#Soups Disc Finale AU | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bamfcoyotetango · 7 years ago

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Number 7, Chaleigh please. 😁

Oh gosh, this is so very late but the Muses ate the prompt and gave me this .

7. Fake Relationship AU

Hand In My Hand

Raleigh's in the middle of setting up the music for the piano when Hansen, their bartender for the night, cleared his throat behind Raleigh.

"You need help cutting the citrus?" He asked sympathetically.

All the bartenders hate citrus and Raleigh's pretty good with a knife.

The only problem was that Hansen didn't ask for help.

Like... Ever.

"Yeah, actually. I, err, I've been meanin' t' talk with you." Hansen relented, his broad shoulders slumping in a show of emotion Raleigh didn't expect.

"Oh?" Raleigh arranged the music and left the wide performance platform, careful to step over the wires the sound crew hid under the rich red carpet. "Any reason in particular?"

The other man handed over a knife, a cutting board and a bag of mixed citrus. "Look, I know I'm not... the most social."

Raleigh snorted at that, "No shit."

"Oi, fuck off yeah? I'm trying here." Hansen growled defensively before he sighed. "I've got a problem."

"... And you think I can fix it?" He countered dryly as he sliced the fruits into multi-colored discs. "I know I'm the bar's handyman and all but uh, I normally don't fix people as a rule."

"Yes." The blunt honesty has Raleigh setting down his knife and turning to face Hansen. "Look, you're pretty enough that my Dad might be fooled inta thinkin' we're datin', alright? He knows I don't swing too often the other way and Mako's like my sister so I can't ask her an' the rest of the bartenders-"

Raleigh held up a hand and mulled it over, parsing out the basics of it in under two minutes. It wasn't exactly a secret that Raleigh appreciated multiple types of people. Hansen might've been a surly jerk but damn if he didn't fill out his bar polo shirt nicely. "You want me to date you... because your Dad is a hard ass?"

"Look, he's coming to visit in a few months an' he keeps a hairy eyeball on my social media, yeah? He knows when I'm not datin' and he gets all sad an' mopey like he didn't do a job 'n a half raising me. My old man wants to see me happy. So... are you in or what?" Hansen grumbled even as he rubbed at his nose.

Raleigh thought of his Maman, in remission, being overjoyed that her middle child finally found someone.

"I'll make you a deal," He allowed carefully, "if this is for your Dad, then it's also gotta be for my Maman. She's in remission and now she's tryin' to meddle in my love-life. You break her heart and I'll break your face. I'll pretend to date your ass for her sake if nothing else."

"What about...?"

Raleigh gritted his teeth and sucked in a calming breath. "Let's just say he's a bastard."

"... Oh. I guess we need to outline what's not okay to touch as a topic." Hansen pointed out.

"Yeah, might be a good idea." He admitted.

"For starters, don't ask about Mum and I won't ask about the rat bastard."

"Got it."

"By the way... M' name's Chuck." Chuck held out his hand and Raleigh shook it.

"Raleigh."

Chuck, for all of his asshole tendencies, was pretty decent with the whole dating thing.

Once Raleigh got past the scowl and the snark and the Alaskan-sized chip on his shoulder, that is.

He'd even bothered to ask Raleigh for his favorite flower (sunflowers) and had presented them with a scowl at the start of their next 'date'.

Somewhere along the way, dating Chuck had become less obligation and started to feel like... something Raleigh shouldn't enjoy as much as he did.

He shouldn't enjoy the under-the-breath quips that were so sarcastic that Raleigh actually cracked up laughing when he caught them.

He shouldn't sneak glances when Chuck closed his eyes and reveled in the wind coming off of the sea.

He shouldn't save a sunflower from each bouquet Chuck "remembered" to bring.

Raleigh spun a thick stem between his fingers and quietly admitted to himself that if he fell in love with Chuck, it might not be so bad.

It wasn't like the ginger bastard would ever return his feelings after all.

Raleigh was one of, it turned out, a lucky three people who had Chuck's phone number.

""So, Chuck hasn't called in and I have it on good authority that you're dating. I got the Kaidonovskies to cover his shift but could you do us all a huge favor and go check on him?"" Sergio asked. ""He's never done this before so I'm a little worried.""

"I'm on it, Serg. I'll let you know what's up, okay?" Raleigh hummed and then scrubbed a hand down his face as he texted Chuck.

Raleigh: Where r u?

It took near five minutes for Chuck to respond, which was way longer than his usual five seconds.

Chuck: m sick

Chuck: don't come over

Chuck: if I die u get my dog

He snorted, texting as he grabbed his jacket, his scarf and his washable surgical mask Mako had given him for his birthday.

Raleigh: drama llama

Raleigh: Ur not gonna die

Raleigh: I'm coming over

Chuck appeared to rouse at that.

Chuck: NO

If Chuck thought he could out-stubborn Raleigh, he had another thing coming.

Raleigh: YES

Raleigh: I'm making you homemade soup

Raleigh: u giant wiener

Chuck didn't respond for several moments as if shocked that Raleigh would do something that nice.

Chuck: U need my address

Chuck: Or did u expect to kno

Chuck: where I live, u wanker

He did laugh at that, midway through testing a tomato with his fingers.

Raleigh: I could ask Mako

Raleigh: She'll provide the info

Raleigh: with half the hassle that

Raleigh: Ur giving me

Raleigh: btw

Raleigh: R u allergic to tomato?

His phone buzzed with the response as Raleigh finished grocery shopping.

Chuck: no, not allergic to tomato

Chuck: pick up some tissue

As though he sensed he was being a little rude, he followed it with another text.

Chuck: ... pls?

Raleigh shook his head, flicked on his voice-to-text app and said, "Already on it period. Send."

Chuck sent the address and Raleigh pulled over into a gas station to input the address. He paused, contemplated labeling it 'U Grumpy Bastard' and then grinned at it occurred to him.

Chuck's address ended up as 'My Dumbass

An English bulldog sat in his way, Raleigh's arms aching as the grocery bags creaked.

"Uh, hi, pup. Could you do me a favor—"

"Max, get." Chuck rasped, poking his dog with his socked foot to let Raleigh into his apartment.

He toed off his boots out of habit and nudged them into a vaguely neat pile near the door.

Raleigh set all the bags down, found the trash can and the fridge and got to work.

By the time the tomato soup was bubbling on the stove, Chuck had been served eucalyptus tea, meds and tissues, in that order.

Raleigh absently texted Sergio as he watched his soup, keeping half an eye on a bemused and snuffling Chuck. He reigned in the urge to kiss the frown off of Chuck's face.

