Back when I wrote my post about the Thai Pesto Noodles I put together in a successful experiment, one reader commented that I never really explained much about fish sauce, nor mentioned which brand or brands I used at home. And while I did link to a very old post of mine, an exhortation to my readers on the glories of fish sauce, (Don’t Fear The Fish Sauce), that post really didn’t talk about which brands of that umami-laden sauce i used in my own kitchen, or the qualities that I found admirable in a fish sauce.

So, now I am writing just such a post.

I’ve been cooking Thai food for about seventeen or eighteen years now. (Good grief, it really has been that long….dang!) And, in the beginning, when I made my first, very tentative explorations of Thai cuisine, guided by some inadequate cookbooks and a very strong taste memory from the restaurants in Miami that Zak and his family frequented, I pretty much used whatever fish sauce I could get my neophyte’s grubby paws on.

And while I made pretty good Thai food back then, it cannot hold a candle to the dishes I make now; this is in part, because I make my own curry pastes, but it is also because the quality of my ingredients has risen. Many more brands of Thai ingredients are available now than there were nearly twenty years ago, and they are more widely available. Thanks to the Internet, which I lacked back in the day, I can even get fresh lime leaves, galangal, chilies and lemongrass shipped to my doorstep, along with any brand of fish sauce I should care to use.

So, what brands of fish sauce do I prefer, and why?

My number one, all-time favorite all-purpose Thai fish sauce is Golden Boy, which I use for everything. I use it cooked in curries, stir fries and raw in dipping sauces and dressings, and it is always delicious. If you look at the illustration above, you can see that it is a lovely amber color, very clear and light. It also has the freshest, least objectionably “fishy” odor of any fish sauce available in the US, which I find is very helpful when I am teaching Thai cooking to people who have never come across fish sauce as an ingredient before. Don’t get me wrong–Golden Boy, when drizzled into a very hot wok still sends forth a billowing cloud of fish-scented steam, but it isn’t particularly bad. In fact, I think it smells rather good, and most of my dinner guests and family agree.

It also has a very balanced flavor, strong on the umami, not too salty, with a slightly sweet finish. In my experience, Golden Boy is the least salty tasting fish sauce available in the US. There is absolutely no hint of bitterness to it, though I have read reviews which have said so. I have never detected it, and I trust myself to have a pretty darned good sense of taste.

Golden Boy is pretty easily available, at least on the East Coast and in the Midwest, though I have heard that it isn’t as easy to find on the West Coast. However, there are many online grocery stores that stock it, including my personal favorite, Import Food.
Look for the cute little grinning baby boy on the label, cradling a bottle of fish sauce on his lap with one hand and making a thumbs-up sign with his other.

Oh, one more thing–it is a beast to unseal. The plastic shrink seal on the lid is simple, you just cut that like you do any other shrink-plastic seal. It is the seal under the lid that gives some folks fits. It is a solid plastic raised disc that you take a sharp paring knife to, sawing back and forth on it until the disc flies off and you are left with a nice, smooth, small hole in the bottle lid with a fold-down, locking cap to keep the precious stuff from evaporating. (It also keeps any wayward cats who may wander your home from jumping up on the counter and knocking the bottle to the floor where it can spill and they can imbibe until they are soused on fermented fish squeezings.)

I also use Squid Brand which has a stronger, but still pleasant fish flavor, and which is a tiny bit darker in color than Golden Boy. I prefer to use it cooked in curries and soups and some very spicy stir-fried dishes, but I won’t use it raw in dipping sauces and dressings. It is a little more salty than Golden Boy and the more pronounced fish flavor, while it is great in curries, is a little overpowering when used raw.

You can see the true color of Squid Brand by looking at the lightest bit of the bottle in the photograph, just above the label. It is slightly reddish and more of a dark honey color than the more golden amber color of Golden Boy. I suspect it is not aged as long as Golden Boy, but I don’t know that for certain. What I do know, is that squid is not used in making the sauce, any more than babies go into Golden Boy. They both are made with anchovy extract, salt and sugar, though water is listed as the first ingredient in Squid Brand, which makes me think that my assumption that it is not fermented as long as my favorite brand might just be correct.

It is easy to recognize Squid Brand–it not only has a squid right on the green and white label, it also has a cute squid embossed right into the glass of the bottle.

