This is a link to an article in which wunderchef Gordon Ramsay decries the poor culinary skills of today's Woman. He's making a new TV show featuring Britons in their home kitchens, and he's gobsmacked and a little bit disgusted to discover that some women can't cook, have no intention of learning or even trying to cook, and that they subsist on frozen meals, take-aways and the like.
I wonder whether this will cause a ruckus? Some sisters might be upset, interpreting Gordon’s Ramsay's disdain as implying that a woman’s place in the kitchen, goddammit!, regardless of whether she has been operating on brains or overseeing the m+a of multi-billion multinationals all day. Has he no idea exactly how busy the 21st century superwoman actually is?
Maybe modern
raunch culture biatches don’t care about cooking, eating and nutrition as much as they care about attracting attention from men? Sounds like Gordon hasn’t noticed that cooking is old-skool, an antiquated life skill irrelevant in an age where
Girls Go(ne) Wild! and enter wet t-shirt competitions because they are empowered and in charge of their own sexualization! Yay!
Am I supposed to hate Gordon Ramsay because he hates it when people can't and won't cook? I hate this too. It's just that my hatred doesn't distinguish between the genders. I love to cook, and more importantly, I love to eat, so I don’t care how snobbish I sound.
I was in the kitchen once when a woman of my acquaintance found it funny that I was making a tomato sauce from scratch, because (you’ll have to imagine the nasal bogan whine here) "tomato sauce already comes in jars at the supermarket."
Actually, tomato sauce doesn’t come in jars from the supermarket . What’s in those jars is an overly sugary one-dimensional substance vaguely reminiscent - but at the same time completely unlike - sugo.
We both learned something that day. She learned that tomato sauce doesn’t have to come from the supermarket. And I? Well, I discovered that spaghetti Napoli is made by dumping a jar of Dolmio on top of a plate of pasta over which you then grate Coon cheese. It’s apparently great because you don’t even have to warm the Dolmio up first!
Men can be equally disgusting. I would routinely throw up after a weekend at an ex’s place because - among many other crimes against my finely calibrated digestion - he laboured under the misapprehension that curry flavoured Continental Pasta & Sauce was a vegetable. I’m sorry, but how many things are wrong with this putative foodstuff? It's pre-parcooked pasta in a bag (wrong) with a dehydrated sauce (wrong), which you bring to life by adding margarine and low-fat milk (both of which are abominations; ersatz products, masquerading as proper, nourishing foods = so wrong). It’s ‘pasta’ in a 'creamy' 'curry' sauce (how many types of wrong is this?), which would usually be served alongside a thoroughly (and likely purposefully, the bastard) overcooked steak bought from the supermarket (don’t get me started on how wrong this is). And that’s it. Bon appetit, baby. I still feel bilious thinking about it seven years later.
It’s not funny or cute to not know how to cook. It’s very wasteful to buy ready meals and prepared products - with your hard earned cash, you’re purchasing lots of packaging and some tasteless and bland substitute for a real meal. Something that is kinda like dinner, but its relationship to actual food is like the relationship of nu-metal to actual music. Or a Matthew Reilly novel to a book worth reading. Or - given this is a food themed post - a Big Mac to a burger from Andrew's in Albert Park.
In case you didn’t know this already, convenience foods are full of chemicals necessary to keep them from spoiling, caking, separating and being rendered otherwise inedible, and also to colour and season them to resemble the actual food being parodied. It is unlikely that these additives are necessary for the overall health and wellbeing of humans.
And I don’t mind if you call me a communist, but I’m not that interested in buying food from multinational corporations whose interests are profits before purveying quality products. Who conduct cost/benefit analyses to determine whether there’s a buck to be made out of poisoning you. Have you read
Fast Food Nation and
Seeds of Deception? Maybe you should; you’d be much less inclined to unthinkingly purchase foods that are likely contaminated (literally) with (actual) shit, or contain genetically modified ingredients, or scarily enough both.