Chuck frowned and then wrote on the whiteboard Raleigh had brought from home.

'What? Do I have something in my face?'

"Nah. Just an old habit from when my sister was sick. She'd sneak off the couch and then get me sick cause she likes to cuddle when she's loopy on meds." He deflected as he poked at the soup.

The squeak of the marker was proceeded by Chuck gathering his blanket nest and sitting on the tall chair next to the counter.

'U have siblings?'

"Mm, two. Yancy's the oldest and Jazzy's the youngest. I'm the middle kiddo."

'Why tomato soup?'

"I'll have you know that Maman and my Mémé would skin me alive if I fed you anything else aside from this. It's supposed to be loaded with nutrients and good protein to help you get better." He countered with a raised brow.

'Meme??'

"French for Grandma. Maman is Mom." Raleigh explained. He pulled out the bacon, frowned and asked, "Where's your frying pan?"

'Under the stove.'

"... You don't cook, clearly, cause otherwise you'd know that that's the broiler, not a drawer. Also, these are really nice pans and it's a shame they don't get used more often." He talked mostly to himself but Chuck blew a raspberry from behind the covers. "It's true."

'Don't b rude. It's my space u know.'

"Supposed to be our space, remember? Shit, should I move in?" Raleigh asked and Chuck shook his head hard enough to negate that.

'NO.'

Chuck wrote quickly and then thrust it out as Raleigh patted the bacon to get the excess grease off.

'I'm already regretting asking u, alright? The last thing I need is to see u in ur undies. I bet u wear whities.'

"Hey! I wear boxer briefs, you jerk. Tightey-whities are soooo last season. Also, Jazz would murder me for that fashion crime. She's majoring in it and if I'm related to her, I'm gonna not cause her pain by dressing, and I quote, 'like a fisherman with no sense'. She's already tried to kill my sweaters, okay?" Raleigh grumbled as he dumped most of the bacon into the soup.

'Wait. Seriously?'

"Yeah, seriously."

'Ur jumpers r how I know it's u. No one else at the bar wears them like u do.' If Raleigh tilted it right, it might've been a compliment but Chuck didn't do those.

"Uhhhh, thanks, I think. Now, eat your soup and rest some more, alright?" Raleigh served up a decent bowl that would go down well with Chuck and reserved the rest of the soup in the pot, closing it with a lid. "Don't even think about ruining my soup by sticking it in the microwave. Heat it up on the stove on low." He looked at Max. "Do I need to take Max for a poop?"

'Probably. His lead's in the hall.'

Raleigh grabbed the red leash and Max was suddenly at his feet, butt wagging furiously.

He barely had room to tug on his boots.

"I'll be back! Finish that soup, Chuck!" The door closed with a clunk behind him. He laughed when Max tugged him down the street, barely giving him time to shrug on his jacket and wrap his scarf up the right way.

"Is that Max I hear?" Max boofed and somehow his butt wiggled even harder. "It is~" An older woman was sitting on the porch, her hands cradling a warm drink with a blanket in her lap. "Oh! You're not Chuck!"

"Ahh, no. He's sick," Raleigh mentioned with a shrug, his muscles straining as Max tugged on the leash in this woman's direction. "Max, pas maintenant*." He chided.

"You must be that friend of his."

"... Umm," Raleigh's face heated up as he thought about Chuck, who was probably miserably eating his soup and scrubbed at the back of his neck.

"Oh, I see. How long?" Her confidential tone made Raleigh want to combust from embarassment.

"Coupla months," he choked out, "Gotta go, ma'am, Max is, umm..."

"Go on. Chuck's got himself a keeper! You tell him Mrs. Gage said so, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am." Raleigh agreed as Max tugged on the leash again.

"Chuck, I swear to God that you've got the nosiest neighbors—" Raleigh froze at the sight of a man who could only be Chuck's Dad.

He let Max off the leash on autopilot after he closed the door, hanging it up like he'd seen it earlier. Raleigh kicked off his boots again and set them against the foyer frame, this time a great deal neater than they'd been before.

"You must be Raleigh," the man said as though he hadn't thrown their whole plan out of wack. "I'm Herc."

"Pleasure to meet you, sir." He let his manners take over, a smile on his face as he shook the offered hand. "Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?"

'Dad doesn't do tea.' When the whiteboard popped up from the couch, it seemed Chuck had retreated back with his blanket nest.

"Mm, coffee then?" Raleigh hummed as Herc looked between them. "Milk? Creamer?"

"Creamer, if you don't mind."

He busied himself preparing two cups of coffee and then dug into the supplies he'd organized on the counter, muttering to himself in Korean as he read the instructions for the citron tea he'd brought over.

"Coffee 'n creamer for us, tea for Chuck. Don't make that face. It's gonna feel nice and it's yuzu, vaguely lemony with honey." He sat next to Chuck, reaching to adjust the blankets and handing over the tea.

'Ur gonna get sick.'

"Mmm, yeah, probably. Do I look like I mind?" Raleigh pointed out as he gently pecked Chuck on the lips. Chuck grumbled wordlessly but snuggled closer as he drank his tea. He made a noise of surprise at the taste and looked at Raleigh with a wordless question. "So-Yi suggested it when I dropped by the bar. Y'know, half of them thought you got in a fight or dropped off the face of the planet. Being sick never even occurred to them."

'Liar.'

"No, that's what you get when literally three people have your number, you dumbass." He bickered back, looking up when a muffled laugh brought him back to their current situation.

Right.

Chuck's Dad.

"Y'know, I almost didn't believe my son when he said he was dating someone. He works hard and doesn't remember to leave time for himself but I can see he's in good hands with you." The pride Herc had for his son was clear in nearly every word he spoke.

"Yeah, well I could've said the same a while back. Chuck's sweet under like, fifteen layers of asshole, but you gotta have enough patience for the layers." Raleigh ribbed Chuck gently, letting himself touch instead of shying away from Chuck. They had to make this convincing—At least that was how he justified it to himself. "Mmm, you've got a fever." He told Chuck as he brushed the damp ginger hair away from Chuck's forehead.

'No shit, u wanker. What r u doing?'

Raleigh leaned in close and whispered his answer, "I'm being your boyfriend, hell practically the perfect one. The least your dumbass could do is play along, right?"

Chuck huffed at that and leaned into the casual touch. 'whatever. R we still doing that ice thing?'

"Like I'm gonna miss the chance to see you fall on your ass?" Raleigh teased. "We'll just have to reschedule for when you're better."

"I'll leave you two to be cutesy." Herc chuckled and Raleigh nearly face palmed.