It also opens quite easily, unlike Golden Boy, which requires a steady strong hand and a bit of cutlery and patience. You just tear off the shrink plastic seal and pop the top up and there you are! It also seals up wonderfully well–better than Golden Boy, in fact, such that I might possibly feel safe enough transporting an already opened bottle of it across town in my car.

I doubt it, though. Having once gotten a bit of fish sauce spilled into my first car, I can attest that the smell, which may not be bad in the bottle, is really bad in car upholstery, especially in the summer.

And it doesn’t really ever come out. It fades over time, and you will forget about it, until the next summer, when on the first ninety-five degree day, you open your car door to be attacked and overwhelmed by the unwelcome odor of long dead and unburied wee fishies. (This is why I always tell people that if they want to cook Thai at someone else’s house and they need to take fish sauce, take a new, sealed up bottle and then leave it there. If you can’t do that, I advocate sealing the bottle with duct tape, then wrapping it in plastic, then sealing it up in a big ziplock bag. Even then, I suggest praying to the Kitchen God the entire time you drive, lest any bizarre and unnatural event occur which would release the thrice-sealed fish sauce into your unsuspecting car seats.)

Now, there is a fish sauce I have not tried which I am going to try and find the next time I go to Columbus.

I want to try Tra Chang Golden Label Brand. It is highly rated by Import Food, and so I am curious to see if it is as good as they say, or if I will stick with my Golden Boy.

Now, what brands do I suggest you not use?

Well, in general, let me say this: if it comes in a plastic bottle don’t buy it.

I have tasted fish sauce bottled in plastic that tasted like, well, fishy plastic.

Ick.

Need I say more about that?

Thai Kitchen brand fish sauce, which you can find in many supermarkets, is not one I would recommend. For one thing, it is very expensive for the tiny bottle, and for another, it has a very salty flavor and a very strong fishy smell. I am not certain it is naturally fermented, but it is certainly not worth the amount of money you pay for it in your usual supermarket. It is much better to order a good brand from online or make the effort to shop in an Asian market for your Thai ingredients than to use the overpriced produces from Thai Kitchen. (This goes for everything they make, by the way–their coconut milk is always at least fifty to ninety cents more per can than the better tasting Chaokoh and Mae Ploy I get at the Asian market.)

Thai Kitchen was the very first fish sauce I used, in large part, because it was the only one I could get in West Virginia way back in the dark days before the Internet could bring anything to your doorstep via mail order. And I have to say, while it did make my food taste sort of Thai, it also made it taste very salty, and that was not good. Thai food is about balance in flavor and too salty does not a balanced dish make.

Also, back in the day, I used to use Three Crabs Brand fish sauce, but stopped using it when I discovered Golden Boy. It is okay, but instead of being made with just anchovy extract, salt and sugar like the other brands it also has water, fructose and hydrolyzed wheat protein in it. I suspect that this accounts for the rather odd, slightly too sweet flavor it has which I now find off-putting.

However, I will say that a lot of people love Three Crabs Brand and swear by it, so if you want, try it and see if you like it. To my taste, it is both too salty and too sweet, without enough of the savory, meaty, delicious and addictive umami kick from the fish that is most of the point of fish sauce in the first place.

So there is my little treatise on which brands of fish sauce I prefer to use in my kitchen. They are all Thai–and I have to admit I use them not only in Thai food, but also in my Vietnamese dishes, always to delicious effect.

And, like many other cooks, I have found that sometimes fish sauce can give a lift to dishes from all over the world by giving them a good jolt of umami along with a dash of salt. Soups stews and especially Italian pasta sauces can really benefit from a little shake of fish sauce at some point in the cooking process.

I have yet to try using fish sauce in a dessert, though it may happen some day.

You never know.

A more accurate headline would be, “Why Does Lou Dobbs See a Conspiracy In The Lunch Trays of The Baltimore City School System?”

But it just isn’t as catchy, so I’ll stick with the original.

What the heck am I talking about here, I am sure some of you are wondering.

It’s like this: The Baltimore City School System has instituted a Meatless Mondays policy and, even though CNN could not find any parents in Baltimore who were against having their kids eat more vegetables and fruits during school, the whole thing is obviously a conspiracy to turn kids into socialist vegan heathens or something.

