I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, which I loved
I kind of laughed when I saw the title and heard him talking about how an awful lot of what we eat now (at least in the US) is not actually ‘food’, as our grandmothers would recognize it. It is imitation food.
I stopped laughing as I read on and he convinced me. He’s also a really good writer, so maybe I should say he seduced me.
But his point was borne out a few minutes ago, in my kitchen.
My three year old wanted chips (fries, to the Americans) with his lunch, so I raked around in the freezer and found…no chips. Luckily the pantry had some potatoes and just enough oil to fry them in. I peeled and sliced the potatoes, plunged them into cold water for as long as I could while the oil was heating up, dried them off and fried them up. Yum!
But as I was draining off the oil and serving up the food, having promised both boys some chicken and chips, my five year old wandered into the kitchen, saw what I was doing and said, disparagingly,
“Mu-um! Those aren’t chips! Those are potatoes!”