TEDxSanJoaquin - Ken Albala - Why We Don't Cook Anymore

Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific. He is the author or editor of 14 books on food including Eating Right in the Renaissance, Food in Early Modern Europe, Cooking in Europe 1250-1650, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe, Beans: A History (winner of the 2008 International Association of Culinary Professionals Jane Grigson Award), and Pancake. He has also co-edited two works, The Business of Food and Human Cuisine, and two other edited collections are forthcoming this fall: Food and Faith and A Cultural History of Food: The Renaissance. Albala was also editor of three food series for Greenwood Press with 30 volumes in print and his 4-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia was just published this summer. Albala is also co-editor of the journal Food Culture and Society and general editor of the new series AltaMira Studies in Food and Gastronomy, for which he has written a textbook entitled Three World Cuisines: Italy, China, Mexico which will appear in the spring of 2012. He is currently researching a history of theological controversies surrounding fasting in the Reformation Era, and has co-authored a cookbook for Penguin /Perigee entitled The Lost Art of Real Cooking, the sequel of which will appear next year and is entitled The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home.

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[nbnvideo]

One of the best TED's I have heard.  He is correct in everything that he says in this talk and I completely agree.  Also, he speaks well. 

[gabrielemariotti]

One of the few good things of being Italian is that everything he said you kinda know by default, you know food, you share food, you are generally responsible of food consumption.

[smb]

Bravo for Ken - his curiosity, enthusiasm, knowledge and conviction. We may not cook but still value a "home-cooked" meal, Sunday dinner, Thanksgiving, the feast after Midnight Mass, brunch. I got the "spend an hour" speech in high school in a Boys Only talk about "health" a zillion years ago (lol). He said we owed it to ourselves to fix a nice meal and enjoy it every day.

As religious and civic gatherings decline, food is assuming a greater importance socially. I see two more problems - the mother to daughter chain that worked for years is gone and our affluence lets us pretend to cook / dine out. We went to a progressive dinner (food not politics) and in a $150, 000 kitchen the wife told us she liked to cook except for handling food, cutting, dicing or using the stove. Her husband said, "We do cook!" (They get these packages where you add X to Y then stir in Z and put in microwave.) I taught my kids to cook and they do so today for their families.

[blindbookworm]

It makes me sad that people don't cook. I'm visually impaired and I am the only one in my group who new how to cook. If a nearly blind person can cook and make it turn out great, then ANYONE can. Get with the program people!

[j.munday]

I think the reason people insist on out of season produce is mainly because of cookbooks. "The recipe says I need peaches!" so you go to the grocery store in the middle of December and pick over sad tasteless peaches. Darling, pick a different recipe! That being said, frozen foods are great. I consider them to be like fresh produce more than anything.

[BobdelGrosso]

Whoa, you are preaching to the choir re: losing cookbooks. I have no use for the damned things. And most are loaded with recipes plagiarized from other cookbooks "tweaked" to give the impression of novelty.
After 30 years of professional cooking I've got maybe as many cookbooks in my library. About a tenth are books I've edited; most are hand-me-downs; there are 3 that I open a few times/ year.  

[blindbookworm]

I did not know that Marie Calender was a restaurant

[Yottabee]

Great talk! I was so intrigued, but this wouldn't play beyond 12:17 - how frustrating!

[gabrielemariotti]

This is likely to happen in a country with no food culture (like USA) where people don't even know how food grows or is processed. Sad.