Never mind that the whole idea came about as a way to promote healthier eating habits among children. Never mind that having kids eat more vegetables might do something to curb the epidemic of childhood obesity that is supposedly running rampant in our country. Oh, and don’t notice that vegetarian chili and grilled cheese sandwiches are cheaper than even the crap-quality meat that is scraped off of the meatpacking companies floors and is sold to school systems. Yeah, and never mind that our country is deep in a recession and nearly every school system in the US is strapped for cash.

Dobbs ignores all of these inconvenient facts and decides that the school system is pushing a political agenda just because PETA gave them one of their Proggy Awards for being the most progressive school system in the country because of their Meatless Monday policy.

I don’t know if you know this, Mr. Dobbs, but blaming the recipient of an award for having a political agenda just because the organization giving the award does have an agenda, is pretty twisted and screwed up logic. Yes, PETA has an a very definite agenda, but just because they recognize the Baltimore school system for being progressive does not mean that the aforementioned school system has the same agenda.

Watch the clip and then tell me the reporting isn’t slanted and bizarre:

I love the little banner on the bottom that reads, “The Food Police?” while the Baltimore school officials are on the screen. That is so–slanted.

And who does CNN get to talk about how it is a bad idea for any school system to do this?

A spokesperson for the American Meat Institute, a trade organization of meat packers and processors. Is this an unbiased source? Um, no. And did you notice that the reporter also was careful to point out that the spokesperson was also is a mother of two children? Why is this mentioned? Does CNN regularly tell us how many kids every spokesperson they have on their shows is blessed with? No.

No, they mentioned that mother of two children bit so as to make the viewer think that this woman is speaking more as a concerned mother than as a paid shill for the meat packing industry, an industry, which, by the way, keeps selling meat tainted with E. coli to the public, including to schools. You know, the very same industry that lobbies against tighter food safety regulations and more mandated health inspections.

You know, those trustworthy creeps.

And what does this paragon of unbiased information have to tell us? What does she say?

She points out at the end of her statement that 75 percent of American schoolchildren are deficient in protein, and for many of them the only protein they eat is what is in their school lunches.

Um, yeah.

Has no one ever pointed out to this highly credible and well-paid spokesperson and concerned mother of two that beans, grains, nuts, and dairy products such as cheese and milk all contain protein? So, the truth is that the kids we see in this news segment who are eating the vegetarian chili with rice or the grilled cheese sandwiches are not being deprived of protein as the American Meat Institute would have you believe. They are actually eating plenty of protein.

It just happens to come from somewhere other than meat.

And then, Dobbs goes on to talk about how the Meatless Monday policy is a “political storm in the making” and insinuates that it is meant to indoctrinate kids into the shadowy world of progressive socialist vegetable-eating, tree-hugging evil-doers.

Look, Mr. Dobbs, it is like this.

Kids should eat more vegetables. You know this, and I know this. The mom interviewed in your news story whose kids actually go to school in Baltimore knows this, and frankly, the American Meat Institute mother of two knows it, too.

And I think, sir, that you know this isn’t some ploy to turn all of the children in America into vegetarians, one school lunch at a time.

But you have to get het up about something and get your viewers upset so they will keep watching you.

But really, the truth is, there are people of all political stripes all over the world who eat very little meat, or who are cutting down on meat, or who eat no meat at all.

And there are plenty of socialists who eat meat. Go to France if you don’t believe me and watch them chow down on some cassoulet, boeuf bourguignon, and foie gras, goodness sake.

And for that matter, plenty of us progressives eat meat, too–just not meat from confined animal feeding operations like the ones that the American Meat Institute favors.

Eating more vegetables is not going to hurt the kids, Lou. It isn’t a vast left-wing conspiracy that is out to turn the nation’s children into elitist arugula-loving activists.

It is really just what the principal and the nutritional director from the Baltimore school system say it is–a way to help kids eat healthier while saving the schools some cash.

Stop hating on the veggies, man and chill out.

Because, dude, just because some kids in Baltimore are eating no meat for lunch one day a week doesn’t mean that PETA is coming to pry your Big Mac out of your cold, dead hands.

