Over the past decade of marriage, our eating habits have increasingly tended towards whole foods. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but as time has gone on, we’ve become less reliant on the packaged foods found in the middle of the supermarket, and more on the “perimeter” foods: produce, meats and dairy.
This has led to a gradual evolution in which a butcher, the farmer’s market and Trader Joe’s can largely take care of any of our culinary needs. It’s rare that I venture into the large supermarkets, and only for the handful of things that I can’t get at TJ’s.
Today, we went to Safeway. I walked the aisles looking for the things on my list – oatmeal, large cans of crushed tomatoes, baking powder – but also to see if there was anything else that I’d forgotten.
What I discovered is that nearly all of the food I was raised on as a child falls into those packaged, middle-of-the-supermarket aisles. Yes, I was the kind of kid who was raised on shelf-stable processed cheese products, parmesan cheese in the green can, spaghetti sauce in a jar, and my mother’s old standby: chicken cooked in cream of mushroom soup.
Today, it would never occur to me to serve any of these things, which sparked a dinner table discussion that my toddler didn’t understand, but had us laughing. Can you imagine my Italian husband’s horror when I thought that real Parmesan cheese – the kind that you grate at the table – “tasted funny” compared to the green can of cheese that I had grown up with? With all of the different ways to cook chicken, was there ever a reason to drown the poor chicken breast in creamy condensed soup? And now knowing that I can make a really tasty homemade sauce in less time than it takes to cook pasta, why on earth would I need spaghetti sauce in a jar?
I think that my mother cooked that way because she thought that it was somehow faster. Yet I hardly spend my entire evening in the kitchen. I have a toddler demanding my attention. We’re certainly not having chicken Kiev or multi-course meals on a random Tuesday night. And yet, it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of effort or creativity to come up with something more memorable than beef-a-roni.
Of course, there’s no doubt in my mind that my son will one day go to a friend’s house for dinner and decide that there is nothing tastier than Velveeta poured over elbow macaroni, and beg me to make it for him. My husband will shake his head and resign himself to the fact that my genetic disposition towards processed foods has been handed down to the next generation, and I will tell my son the stories of dinnertime growing up at his Grammy and Granddad’s. Until then, he’ll just have to endure torturous years of homemade pasta sauce and fresh ingredients.