December 13th, 2008 by Chris Eng

“Not only am I not learning, I’m forgetting stuff I used to know. ”
- Milhouse

I was thinking about The Joy of Cooking the other day and how baffling parts of it were to me growing up. “Why,” I thought to myself in dumbfounded bemusement, “do they tell you how to skin and gut animals in here? Do people still do that?” The short answer being yes, just not in as great numbers as they used to.

And that’s the thing of it: the contents of The Joy of Cooking were a standard repository of kitchen practice and advice from 50 or 60 years ago. In half a century, the collective knowledge and wisdom related to food preparation in Western culture has degraded immensely. Catastrophically, really. Witness the CitiGroup ad from earlier this year, featuring a woman standing in a kitchen where every available bit of cupboard space is filled with clothes, about which she proudly boasts: “I don’t cook. So I made my eat-in kitchen a fabulous walk-in closet.” Which isn’t to say it’s a woman’s place to be in the kitchen skinning possums and baking pies and men should be out shooting said possums with their 12 gauge. Not at all. But it is to say that we generally have no idea where our food comes from or the steps it takes to bring it to the table anymore, and even the act of cooking a simple meal is arduous and confusing to the better part of a generation.

If most of our food is already prepared and comes from a box, bag, bottle or can, what will that mean if the cost of shipping the food to the cities from its origin points around the globe becomes so expensive it’s untenable to continue buying it on a daily basis? It means people will have to resort to buying their food locally—fresh food, untouched by preservatives and still in its component parts. And the generation that’s going to have to put it together is the one demanding Kraft Cheese & Macaroni in already assembled microwaveable packages because the original kind takes too much effort and/or skill to prepare.

This loss of knowledge and wisdom is touched upon in a recent essay by Dorothy Woodend. In it, Woodend specifically adresses the concept of what might happen to coming generations if there’s some kind of large-scale emergency spurred on by a global oil crisis. All the skills useful in such a situation (which our grandparents might have known and practiced) are being forgotten and abandoned at such a rapid pace that in a few generations there will be very little first-hand knowledge left to be passed down.

“Still,” as one of my co-workers argued, while we discussed this the other day, “we’ve never been in a situation like we are now, where almost limitless information is available on every conceivable subject at the touch of our fingertips.” Which is true as far as it goes, but Woodend has a convenient and succinct rejoinder for that: “Information is not knowledge, nor even close to wisdom.” And that drives to the heart of the matter. If you want to build a house, you can find blueprints for any one you want, but they won’t teach you the proper way to use your tools. Even if you find good books on foundation-laying, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, tiling, shingling and all of the other trades that go into house-building, you still won’t have the accumulated tips and advice accumulated by doing the same job over the course of your life—the wisdom gained by being an expert in one’s field. That’s what will take the most time to regain, should we find ourself at a point where our culture needs this wisdom again.

And those are my plans for the short term: read up on the various subjects I’m interested in as much as possible, then seek out someone able to impart first-hand knowledge of them. In the case of farming, there’s a number of places around the Lower Mainland that accept volunteers (though not for a few months, at the moment—December/January isn’t really the ideal crop-growing season), and in the case of cooking, there’s Carla. I’m not an awful cook, but she knows tricks and shortcuts around the kitchen that would help me out immeasurably over the course of my life, and conveniently enough lives in the same house as me. In point of fact, there are experts out there willing to give you practical, hands-on training in almost any almost any field you could want—some for money (in places like community colleges), some not—but we have to get our D.I.Y. drives back up and running and quit handing all our problems off to the next person in line. Yes, there’s too much out there to be an expert or even a jack-of-all-trades in every field, but we can learn enough to feel like accomplished, capable and responsible people in our own lives, and maybe the reclamation of that responsibility—and the decision not to fill our kitchen with Manolos—is one of the most responsible acts we can currently strive for.