This is not a usual pattern for me–I am not a regular reader of Gourmet, and never have been. But, over the years, I have plucked individual issues off the newsstand because I was intrigued by the stories advertised on the cover and when I read them, I was rarely disappointed. But, the general tone of the magazine, with its emphasis on travel stories and restaurant reviews, tended to be extremely unappealing to me. (I am one of the few people I know who loves great food, but could care less about most travel writing. I just don’t care about where people go on vacation. I’d rather read in-depth memoirs of places and people from the viewpoint of expatriates. My Life in France by Julia Child is a great example of the kind of travel writing I like. Short articles are just too short and too–uninspiring for me to grok.) And the aspirational ads for luxury items from cars that cost more than a small house to pearl and diamond-encrusted jewelry to wine glasses that cost more than most of the bottles of wine I have ever had the pleasure to drink in my life, I found to be preposterous. (I can’t help it. I grew up poor, dammit, and some of the stuff that people will spend huge amounts of money on boggles my mind. Hundreds of dollars for a place setting? Wha? Does it make the food taste better? For that price, it should go in the kitchen and cook the damned food.)

But, it seems that the lack of those annoying ads is why Gourmet is now going away–yes, Conde Nast has announced today that Gourmet will cease publication after their November 2009 issue.

And even though I am not a regular reader, I am very disappointed.

No, disappointed is not a strong enough word. I am, quite simply, sad.

See, here’s why–while I have never cooked a recipe from Gourmet, the writing in its articles–even if they were not something I, personally, was interested in reading, was top-notch. Great food writers from James Beard to MFK Fisher and on to the current editor, Ruth Reichl all have helped make Gourmet magazine the bastion of food journalism that it was until today. Serious in-depth articles on food, politics and the intersections between the two, were part of what made Gourmet unique and interesting, at least from this reader’s perspective.

And I find it really annoying that Bon Appetit, also a Conde Nast product, is going to continue onward, as I find it to be a very shallow, middle-brow mish-mash of aspirational articles showing upper-crust dinner parties, along with menus and recipes from celebrities and other well-heeled folk and entry-level trend-following “fine food” recipes. (I also know for a fact that some of those recipes do not work out too well–I learned that long ago, in fact, much to my beginning-cook’s chagrin.)

I say this as someone who once had a subscription, and kept it for years. Granted, I bought that subscription back when I was in high school and in early college, and I have to say that back then, Bon Appetit did often have technique-based articles that did indeed help me teach myself how to cook. It also helped give me a foundational knowledge of ingredients, the French vocabulary of cookery and second-hand experience with different cuisines than what was available in West Virginia at the time, and for that, I am grateful. But after a few years, I found that the emphasis on expensive tableware, wines I would probably never be able to afford and on those silly dinner party stories (as little as I care about where other people go on vacation, I care less about what the rich family of the month is serving at their latest “casual” dinner party) to be by turns boring and annoying.

Then, I discovered Fine Cooking Magazine, and later, Saveur, and have not looked back.

Still, I find the lack of Gourmet to be really, depressing. I mean, the magazine has been a part of American food culture since 1940–and having it disappear while a lower-quality publication continues on, essentially in its stead, is really a shame.

But it is all a numbers game. The ad revenues dropped more for Gourmet than they did for Bon Appetit.

And Conde Nast is just protecting their bottom line.

And that, my friends is how capitalism works. You have to go with what makes the most money, quality be damned.

I’m really sorry for the Gourmet staffers–the writers, editors and amazing food photographers. I hope that they can all find employment somewhere, because they are all really good at their craft, and I hate to see them join the vast ranks of the unemployed. (Truthfully, anyone who loses a job in this economy makes me both sad and angry. Sad for the ones without employment and angry at the robber barons and elected leaders who have contributed to the rapid decline and destruction of our economy.)

I am interested to see where these folks go, and what they do. I’d like to think that they might go and start up their own magazine, but I know that is nothing but wishful thinking at best, and a pipe dream at worst. The likelihood of a new food magazine starting up in this economy is minimal. Okay, it is vanishingly small.

All right, it is next to impossible.

But, a food blogger can dream, can’t she?

It really is that simple.

If I didn’t have a family, or roommates or friends, and I didn’t work as a chef or line cook–in other words, if I was completely and utterly alone, I probably wouldn’t cook much that was interesting, and I certainly wouldn’t write a food blog.

