Low food literacy’, she says, is the cause of our unhealthy food choices.  Our supermarket trolleys are laden with overpriced and highly processed convenience foods, rather than the fresh and nutritious ingredients needed to prepare meals ‘from scratch’.  True.  This phenomenon however, is reflective, and indeed symptomatic, of a general lack of knowledge surrounding the entire food chain – not just the pointy end where we buy and ingest our food. 

Goodyer’s suggestion for improving food literacy, is – you guessed it – yet another cookbook: this particular one based on “teaching simple cooking techniques, food planning skills and basic nutrition in a way that’s easy to grasp”.   

I would argue that food literacy extends far beyond the simple notion of knowing what foods are healthy and developing the skills to prepare them. After all, cooking shows, diet manuals, and glossy recipe books proliferate, yet as a society we know less about food than ever in history. 

Food is such a primal part of our existence and a cornerstone of culture that there is something very unsettling in the thought of people sitting on the couch shovelling microwave pizza down their gullets whilst watching Jamie bang on about the merits of the organic chook, or Nigella extolling the virtues of locally-grown, in-season apples.  Prime-time ‘gastro porn’ shows, and their accompanying cookbooks, have almost become – like more traditional forms of pornography – a substitute for the real thing.

When big business wrested control of the food chain away from farmers and consumers, we settled for less in quality, in exchange for more in quantity.  As Michael Pollan asks in The Omnivores Dilemma, “Why do we care so much about choosing a mechanic or builder, but don’t know or care who produces the food we put in our bodies?”.  Our love affair with the supermarket has depersonalised food, to the point where we are not only unaware of who produces our food but often don’t even know what it really is.

There are signs, though, that the tide is beginning to turn.  With a growing awareness of the health and environmental implications of our food choices, has come a growing rejection of ‘anonymous food’.  Consumers are beginning to ask where and how their food is produced.  

In the United States, arguably the birthplace of the multinational-controlled industrial food chain, there is now a growing push for ‘local food security’ and a burgeoning number of new farmers markets and community-supported agriculture schemes.

In Australia, too, farmers markets are growing in popularity, forging direct links between the producers and consumers of food.  How do we retain and build on this momentum?  How do we take back control of our food?  It will require some serious social and political change.  Re-engaging ourselves with the way we eat is crucial, but it’s going to require more than a recipe book and a set of bathroom scales.