I've long believed that the idea that eating well couldn't be done on a budget was somewhat incorrect. Certainly if you had no access to healthy food then no matter how much money you had, it wouldn't matter. But assuming you have the access to choose healthy over not healthy, it seemed that the bigger issue was the perception that there wasn't time to cook, or perhaps, there weren't the skills.
To cook - like many other things in our Western culture - is a choice. If we don't "want" to cook or "like" to cook we don't have to. It wasn't always that way and still isn't in many other parts of the world (and truthfully, in many parts of the US as well.) To live is to cook...or if you eat only raw foods, at least to prepare them if not alter them with heat. Yet in the last 30+ years we seem to have left cooking to others, too busy with "important" things to do it. But maybe the tide is shifting as "cooking" takes on a new chic face with shows, competitions and attention by marketers. Yet, at it's heart, cooking is about sustaining life, building community among friends and family and - at least for me - it's a meditation on the amazing variety, taste, aroma and beauty of all the ingredients as well as the finished product.
How we view cooking - as drudgery to be left to others or as something that doesn't fit into a busy day - has consequences. Both financial and health related. And the money we spend on it doesn't have to break the bank to be tasty or more nutritious. Slow Food, the movement that began as a reaction against "fast food," has set out The $5 Challenge to encourage cooking and reeducate us that eating well doesn't have to be expensive. In the process, hopefully people will begin to rediscover there is a joy in cooking (a tip of the hat to Irma Rombauer...) and in the results. Even if things don't work out quite the way the recipe shows, unlike with other mistakes in life, with cooking most times we can really eat our mistakes :-)
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