They were totally—"Oh God, I'm the worst host-"

'Sorry Dad.'

"Don't be sorry. You two remind me of a better time." Herc only smiled at them and let himself out, nudging Max away from the door with his foot out of years of practice.

Raleigh practically turned the air blue with French curses before he sighed. "At least your Dad's convinced?"

"Why'd you kiss me?" Chuck's voice, as raspy as it was, caught his attention immediately.

"We're supposed to be dating. If I really was your boyfriend, I wouldn't let a cold keep me from kissing you. You were just so adorably grumpy," Raleigh replied before he caught what came out of his mouth. "I-I mean, I've gone and done it with my other relationships, y'know, so I thought you wouldn't mind—"

"Raleigh." Chuck's gaze cut off his voice faster than anything else. "Did you call me adorably grumpy?"

"No," he denied it quickly, valiantly trying to ignore how his face felt like it was on fire.

"You sure?"

"Yes!"

"Raleigh, I-"

"I think I might be in love with you." He blurted and then slapped both of his hands over his mouth in shock.

Oh he was so screwed; Chuck was going to break off their agreement, break up with him even though they weren't really dating and why did that thought hurt so much?

Raleigh made to stand, one foot planted on the floor when Chuck's hand shot out and grabbed the front of his sweater.

"I thought it was hopeless," Chuck coughed before he continued hoarsely. "that there was no way in a million years that sunshine personified would ever like me enough, but you said... You said you're in love with me."

Huh. Weren't they a match made in heaven; oblivious as hell until one of them confessed.

Raleigh settled back into the blankets and whispered, "'Sunshine personified'? Really?"

"Don't you start, Rahleigh."

"Well, since we're actually dating, there is a way to shut me up."

He was going to regret it later, he knew, but the feel of Chuck's tongue in his mouth over-rode the resignation of being sick right along with his boyfriend.

Mako only laughed when Raleigh whined about being sick.

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callioope · 7 years ago

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11 Questions Meme

I was tagged by @letthepeoplesay-oh and @ta-dala -- thanks both of you because I love these! Also I’m just going to combine these into one long post so I cut it so it wouldn’t be ridiculous.

Rules: Answer the questions given to you. Make 11 questions of your own. Tag 11 people.

First set: (letthepeoplesay-oh)

1. If you could have any animal (real or fictional) as a pet, what would it be? My actual dog is pretty awesome, but that’s probably not the point of this question. So I’m going to say a red panda because they are the cutest animal and that’s a fact.

2. What’s your Hogwarts house? (Or your best guess, if you’re not a fan!) I spent all my life thinking I was a Hufflepuff, but Pottermore put me in Ravenclaw.

3. If you could change the smell of rain to any other smell, what would you choose? Ummmm so I can’t actually smell so I don’t really know how to answer this question. Isn’t the smell of rain supposed to be pleasant?

4. What was your favorite book as a child? Haha well ok. My sister and I always loved to check out There’s a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake by Hazel Edwards from the library. I don’t know what we loved about it, maybe that the hippo got up to so many strange activities on a roof? So we recently found it super cheap on Amazon and reread it, and it’s actually kind of creepy? There’s a line where the kid is talking about how they like to watch TV and it goes “He watches. I know he does.” So anyways. We liked a weird book.

5. If the police came to your house to arrest you right now, what crime would they charge you with? Listen, when it comes to cops, I am basically Ben Wyatt. I’m Lawful Good. I’ve refused to jaywalk before. I don’t even know how to answer this. I cannot imagine myself committing a crime.

6. If you could sit on a bench in a beautiful woods, who would you like sitting next to you on the bench and why? My fiance because we always go hiking together and idk there’s no one else I’d rather be with

7. If you could choose your age forever, what age would you choose and why? I think 27? Idk why it just seems like the sweet spot between feeling young and feeling old? At least for me.

8. What’s your earliest childhood memory? I used to say it was when I was 3, sitting in our backyard in San Antonio, our neighbor’s ball landed in our backyard and I liked it so I just decided to keep it. But I think that’s more a memory of a memory at this point. So I’m going to go with... I was 4, saw Beauty and the Beast on ice at Hershey Park in PA, would fall asleep listening to the soundtrack.

9. If you could go back in time and change history, what would you change? Everything? There’s too much badness in history, I’m struggling to pick one thing. Maybe stopping Christopher Columbus. I think this would have just delayed the horribleness that was wrought upon the Americas but... maybe if he was stopped, it could have been different. Anyways Orson Scott Card wrote a book about this (Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. It’s probably problematic (I mean the title sounds kind of problematic); I haven’t read it in years, and Card has a tendency to be problematic. But it certainly was an interesting thought experiment.)

10. If you were to change your name, what name would you adopt going forward? I used to use Fiona as a pen name before I started using Callioope... I guess I also like Abigail. I wanted to use this name for a future kid, but my fiance’s aunt is named Abigail so now we can’t use it. Dumb. Anyways I’ve always felt really lucky that I like my name and wouldn’t want to change it.

11. How do you like to spend a rainy day? Curled up on the couch, hot tea in hand, reading.

Second set: (ta-dala)

1. What is the “craziest” thing you’ve done for the love of something? Well. I went skydiving for my fiance. I have a strong fear of heights, he’d been wanting to do it for years and said he’d prefer to share such a life experience with me (so he wouldn’t go with anyone else). I refused for many years, but this past summer I finally took the leap (har har) and bought a groupon for it for his bday. I actually ended up having a blast, so I’m glad I went, but… I definitely thought it was a thing only crazy people do, before I did it.

2. What is your ultimate bucket-list travel destination? I would have said Efes, but I had the fortune of going there in 2014. (Both my user pic and cover pic are from Efes.) Otherwise there are so many places I want to go that it’s hard to choose just one. Hmmm we didn’t do Pamukkale when we were in Turkey soo maybe that. I mean, basically, ancient ruins are usually at the top of my list. And there are a lot of ancient ruins in Turkey along the southwest coast that we didn’t go to that I want to go back for. Oh and hot air ballooning in Cappadocia!

3. Cats or dogs? Dogs. I have nothing against cats, but I grew up with dogs all my life because my mom was allergic to cats.

4. If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be? I mean, right now I’m sleepy and still not quite 100% (but very close) recovered from being sick, soo… being at home, in pjs, on my couch is pretty appealing. But my usual answer to this is somewhere in Turkey, or maybe München. I’d move to München if distance was somehow made negligible by science fiction-esque modes of transportation and thus I wouldn’t be so separated from friends and family.