Cooking for myself is bloody boring, not to mention a pain in the wazoo–why make that much of a mess just for myself? Especially since it would be myself cleaning up that mess without help or companionship in the kitchen.

So, were it just me, there would be no Beouf Bourguignon, Hillbilly Fried Rice or Panko Fried Catfish. No Chicken with Bitter Melon. No Thai Green Curry. No Bacon-Filled Waffles with Chili-Fried Apples. Nothing that really required multiple steps, lots of oil, large vegetables, hand-made curry pastes, special electric appliances or leftovers.

It isn’t as if I would never cook at all.

I would probably still make simple Indian curries, very simple stir-fried dishes, soups, dals, and easy cold noodles, and quick hot pastas, but falafel would be out of the question.

If it was just me, I would barely bake. Why make cheesecake just for yourself? Or Aphrodite Cakes? Or Aztec Gold Brownies? Or even my beloved sour cherry pie, for goodness sake? No one should eat an entire pie, for various reasons, and if I wasn’t going to eat the entire thing and it was just me, well, then, I would just not bake the pie in the first place.

Luckily, few cooks live in completely isolation. We almost always have someone around for whom to cook and it is a good thing too. Not just for our waistlines, but for our sanity as well.

I fully believe that most people who love to cook, and this includes line cooks and chefs, do so not only because they love food and the challenge of working alchemical arts upon it, but because they love people, and their favored way of showing that love is through feeding them.

Every great chef or cook I have ever known, even the cynical and cranky ones, even the most crusty and snide ones, all have a heart filled with love for other people, and the desire to show that love through the most intimate act of cooking them food which feeds both body and soul. Often all of that cranky, crusty and cynical demeanor is armor which protects those sweet and loving hearts from the slings and arrows that an often rough world flings in a professional kitchen.

Most home cooks I have known are the same way; they will not hesitate to cook for their loved ones, but can’t be bothered to do much more than scrambled eggs or grilled cheese sandwiches for themselves. My Gram, from whom I learned to cook fried chicken and delicious beef vegetable soup, and who taught both my mother and I how to make homemade noodles, as she got older and after Pappa died, barely cooked for herself. I would go to her house on weekends and cook for her, even though I was in the middle of a divorce and was living forty-five minutes away. I did it because I loved her, she was losing much needed body weight and she would delighted eat whatever high-calorie food I would create for her, and would dutifully heat up the leftovers over the week.

After going to see Julie & Julia with me, Heather said that the main reason she is moving into a house filled with young roomates was so she would have someone to cook for. She had already made her reputation as a cook in her office by bringing batches of Aphrodite Cakes and Aztec Gold Brownies to share, but she wants to do more. (And, as she noted on her Facebook page, she now wants to learn French food! Yeah, Julia–still inspirational after all of these years!)

When she said that, Dan, who also went to see it with us, pointed out that Neil Peart, famed drummer for Rush, has a food blog on his website. In the opening essay of the blog, Peart talks about how he learned to cook for his first wife when she was ill, and as such, has come to see cooking as a very visceral expression of love. Left to his own devices, he’d not cook–he doesn’t love it for itself. He loves cooking for the people he loves– and that is a distinction that I believe most people would understand and agree with.

My first guinea pig, I mean, cooking student, Bill, figured it all during the hours of a long evening of the two of us cooking a multi-course Chinese feast at the home of a friend who had never tasted our food before.

It was a stressful evening for Bill–me–I was in my element. When we had gone to Krogers here in Athens (we were visiting from Maryland), I had found that there was no ground pork to be had, so I had shrugged, bought pork shoulder and loin and had declared I would simply mince it by hand with two matched cleavers–mine and Bill’s. This process is loud and flashy, and before long, half of the twenty-odd diners had popped their heads into the smallish kitchen to see what the ruckus was about.

Bill worked quickly and efficiently, but had the air of a wild rabbit harried by hounds–breathless and wide-eyed.

By the time we served the first course, a hot and sour soup fragrant with lemongrass and galangal, Bill’s face had taken on the look of a whitetail deer in the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler on a rainy night. He was terrified.

I whispered in his ear, “Relax. Remember, no apologies, and no fears. Ever.”

