The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [15]
You simmer this mixture for an hour, add the grain, cook slowly for another two hours, and let it cool. The most delicious way to eat it, Fisher writes, is by taking some slices of the solidified mass and frying them like scrapple.
“Shame on you, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher,” I muttered under my breath as I scoured the supermarket, trying to shop for her recipe. “Why couldn’t you have given the quantities in weight or volume?” I had already called the Commerce Department. From 1942 to 1992, the overall consumer price index increased 8.8 times, while food prices increased 9.5 times. I could have tracked down the price of ground beef in 1942, and celery and onions, but I had no way of identifying what kind of whole grain Fisher had in mind. So I threw up my hands, multiplied all her numbers by 9.5, and filled up my shopping cart with $1.43 worth of ground beef (thirteen ounces on super-special sale), 95 cents of Wheatena (just a half pound), and $2.37 of onions, celery, carrots, and cabbage, nearly a pound of each. Can you believe that celery costs nearly as much as beef?
How We Live Today
Today’s mania for take-out food and the disappearance of home cooking have two related causes—smaller households and working women. (No man ever gave up cooking because he went back to work.) Are these trends likely to continue? With the aid of a see-through plastic ruler, I have projected the past twenty-five years of U.S. Census Bureau figures into the future, and the results are chilling.
Item: By the year 2050 the average family size will have decreased to about one person. Everyone in America will be living alone.
Item: All women older than eighteen will be working outside the home.
Item: All women will be older than eighteen.
The inevitable conclusion is that by the year 2050, everybody will order take-out food at every meal.
Eating will become extremely expensive. You will need an annual income of at least $392,114 in current dollars to get by. Grazing my way from one end of Manhattan to the other, I found that a modestly upscale take-out breakfast, lunch, and dinner cost $40 plus $7 for a taxi or $54,896 a year for an average family of 3.2 persons. Department of Agriculture figures show that the average American family spends 14 percent of its income on food. Therefore, it must earn $392,114 a year.
Finding good take-out food is not easy. Searching it out will become your full-time occupation in the year 2050, more than cooking ever was. Americans will once again become a lonely race of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers prowling the darkened city streets, wallets honed and sharpened, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting pint of pasta primavera and snare the slow-footed slice of pâté de campagne. We will scarcely have time to eat.
April 1988
I browned the meat first, ground up the vegetables in my food processor, added some canned tomato puree, salt, and pepper for additional flavor, grew thoroughly fed up with Fisher’s instruction to “cover the thing with what seems too much water,” covered the thing with too much water, and then had to let it boil down for the next five hours. The finished Sludge was an appetizing brown and tasted inoffensive (more onions and tomatoes would have helped), and I let it cool and solidify in a large baking pan. The recipe yielded ten very generous half-pound portions (I was in charge of portion control), one for lunch, one for dinner, and a half portion for breakfast for the next four days. Total cost was $5.25, including the tomato puree, salt, and pepper. Cost per day was $1.31. Add 30 cents for coffee and a little orange juice in the morning, and subsistence comes to $1.61 a day. Just compare that with $1.70 a day for eight peanut-butter sandwiches and four glasses of reconstituted milk—not counting the 20 extra cents for a deluxe vitamin pill.
Whether Sludge or peanut-butter sandwiches with