5. Write me a piece of advise that you’d go back and give to your younger self. Perfection is the enemy of good enough — you don’t even have to be great at something as long as you try and give it the best you can.

6. Share one sentence of something you’ve written and tell me why you like it. “She discovers him on Endor, eyes dark and far away even after the Death Star disintegrates into fireworks above them, and they spend a night separate from the celebration, their own relief soft and slow and solemn as they reconcile their fears of tomorrow against its new promises.” from “if i wait (will you stay?)”

I enjoyed writing the imagery here; I liked the idea of Jyn and Cassian keeping their celebration of the destruction of the second Death Star private, it’s too deep and personal for them; I liked the alliteration of ‘soft and slow and solemn.’ The victory/beginning of the end of the war would be so charged for them because this is a war they’ve been fighting all their lives and it’d be the first glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel and I think that would terrify them as much as it would excite them.

7. Can you still love/be a fan of something/someone and be critical of a choice or decision? Why or why not? ABSOLUTELY!!! Thank you for this question, this is a good question and one I feel very strongly about. (Look, I’m a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, there’s no way I haven’t learned how to take enjoyment from something while still being critical of it.)

I’d argue that maybe you don’t really love something until you’re honest about its faults. That seems a little dramatic to say though. And I don’t want to devalue someone’s love of something because they’re not critical of it. (Also, some things just… are less problematic.)

With my own experience in fandom, I’ve felt more sincerely and honestly connected and engaged with a work once I’ve acknowledged its criticisms. I think it comes about naturally when you pay enough attention to something or analyze it deeply enough. And to some extent (depending on the work), I feel if I wasn’t honest about its faults, there’d be a level of idolization happening that isn’t 100% sincere. Placing works or people on a pedestal is dangerous. Understanding the faults of a person or thing, to me, seems like a more true/sincere/honest understanding of it.

Also, nothing in this world is 100% Perfect and Good. It’s possible for a Thing or Person to both propagate very good, positive, progressive ideas and beliefs and commit mistakes and misunderstandings that aren’t great. In fact, most things in life are probably this way. Open honesty about how something is good and how something is bad is a natural, and I’d say necessary, course for progressing and improving and gaining a better understanding of the world.

8. Rogue One. Dead or alive? ;) I don’t… I don’t understand this question. What do you mean dead? Why would they be dead? Obviously alive… :P

9. You can only eat one food the rest of your life. What is it? (You really didn’t want to ask me this question. I apologize in advance.)

It’s potatoes. There are so many different ways to cook them. I’m assuming that I’m allowed to cook them in different ways? Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew? I mean, in addition to what Samwise already wisely (heyyy) pointed out, there’s baked potatoes, potatoes au gratin, Hasselback potatoes, roasted potatoes — and so many ways to roast them! You can also make french fries, you can make potato chips. Cream of potato soup. Hash browns! Tater tots! Gnocchi! (I have leftover gnocchi from Maggianos in the fridge and it’s time for dinner and guess what I’m doing when I’m done here. I took a break to eat) And honestly?? I’ve only really covered western cooking for potatoes here. I’ve had potatoes in Indian cuisine that is delicious!! I just can’t remember what any of those dishes were called.

Look, I just googled all the ways you can cook potatoes and the first line of the first link that came up said “the potato is the Mariah Carey of vegetables.” They’re not wrong.

10. Give me your Desert Island Discs list. This was very hard and for the record, these only reflect my tastes as of today.

Records:

All This and Heaven Too by Florence + the Machine

Sibelius Symphony No. 2 by Jean Sibelius

While My Guitar Gently Weeps by The Beatles

(Can I count the end of Abbey Road as one medley? I mean, can I just bring Abbey Road? Only one song? FINE) it’s going to be whatever the best cover of Carry That Weight is with the longest jam session in it, research pending

Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky

Between Two Lungs by Florence + the Machine

Cassiopeia by Sara Bareilles

Howl by Florence + the Machine

On the Radio by Regina Spektor

A Day in the Life by the Beatles

Book of my choice: The Golden Compass. But I was very tempted to take Wicked. Gregory Maguire’s prose is next level it’s so beautiful I just…. But he’s a little darker for me. The Golden Compass has been a solid fave for a long time.

One luxury item… pen and paper?

11. What is your favorite curse word? I’m not really creative when it comes to cursing, I generally just say ‘fuck’ a lot.

My questions:

What was your favorite game to play as a child?

You hear just the first few notes of a song, recognize it instantly, and are filled with joy -- what song is it?

Name any goal you ever set for yourself that you are proud to have accomplished.

If you had to pick a senior yearbook quote today, what would it be?

What would your daemon be? (aka an animal manifestation of your ‘inner self’)

What was the first concert you ever went to?

If you were a city, what city would you be and why?

If you could automate a chore so you wouldn’t ever have to do it anymore, what would it be?

What is something you’ve learned in the past year?

Name a person, real or fictional, that has inspired you and explain how.

What is something anyone can do to make the world around them just a little bit better?

Tagging: @ta-dala (you seemed like you wanted more tags, so tagging you back! :) ), @theputterer, @magalis, @latinaspitfire, @thenewleeland, @estherlyon, @thestarbirdfromtheashes, @jenniferjuni-per, @lustfulpasiphae, @caffeinosis, @imsfire2 (and of course the disclaimer: no pressure/no worries if you don’t want to do it! and apologies if you’ve done it already)

#tag meme #personal #about me #liz rants

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theoanqblog · 7 years ago

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Rythmes & Bleus

J’ai récemment été surpris par la portée grandissante de mes billets. Bien que je ne sois pas encore en mesure de renverser un gouvernement ou d’impacter le cours d’une action cotée en bourse, j’ai néanmoins abîmé l’estime des membres de mon club de badminton – il m’apparait donc que Google Translate fait vraiment du bon boulot.

Ainsi, je profite de ce deuxième paragraphe pour rappeler que mon style caustique est à prendre avec une grosse cuillère à soupe de second degré, quelques comprimés d’humour noir et un bon chocolat chaud. Oui, j’écris des choses qui doivent être lues avec un certain recul.

Et puis là, j’ai envie de vous parler d’écrire, puisqu’une connexion vient de se faire dans mon cerveau. Un soir, alors que je travaille mes gammes au piano, m’arrachant les cheveux devant l’incapacité de ma main gauche à lier le pouce à l’auriculaire, je décide de moins penser. Et là, miracle ! Mon gros doigt dodu laisse la place à l’Apollon dans une fluidité onirique, ma main est comme une pluie de chair rosée qui s’abat sur un trottoir en ivoire, et la gamme de mi majeur résonne dans l’air avec toutes ses dièses.