When everyone had filed through the kitchen and ladled up their soup, he and I both two small bowls, and slipped into the nearly silent living room.

I say nearly silent because while there was a lot of sipping and noisy slurping going on, no one, but no one was talking.

Everyone’s head was bowed over their bowls as they busily ate the soup in great gulps.

I smiled, sat and sipped my soup, while watching everyone else eat.

When I looked up, Bill was sitting across from me on a floor pillow. He hadn’t touched his soup, even though he hadn’t eaten all day.

He was just gazing around, smiling goofily.

“Now I understand,” he whispered, “Why you barely eat anything when you cook for people. You don’t need to.”

I grinned and rose, heading back to the kitchen after finishing my last swallow of my meager bowl of soup.

When Bill followed me, I nodded. “My food is their delight, not the food I cook.”

As he sipped his soup, I turned back to the stove.

“Let’s get back to work,” I said. “Spring rolls can’t roll and fry themselves, you know.”

It was pointed out to me by a regular reader who was so incensed by a statement that Pollan made in the course of his eight page article that she wrote a letter addressed both to the editor of the NY Times and to Pollan himself refuting his claim that “Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.” She pointed out that making sweeping general statements about a group of people of which one is not a part is not only patently insulting, such reasoning is easily falsifiable.

Which she handily does, pointing out that she is a 40-something year old professional woman who works full time and sometimes more than that, but who still manages to take the time to cook completely from scratch, everything including Thai curry pastes and bread, all from whole foods purchased at local farmer’s markets.

So much for that “all American women” statement.

This statement comes after Pollan notes that most Americans no longer cook at home, and while he is careful to note that it wasn’t -just- the fact that most American women work outside the home that caused this decline in home cooking, the fact that Pollan makes this patently sexist statement negates any of his mentions of egalitarian domestic chore sharing before it.

My vigilant reader and I are not the only ones to pick up on the subtle sexist undercurrent of Pollan’s lament of the decline of American cookery; Kate Harding of Salon also noticed it and commented upon it in a blog post yesterday entitled “Michael Pollan Wants You Back in the Kitchen.”

In the course of her commentary, Harding rightly notes Pollan’s misreading of Betty Friedan’s classic work, The Feminine Mystique as “the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.”

Friedan’s book, which coincidentally, jumped into the American cultural consciousness at the same time as Julia Child did, did not -teach- American women to regard cooking and other housework as drudgery–it simply recorded and validated feelings that already existed among white, middle-class primarily suburban women regarding housework. Women were already dissatisfied with being housewives without the benefit of Friedan–it is just that she happened to ask them about it and then recorded what she found.

Pointing out pertinent facts such as the intellectual and spiritual malaise of intelligent, educated women who were essentially forced into the role of housewife back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s does not equate with making up these facts.

I find this subtle thread of woman-shaming on Pollan’s part to be disturbing and unfortunate, but what really irked me as I slogged through this eight-page article, was the fact that Pollan’s main source for information regarding how much time Americans, women and men (though, again, he harps on the women more than the men) in the kitchen cooking versus how much time they are spending on the couch watching people cook on cable television shows is that he quotes exactly one source of information on his the statistics that support his thesis.

Who is this source?

One Harry Balzer, a food marketing researcher for the National Eating Trends division of NPD Group. For the past thirty one years, Balzer has studied American eating and cooking habits–two years longer than the National Eating Trends division of NPD has existed.

I don’t really have a problem with Pollan asking Balzer about the cooking and eating habits of Americans–Balzer is indeed an expert. But, I find it rather odd that he would ask someone whose information is skewed in favor of large food corporations. I mean, really, Balzer -is- going to tell Pollan that Americans don’t cook anymore, because that is what he is paid by NPD to say to their food corporation clients. Does this make him a trustworthy, unbiased source of information?

No, not really. Not in my view anyway.

Balzer says that in the future, no one cook except the people in the supermarkets who will do all the cooking for us. No Americans will ever cook again in the next generation because no one is teaching the next generation how to cook anymore.

Pollan agrees, noting that if you look at the programs on The Food Network, very few of them really teach cooking technique like Julia Child did back in the day.

