six impossible things before breakfast 131scratch just to see if we can. We’ve rolled out and cut our pasta, raised
turkeys to roast or stuff into link sausage, made chutney from our garden.
On high occasions we’ll make cherry pies with crisscrossed lattice tops
and ravioli with crimped edges, for the satisfaction of seeing these story-
book comforts become real.
A lot of human hobbies, from knitting sweaters to building model air-
planes, are probably rooted in the same human desire to control an entire
process of manufacture. Karl Marx called it the antidote to alienation.
Modern business psychologists generally agree, noting that workers will
build a better a car when they participate in the whole assembly rather
than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day.
In the case of modern food, our single- bolt job has become the boring act
of poking the thing in our mouths, with no feeling for any other stage in
the process. It’s a pretty obvious consequence that one should care little
about the product. When I ponder the question of why Americans eat so
much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation.
We can’t feel how or why it hurts. We’re dying for an antidote.
If you ask me, that’s reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a
family’s life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just
products. It’s the prime motivation behind our vegetable garden, our reg-
ular baking of bread, and other experiments that ultimately become
household routines. Our cheesemaking, for example.
Okay, I know. You were with me right up to that last one. I’m not sure
why, since it takes less time to make a pound of mozzarella than to bake a
cobbler, but most people find the idea of making cheese at home to be
preposterous. If the delivery guy happens to come to the door when I’m
cutting and draining curd, I feel like a Wiccan.
What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It’s too hard to imagine, too home-
spun, too something. We’re so alienated from the creation of even ordi-
nary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations
team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back
around to doing a thing ourselves, at home. Knitting clothes found new
popularity among college girls, thanks largely to a little book called Stitch
and Bitch. Homemaking in general has its Martha. French cuisine had its
immortal Julia. Grilling, Cajun cooking, and cast- iron stewing all have