Alors, ivre de joie et de fierté, je traverse l’école de musique déserte pour rejoindre le Quad plongé dans la nuit et le froid, les feuilles d’automne craquantes sous mes pas galopants, et je crie haut et fort : « Euréka ! Euréka ! ». Je chope au passage une belle pneumonie, mais qu’importe les microbes : j’ai été victime d’une connexion ! Un neurone qui se connecte à un autre neurone, rendant le possesseur du cerveau concerné un poil moins con.

Ecrire, c’est comme travailler ses gammes (ou quoique ce soit d’autre, pourvu que l’on ait la passion) : au début, c’est incroyablement frustrant. Et puis, au fur et à mesure, alors que l’on s’abandonne, que l’on se fait confiance, l’inspiration vient, et c’est comme si un liquide doré jaillissait directement du cœur vers le support – qu’il soit feuille de papier ou clavier blanc et noir. Et la sensation que l’on ressent alors est toute singulière.

Mais ne partons pas trop loin en terres inconnues, au risque de se perdre dans des phrases pompeuses et de jolis mots dénués de sens. Rythmes et bleus, rhythms & blues : parlons musique ! Le week-end dernier, j’ai joué au festival Arts Tech, organisé par une association étudiante dans une galerie d’art laissée à l’abandon.

Nous avions travaillé dur pour faire de cet évènement une expérience insolite, et le résultat l’était : imaginez-vous, une grande salle blanche aux recoins plongés dans l’obscurité. En son centre, un échafaud sur lequel sont posés projecteurs et guirlandes lumineuses, véritable phare au sein de la pénombre musicale qui règne sur le campus.

Sur les murs, les images projetées réagissent au son grâce à l’ingéniosité des étudiants qui s’initient au VJ (petite parenthèse pratique : DJ vient de Disc-Jockey, le rider de disques, celui qui contrôle la musique. Ainsi, vous l’aurez deviné, VJ correspond au Video-Jockey, celui qui contrôle la vidéo.)

L’audience était réduite, composée de curieux, d’amis et de quelques passionnés. Pour l’occasion, me sentant en confiance, j’ai laissé de côté ma platine en plastique pour me diriger vers un vieux piano en bois, oublié dans un coin de la galerie. J’ai joué des mélodies, des accords, puis une chanson entière composée sur Belle Île à l’été 2013.

Alors que les dernières notes s’estompaient dans une atmosphère chargée d’émotions, je suis passé sur mes machines pour une performance live. J’ai livré un mélange de petits bouts : des échantillons de sons coupés en morceau, des voix modifiées à l’extrême, des basses lancinantes, une structure rythmique répétitive, et le son du piano en arrière-plan. Puis, après une bonne dizaine de minutes, j’ai finalement sorti ma platine pour jouer la musique d’autres, et entraîner tout le monde dans une danse frénétique.

La performance a été capturée, et je partagerai ici le résultat dès que possible. En attendant, je vous laisse profiter des photos prises par une membre de l’association pour vous donner une idée de l’ambiance.

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leblancmusicinfo · 5 years ago

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8/22/2019

Unwound - Challenge for a Civilized Society (disc 7 from the What Was Wound box set) while bagging papers and the start of delivering. Elvis while delivering and Down - On March The Saints for the ride home.

Elvis flash drive still going strong in the car. I have finally hit the L songs.

at WQA:

Y&T - In Rock We Trust

Madonna - Express Yourself (Stop Go Dubs) (1989) HD Limited Edition

Eddie Trunk comments on "THE ILLEGALS VULGAR DISPLAY OF PANTERA" (08/21/2019)

The Soup Dragons - Divine Thing Sweet (12" Inch Special Version Mix) - (1992)

EN MINOR - On The Floor

Philip Anselmo's Depression Core Project En Minor Play On the Floor : No Distortion Ep. 6

Au Pairs - Playing with a Different Sex 1981 Full Vinyl

Elvis Presley - I Sing All Kinds - The Nashville 1971 Sessions (getting back to the files from Kim A. It has been almost a year since I have played any of these. Mirna wanted to pass by Graceland - Elvis’ house in Memphis and that kicked in the flash drive in the car and getting to this file folder of Elvis music.)

WOOF - What Cult Are You In? (This band was mentioned in a Sorry State newsletter and they are from New Orleans and I liked the picture on the cassette cover [snarling poodles]).

Taylor Swift - Lover's Lounge (Live) [Had on in the background while working. Not really getting to check it out, but I did watch the new video, Lover.]

ended up playing the Lover’s Lounge (Live) recorded video and was able to pay more attention. I thought there would be more highlights from the album presented, but.....

at the health club:

working on the Bring Work to Life audio book.

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ericpoptone · 6 years ago

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Thiên Hương — better known as “Tiny Yong” is a French singer associated with the yé-yé scene of the 1950s and ’60s.

She was born Tôn Nữ Thị Thiên Hương on 8 February 1944 in Phnom Penh — the capital of Cambodia since 1865 but then part of French-Indochina. Her father was a doctor and her mother a homemaker; both traced their heritage to Vietnam‘s Dương Dynasty. The family relocated to Saigon and Thiên Hương was schooled at Le Couvent des Oiseaux de Dalat, where she learned English, Spanish, and French. In 1958, the family again relocated, this time to a home on La rue Coustou in Paris‘s 18th arrondissement. There her father continued to practice medicine and her mother opened a Vietnamese restaurant.

In 1960, Thiên Hương performed in Albert Camus‘s Les Justes and Jean Cocteau‘s L’Épouse injustement soupçonnée, staged at La Théâtre de la Tomate. She next appeared in François Campaux‘s Chérie Noire. Meanwhile, her brother helped her secure a job performing Vietnamese and French “chanson à texte” at a cabaret in the 1st arrondissement called La Table du Mandarin. In December, she made her television debut on Aimée Mortimer‘s show A L’École des vedettes. The following February, she returned to the airwaves to mime “Rêve Opératoire.” In March she released her debut recording, the 7″ EP “Le Monde de Suzie Wong,” accompanied by Jacques Loussier et son orchestre, on Caravelle.

Cambodian actress and singer Tiny Yong in Rome, Italy, to star in the film ‘Parias de la gloire’ (‘Pariahs of Glory’), 1964. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In April, Thiên Hương performed “Si tu cherches ta jeunesse” on the music television series, Discorama, a song intended for an EP which ultimately wasn’t released. She also continued performing at La Table du Mandarin, where she was noticed by filmmaker Robert Hossein, who cast her as “L’eurasienne” in Jeu de la vérité (1961).