And, he is right. In the daytime, you have shows by Sandra Lee, Rachael Ray and Paula Deen, all three queens of the can-opener and convenience food aisles. And in the evening, the competitive cooking shows like Iron Chef, which make cooking a competition, and shows which feature macho male chefs creating amazing food that no one in their right minds would try to make at home. No effort is made to show basic cooking techniques–the days of Julia Child, Madeline Kamman, Martin Yan and heck, even The Two Fat Ladies are gone. Cooking is now entertainment, not something that one would want to learn. At least, not on TV.

But is television the only mass-media out there that consumers turn to? What about, oh, say, the Internet? You know, that thing you are reading this post on?

And what about food bloggers–you know, like yours truly, and many other amateurs out there in the world, who are cooking, photographing their efforts and writing about them? Some of us food bloggers specifically go out of our ways to teach cooking techniques, and so yeah, there -are- people out there teaching the next generation to cook, thank you very much.

What about the professional food bloggers like Mark Bittman? His blog, “Bitten” is all about teaching simple plain cookery that is accessible to everyone.

And then there is Michael Ruhlman who is, in addition to being a professional author, is also a passionate food blogger. In his response to Pollan’s gloomy article, he notes that there are plenty of bloggers teaching cookery to untold numbers of readers. He states:

Balzer is wrong, of course. Many, many people are cooking. Most of the people reading this, for instance, are committed cooks. As are the gazillions of readers clicking on Simply Recipes and 101Cookbooks looking for honest home cooking.

And both Bittman and Ruhlman have written books teaching the average American how to cook simple dinners using whole foods using techniques that anyone can learn. Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen and Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking and Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food are all excellent introductions to the art of cookery which anyone who has basic reading comprehension skills and some basic kitchen tools can use to learn to make healthful, delicious meals for themselves and their families.

So, yeah, I stand with Ruhlman and agree that there are plenty of cooks out here teaching other folks how to cook. I know for a fact that my blog has taught a great many readers how to cook, because I get email every week from people telling me so. And I know that there are plenty of other bloggers get the same sort of emails because I hear from them, too.

I mean, let’s think about this a little bit.

If there is no one in America cooking anymore, if there are fewer Americans cooking than ever, if we really have gone that far into the culinary gutter, then why have the number of farmer’s markets in the United States ballooned over the past twenty years? Where is all that food going? I mean, someone is buying it all–otherwise the farmers wouldn’t be making livings from it, right?

Why is Whole Foods such a big corporation? People don’t just buy their prepared foods–they buy the organic produce, the free range eggs and grassfed dairy, the seafood and free-range meat, too. If people weren’t buying these products, they would not be on the shelves.

If no one is cooking anymore, why was “Locavore” the 2007 Oxford word of the year? I mean, if no one was cooking and eating local food, it would not have been useful enough to catch the dictionary publisher’s attention.

And Michael Pollan knows about all of these facts.

So, why is he getting his information from a source who is going to spew the facts that the food corporations pay him to spew?

The only thing I can figure is that Pollan wanted to scare and shame people back into the kitchen. by presenting it as a hopeless situation. It is a sensationalist way to get readers’ attention–gloom and doom sell newspapers after all, but really, I don’t think he is going to get anyone to rush off to the kitchen and bustle among the pots and pans to rustle up dinner that way. No one likes to be shamed, blamed or guilted into doing anything.

I think that Ruhlman’s way, and Bittman’s way, and my letter-writing reader’s way, and heck my way, is going to produce more positive results. By leading by example, by writing about cooking in a positive way, by talking about farmers markets and local food and showing how easy making real food can be, I think that food bloggers and cookbook authors are getting more people into the kitchen than Harry Balzer wants to think about or even imagine.

So, do I think Michael Pollan stuck his foot in his mouth?

Maybe he did a little, though I think that he had the best of intentions in doing so, and I don’t think the condition of foot-in-mouthitis is a fatal case.

I think he believes he will inspire people to return to the kitchen by telling them all the bad things that will happen to America and Americans if we forget how to cook.

Either that, or he wanted to sell more papers for the New York Times by writing gloom and doom predictions.

Whatever Pollan’s reasons for writing his article, I know that I and plenty of other cooks will merrily keep on growing, buying, cooking and eating delicious whole foods, despite what market researchers would like Micheal Pollan and everyone else to believe.