In social economics it is common to hear the phrase, hidden cost. “Hidden cost” refers to an expense not included in the price of a product or service. As far as I understand, these hidden costs suggest that someone or something is exploited to make the final product affordable. Two common examples come to mind: one, clothing made by child workers. Yes, the t-shirts are $2 but who is underpaid or uninsured to make the price possible? In the context of food, non-organic produce is another good example. Why are strawberries at the farmers market more expensive than those at the store? The price difference refers to the growing method employed by the farmer and the extra work required for organic berries. The conventional berry is grown with pesticides to kill bugs, while the organic berry is grown without such chemicals (and more berries are lost to insects.) Consequently, the stream near the berry farm is polluted with these chemicals. Pollution is one of the hidden costs behind the cheap strawberry.
When I think of hidden costs I think of tangible things, like clothing or food. Lately, I find myself wondering about the hidden cost of convenience. When I talk to people about cooking food and planning meals, the immediate response is “who has time for that” or “what about poor people who have no time?” It seems that after price, time is the second target among the fearful doubters.
This conflict of interest gets me thinking about convenience. Like my example above, practically all food items that are not grown on small organic farms have an environmental hidden cost and most likely underpaid and exploited laborers – we can call this a ‘human hidden cost.’ But at the moment I’m less focused on convenient foods, like fast food or packaged processed foods; I am interested in the act of convenience.
This act of convenience is linked to the use of a convenient product. For example, it is convenient to use boxed chicken stock rather than making it from scratch even though the latter process is fairly simple. Among the skeptical, simplicity is not the problem. The time it takes to make chicken stock from scratch is somehow not simple. That use of time takes away from the simplicity of the meal or recipe.
Yes, chicken stock has 6 ingredients but it takes 2 hours to make, therefore it is inconvenient.
It seems as if ‘convenience’ has become a mentality, a normative trait in our mainstream culture. If this assumption is at all true, then this may be a huge obstacle for the food movement. Slow Food comes to mind here, as this international organization has begun the fight against convenience. (See Slow Food’s “Ark of Taste” as an example of their work.) In some ways I think Slow Food is at an extreme end of the spectrum. As much as I commend their work in the food movement, I fear that their ideals are not fit for all Americans and instead, Slow Food attracts the educated and well-off food lovers in our society. For our purposes, lets keep Slow Food at one extreme and not expect their ideals to be the ‘next best thing.’
That said, the local food movement is getting huge support from Slow Food and its local chapters spread out across the country. One positive effect is the growing popularity of farmers markets and stores catering to “slow food” foods, like artisanal cheeses and grass-fed beef and fair trade coffee. Again though, who gets access to these high-quality and incredibly expensive goods? We may eat some quality meats, but our refrigerator rarely sees some aged cheddars from WI or a tangy goat cheese from France. I have yet to figure a budget that let’s us really live the good life!
But I digress. The issue is education and teaching people how to eat simple whole foods. For example, roasting a chicken with rice and steamed broccoli is really not that complicated, but it does take time. Why is taking time to prepare a meal not a priority for people? Why does television get watched 4+ hours a day but so few people have the time to make chicken stock? This really irks me.
This leads me to the hidden cost of convenience (in the kitchen): the more convenience is sought, the weaker the ability to consume healthy foods that nourish the individual, the family and the community. Above all else, how can health not be a priority? (This of course is even more ironic with the ongoing healthcare crisis.) If it truly is the number one priority, why does meal planning and healthy food preparation get the short end of the stick?
I think it’s time to be more honest about our priorities.
Related posts:
- The “Hidden Cost” of Convenience (Returns!)
- The “hidden cost” of convenience (follow-up)
- Chicken Stock
- Menu Consultation
- “Fancy Food”
Tags: cooking, food literacy, slow food, Stock
Last week I cooked a wild Alaskan halibut chowder for a potluck, the chowder called for chicken stock. If I want to create my own chicken stock for a chowder that I am cooking on Thursday, I need to take the 6 hours to prep it on the weekend before, or possibly a few days in advance (but who , with a job, has that kind of time to prep during the weekday). How can I spend all that time just for one dish?
It starts with knowing how to manage a kitchen. Roasting a bird on the weekend can be a meal for Sunday, letfovers on Monday and the carcass can form the stock for the chowder on Thursday. This takes time and planning and a little ingenuity. I think much of the valuable cultural kitchen wisdom has eroded over the last few generations. In place of planning and management of a kitchen is the convenience item.
One question I have for you is what are the hidden benefits of convenience foods? What has the additional 7 hours of planning and prep time allowed the home cooks of our society to do?
The free time afforded families by the invention of convenient foods is conflicted and unbalanced. There are many wonderful benefits to the added time, but in my opinion, these benefits are tied to the consumer world we inhabit. It’s a tough question to answer because it makes me think about all the traditional values I desire vs. the hedonism I want to fulfill for myself.
My call for cooking at home is completely tied to a romantic view of community and sustainability – i.e. growing your own food, canning with friends, cooking meals with family, etc. All forms of convenience require you to rely on an external entity. I am advocating for greater self-reliance and all the knowledge that comes with that.
To answer your question about time, it is partially about the temporal order of food and TV… if someone gets home under an hour before they want to eat, preparing food feels time consuming. TV often comes after dinner (for me at least, and i don’t think i’m alone).
One of the challenges that slow food has is teaching people how much time they actually spend eating out or preparing convenience foods now and showing them that it is possible prepare meals in little more than the time they are using now.
People need tools for thinking about making time work. For example, roasting a chicken can produce more than one from scratch meal for their family. It just front loads the time into one day. But in order to get people consistently eating local foods from scratch, there does need to be a lot of attention on foods that can be easily prepared in a short amount of time but stay true to the idea of local and from scratch. It is a sad reality, but in order to make this change people need an arsenal of easy (that extends beyond the bounty of summer).
My reality is that during the semester unless I eat salads or eggs every night, making an entire meal from scratch each night is out of the question. It doesn’t work, the economy of scale for 1 person is really high. Instead I make one or two big meals a week, then eat half 2 meals a day, freeze the other half and eat it in a few weeks.
Good point Caren on the economy of scale comment. The fact that so many homes are filled with a single person trying to feed that one person throws a wrench in the traditional view of home-cooked meals. It would make sense if a new communal living movement began in response to this trend, as it is difficult to live alone, have an active life outside of work and eat home-cooked meals regularly. This balance is the main issue and I think the individual needs to find a way to make it work.
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[...] other food activists and the like) is the “hidden cost” of convenience. In a previous post I went into great detail on this topic. To summarize, the external costs not accounted for in the [...]