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Her second audio release was “La Prison de Bambou,” a duet with Jean-Philippe, backed by Jack Ledru et son ensemble, and released by the tiny label, Lotus in 1962. It was recorded for the 1962 Piero Pierotti film, L’avventura di un italiano in Cina, in which she also appeared as “Tai-Au.” It was released in the US, dubbed in English, as Marco Polo — and with a Les Baxter score.

In November, she returned to Discorama where she performed “L’Oiseau de paradis” — the theme to Marcel Camus‘s film of the same name. For the performance she was accompanied by Elek Bacsik (a cousin of Django Reinhardt) and Henri Salvador (a Guyanese comedian, singer, and producer who co-owned his own label Disques Salvador with his wife, Jacqueline).

In December, Thiên Hương appeared on another television program, La Tournée des Grands Ducs, this time joined by her sister Bạch Yến, with whom she duetted on “Les Fées du crépuscule.”

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Shortly after, Thiên Hương signed a deal with Disques Salvador, where Henri and Jacqueline came up with a new nom de scène, “Tiny Yong.” The couple hoped to fashion her into a rock ‘n’ roller along the lines of Jacky Moulière. Henri Salvador also owned a club, L’Alhambra, where Thiên Hương began singing songs popularized by American girl groups. Her first recording for Disques Salvador was “Tais-Toi Petite Folle” with Christian Chevallier. The A-side was a French language cover of Helen Miller and Howard Greenfield‘s, which had been a big hit for The Shirelles just weeks earlier. The B-side was a French cover of Roy Orbison‘s “In Dreams” titled “En rêve.”

Her next release was the 10″ album, Je Ne Veux Plus T’Aimer, the title track a cover of Goffin And King‘s “I Can’t Stay Mad at You” adapted into French by Hubert Ithier.

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For the next few years, Tiny Yong was a regularly featured performer on television, radio, film, and in print ads for companies including Bic and Odilène; all the while releasing 7″ EPs on Disques Salvador and Rigolo (the Salvador’s other label). In March 1964, she performed “Les garçons m’aiment” on the program, Âge tendre et tête de bois, for which she was introduced by Albert Raisner as “la yéyé du pays du sourire” (even though it’s Thailand which is sometimes referred to as “the land of smiles.” In April she appeared as “La chinoise ” in the Henri Decoin film, Les Parias de la gloire. She next performed on Les Raisins verts and twice on La grande farandole.

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In 1965, she performed on Entrez dans la ronde, Pirouettes Salvador, and Tête de bois et tendres années.

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Yong’s final release on Rigolo was “Mon Futur Et Mon Passé” in 1965. A second appearance on Tête de bois et tendres années — on 27 April 1966 — proved to be her final television performance. Following a disagreement with the Salvadors, she parted ways with them.

Hương appeared as in Nicolas Gessner‘s 1967 film, La blonde de Pékin, in which still credited as “Tiny Yong” she played Yen Hay Sun.

Hương returned to Saigon, in 1968 — the year the Tet Offensive marked a major turn in the Vietnam War. There she resumed performing at cabarets before deciding to retire from public performance. In 1970, she returned to France where she appeared on an episode of Allô police titled “La pantoufle de jade.”

It was also in 1970 that she opened the first of several restaurants — first in Paris, then in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, followed by Pont de Jade in Pont-sur-Yonne, and finally in Montpellier, where she resides today. She married An Nguyên Ngoc and the two had a daughter.

Naturally, Thiên Hương/Tiny Yong’s vinyl catalog is out of print but her music has been thrice compiled by Magic Records on compact disc: La Collection Sixties Des EP’s Français, Tiny Yong – L’integrale 1961/1965, and the two-disc Tiny Yong – L’Intégrale Sixties. In 2017, a duet with Trần Văn Trạch of Nguyễn Văn Đông‘s “Chiều Mưa Biên Giới” was released 57 years after it was recorded.

Bon anniversaire!

DISCOGRAPHY

1961 – Le Monde de Suzie Wong (7″, EP), Caravelle

1961 – Le Monde de Suzie Wong / Pour t’aimer / Geisha / Fol amour (7″, EP), Caravelle

1962 – Parfum Céleste / La Prison De Bambou / Avril A Paris / Mon Galant Viendra (with Jean Philippe), (7″, EP), Lotus

1963 – Tais toi petite folle (7″, Single), Disques Salvador

1963 – Je ne veux plus t’aimer (10″, Album), Disques Salvador

1963 – Je ne veux plus t’aimer (7″, EP), Disques Salvador

1963 – Je ne veux plus t’aimer (I Can’t Stay Mad At You) / Le Carrosse blanc (7″, Single), Disques Salvador

1963 – En rêve (In Dreams) / Ma poupée (Charms) (7″, Single, Promo, Juk), Disques Salvador

1963 – Je ne veux plus t’aimer / Le Carrosse blanc / Tu es seule / Un seul garçon sur la Terre (7″, EP), Disques Salvador

1963 – Je ne veux plus t’aimer / Le Carrosse blanc / Ma poupée / En rêve / Tais-toi petite folle / Un seul garçon sur la Terre / Tu es seule / Syracuse (LP25), Disques Salvador

1964 – Tiny Yong avec Christian Chevallier et son Orchestre Mon chien et moi / Je t’attendrai / Les garçons m’aiment / Il reviendra (7″, EP), Belter, Disques Salvador

1964 – Histoire d’amour / Aime-moi / C’est fini nous deux / Tout ce qui fut l’amour (7″, EP), Rigolo, Belter

1964 – Tiny (I’m Too Young) / La Nuit est à nous / Le Sauvage (He Is No Good) / Adieu Bonne Chance (Shake Hands With A Loser) (7″, EP), Rigolo

1964 – Il reviendra (7″, Single), Disques Salvador

1964 – Je t’attendrai / Mon chien et moi (7″, Single), Disques Salvador

1964 – Un seul garçon sur la Terre (7″, EP), Belter

1964 – Je t’attendrai / Les garçons m’aiment / Il reviendra / Mon chien et moi (7″, EP), Disques Salvador

1965 – Huit jours par semaine / Le Tigre (7″, Single), Rigolo

1965 – Mon futur et mon passé (7″, EP), Rigolo

1965 – Huit jours par semaine / Tu es le roi des menteurs / Le Tigre / Je reviens pour toi (7″, EP), Rigolo

1966 – Mon futur et mon passé / Le Bonheur / Je t’aime t’aime tant / Il ne me reste plus rien (7″, EP), Rigolo

2017 (recorded in 1960) – Chiều Mưa Biên Giới (7″, single), Dĩa Hát Dư Âm

Eric Brightwell is an adventurer, writer, rambler, explorer, cartographer, and guerrilla gardener who is always seeking paid writing, speaking, traveling, and art opportunities. He is not interested in generating advertorials, cranking out clickbait, or laboring away in a listicle mill “for exposure.”

Brightwell has written for Angels Walk LA, Amoeblog, Boom: A Journal of California, diaCRITICS, Hidden Los Angeles, and KCET Departures. His art has been featured by the American Institute of Architects, the Architecture & Design Museum, the Craft & Folk Art Museum, Form Follows Function, Los Angeles County Store, the book Sidewalking, Skid Row Housing Trust, and 1650 Gallery. Brightwell has been featured as subject in The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, LAist, CurbedLA, Eastsider LA, Boing Boing, Los Angeles, I’m Yours, and on Notebook on Cities and Culture. He has been a guest speaker on KCRW‘s Which Way, LA?, at Emerson College, and the University of Southern California. Art prints of Brightwell’s maps are available from 1650 Gallery.

Brightwell is currently writing a book about Los Angeles and you can follow him on Ameba, Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Mubi, and Twitter.

Click here to offer financial support and thank you

Thiên Hương (aka “Tiny Yong”) Thiên Hương -- better known as "Tiny Yong" is a French singer associated with the…

#1960s pop #French Music #Thiên Hương #Tiny Yong #Vietnamese Singers #yé-yé

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nonfictionwritingstyles · 6 years ago

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1. Cultural Criticism

Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

Michael Pollan, The New York Magazine

1. JULIA’S CHILDREN

I was only 8 when “The French Chef” first appeared on American television in 1963, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this Julia Child had improved the quality of life around our house. My mother began cooking dishes she’d watched Julia cook on TV: boeuf bourguignon (the subject of the show’s first episode), French onion soup gratinée, duck à l’orange, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat. Some of the more ambitious dishes, like the duck or the mousse, were pointed toward weekend company, but my mother would usually test these out on me and my sisters earlier in the week, and a few of the others — including the boeuf bourguignon, which I especially loved — actually made it into heavy weeknight rotation. So whenever people talk about how Julia Child upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively. I owe her. Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners, and those were pretty good, too.

Every so often I would watch “The French Chef” with my mother in the den. On WNET in New York, it came on late in the afternoon, after school, and because we had only one television back then, if Mom wanted to watch her program, you watched it, too. The show felt less like TV than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor, which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough) but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the squeal of an oven door in need of WD-40, all the kitchen-chemistry-set spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast uncut and unedited, so it had a vérité feel completely unlike anything you might see today on the Food Network, with its A.D.H.D. editing and hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia waited for the butter foam to subside in the sauté pan, you waited, too, precisely as long, listening to Julia’s improvised patter over the hiss of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips and lore. It all felt more like life than TV, though Julia’s voice was like nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python came to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC supposedly took “The French Chef” off the air because viewers wrote in complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented.

Meryl Streep, who brings Julia Child vividly back to the screen in Nora Ephron’s charming new comedy, “Julie & Julia,” has the voice down, and with the help of some clever set design and cinematography, she manages to evoke too Child’s big-girl ungainliness — the woman was 6 foot 2 and had arms like a longshoreman. Streep also captures the deep sensual delight that Julia Child took in food — not just the eating of it (her virgin bite of sole meunière at La Couronne in Rouen recalls Meg Ryan’s deli orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally”) but the fondling and affectionate slapping of ingredients in their raw state and the magic of their kitchen transformations.

But “Julie & Julia” is more than an exercise in nostalgia. As the title suggests, the film has a second, more contemporary heroine. The Julie character (played by Amy Adams) is based on Julie Powell, a 29-year-old aspiring writer living in Queens who, casting about for a blog conceit in 2002, hit on a cool one: she would cook her way through all 524 recipes in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 365 days and blog about her adventures. The movie shuttles back and forth between Julie’s year of compulsive cooking and blogging in Queens in 2002 and Julia’s decade in Paris and Provence a half-century earlier, as recounted in “My Life in France,” the memoir published a few years after her death in 2004. Julia Child in 1949 was in some ways in the same boat in which Julie Powell found herself in 2002: happily married to a really nice guy but feeling, acutely, the lack of a life project. Living in Paris, where her husband, Paul Child, was posted in the diplomatic corps, Julia (who like Julie had worked as a secretary) was at a loss as to what to do with her life until she realized that what she liked to do best was eat. So she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and learned how to cook. As with Julia, so with Julie: cooking saved her life, giving her a project and, eventually, a path to literary success.

That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s legacy. Julie Powell operates in a world that Julia Child helped to create, one where food is taken seriously, where chefs have been welcomed into the repertory company of American celebrity and where cooking has become a broadly appealing mise-en-scène in which success stories can plausibly be set and played out. How amazing is it that we live today in a culture that has not only something called the Food Network but now a hit show on that network called “The Next Food Network Star,” which thousands of 20- and 30-somethings compete eagerly to become? It would seem we have come a long way from Swanson TV dinners.

The Food Network can now be seen in nearly 100 million American homes and on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable news channels. Millions of Americans, including my 16-year-old son, can tell you months after the finale which contestant emerged victorious in Season 5 of “Top Chef” (Hosea Rosenberg, followed by Stefan Richter, his favorite, and Carla Hall). The popularity of cooking shows — or perhaps I should say food shows — has spread beyond the precincts of public or cable television to the broadcast networks, where Gordon Ramsay terrorizes newbie chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen” on Fox and Jamie Oliver is preparing a reality show on ABC in which he takes aim at an American city with an obesity problem and tries to teach the population how to cook. It’s no wonder that a Hollywood studio would conclude that American audiences had an appetite for a movie in which the road to personal fulfillment and public success passes through the kitchen and turns, crucially, on a recipe for boeuf bourguignon. (The secret is to pat dry your beef before you brown it.)

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

What is wrong with this picture?

2. THE COURAGE TO FLIP

When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to her, she explained that “for so many of us she took the fear out of cooking” and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato show (or, as Julia pronounced it, “the poh-TAY-toh show!”), one of the episodes that Meryl Streep recreates brilliantly on screen. Millions of Americans of a certain age claim to remember Julia Child dropping a chicken or a goose on the floor, but the memory is apocryphal: what she dropped was a potato pancake, and it didn’t quite make it to the floor. Still, this was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than let such an outtake ever see the light of day.

The episode has Julia making a plate-size potato pancake, sautéing a big disc of mashed potato into which she has folded impressive quantities of cream and butter. Then the fateful moment arrives:

“When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions,” she declares, clearly a tad nervous at the prospect, and then gives the big pancake a flip. On the way down, half of it catches the lip of the pan and splats onto the stove top. Undaunted, Julia scoops the thing up and roughly patches the pancake back together, explaining: “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.” And then, looking right through the camera as if taking us into her confidence, she utters the line that did so much to lift the fear of failure from my mother and her contemporaries: “If you’re alone in the kitchen, WHOOOO” — the pronoun is sung — “is going to see?” For a generation of women eager to transcend their mothers’ recipe box (and perhaps, too, their mothers’ social standing), Julia’s little kitchen catastrophe was a liberation and a lesson: “The only way you learn to flip things is just to flip them!”

It was a kind of courage — not only to cook but to cook the world’s most glamorous and intimidating cuisine — that Julia Child gave my mother and so many other women like her, and to watch her empower viewers in episode after episode is to appreciate just how much about cooking on television — not to mention cooking itself — has changed in the years since “The French Chef” was on the air.

There are still cooking programs that will teach you how to cook. Public television offers the eminently useful “America’s Test Kitchen.” The Food Network carries a whole slate of so-called dump-and-stir shows during the day, and the network’s research suggests that at least some viewers are following along. But many of these programs — I’m thinking of Rachael Ray, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee — tend to be aimed at stay-at-home moms who are in a hurry and eager to please. (“How good are you going to look when you serve this?” asks Paula Deen, a Southern gal of the old school.) These shows stress quick results, shortcuts and super convenience but never the sort of pleasure — physical and mental — that Julia Child took in the work of cooking: the tomahawking of a fish skeleton or the chopping of an onion, the Rolfing of butter into the breast of a raw chicken or the vigorous whisking of heavy cream. By the end of the potato show, Julia was out of breath and had broken a sweat, which she mopped from her brow with a paper towel. (Have you ever seen Martha Stewart break a sweat? Pant? If so, you know her a lot better than the rest of us.) Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child did. In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television.

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression. You may think of these two figures as antagonists, but that wouldn’t be quite right. They actually had a great deal in common, as Child’s biographer, Laura Shapiro, points out, and addressed the aspirations of many of the same women. Julia never referred to her viewers as “housewives” — a word she detested — and never condescended to them. She tried to show the sort of women who read “The Feminine Mystique” that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s too.) Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex” that though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of “revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the gift.” This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c’est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.

3. TO THE KITCHEN STADIUM

Whichever, kitchen work itself has changed considerably since 1963, judging from its depiction on today’s how-to shows. Take the concept of cooking from scratch. Many of today’s cooking programs rely unapologetically on ingredients that themselves contain lots of ingredients: canned soups, jarred mayonnaise, frozen vegetables, powdered sauces, vanilla wafers, limeade concentrate, Marshmallow Fluff. This probably shouldn’t surprise us: processed foods have so thoroughly colonized the American kitchen and diet that they have redefined what passes today for cooking, not to mention food. Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff. So the shows encourage home cooks to take all manner of shortcuts, each of which involves buying another product, and all of which taken together have succeeded in redefining what is commonly meant by the verb “to cook.”

I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.” Balzer has been studying American eating habits since 1978; the NPD Group, the firm he works for, collects data from a pool of 2,000 food diaries to track American eating habits. Years ago Balzer noticed that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had grown so broad as to be meaningless, so the firm tightened up the meaning of “to cook” at least slightly to capture what was really going on in American kitchens. To cook from scratch, they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires some degree of “assembly of elements.” So microwaving a pizza doesn’t count as cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does. Under this dispensation, you’re also cooking when you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty. (Currently the most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich; the No. 1 accompanying beverage is a soda.) At least by Balzer’s none-too-exacting standard, Americans are still cooking up a storm — 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that figure has been falling steadily since the 1980s.

Like most people who study consumer behavior, Balzer has developed a somewhat cynical view of human nature, which his research suggests is ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, optimally, both. I kept asking him what his research had to say about the prevalence of the activity I referred to as “real scratch cooking,” but he wouldn’t touch the term. Why? Apparently the activity has become so rarefied as to elude his tools of measurement.

“Here’s an analogy,” Balzer said. “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

After my discouraging hour on the phone with Balzer, I settled in for a couple more with the Food Network, trying to square his dismal view of our interest in cooking with the hyper-exuberant, even fetishized images of cooking that are presented on the screen. The Food Network undergoes a complete change of personality at night, when it trades the cozy precincts of the home kitchen and chirpy softball coaching of Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee for something markedly less feminine and less practical. Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late ’90s, recognized early on that, as she told a journalist, “people don’t watch television to learn things.” So she shifted the network’s target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a considerably larger universe and one that — important for a cable network — happens to contain a great many more men.

In prime time, the Food Network’s mise-en-scène shifts to masculine arenas like the Kitchen Stadium on “Iron Chef,” where famous restaurant chefs wage gladiatorial combat to see who can, in 60 minutes, concoct the most spectacular meal from a secret ingredient ceremoniously unveiled just as the clock starts: an octopus or a bunch of bananas or a whole school of daurade. Whether in the Kitchen Stadium or on “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star” or, over on Bravo, “Top Chef,” cooking in prime time is a form of athletic competition, drawing its visual and even aural vocabulary from “Monday Night Football.” On “Iron Chef America,” one of the Food Network’s biggest hits, the cookingcaster Alton Brown delivers a breathless (though always gently tongue-in-cheek) play by play and color commentary, as the iron chefs and their team of iron sous-chefs race the clock to peel, chop, slice, dice, mince, Cuisinart, mandoline, boil, double-boil, pan-sear, sauté, sous vide, deep-fry, pressure-cook, grill, deglaze, reduce and plate — this last a word I’m old enough to remember when it was a mere noun. A particularly dazzling display of chefly “knife skills” — a term bandied as freely on the Food Network as “passing game” or “slugging percentage” is on ESPN — will earn an instant replay: an onion minced in slo-mo. Can we get a camera on this, Alton Brown will ask in a hushed, this-must-be-golf tone of voice. It looks like Chef Flay’s going to try for a last-minute garnish grab before the clock runs out! Will he make it? [The buzzer sounds.] Yes!

These shows move so fast, in such a blur of flashing knives, frantic pantry raids and more sheer fire than you would ever want to see in your own kitchen, that I honestly can’t tell you whether that “last-minute garnish grab” happened on “Iron Chef America” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star” or whether it was Chef Flay or Chef Batali who snagged the sprig of foliage at the buzzer. But impressive it surely was, in the same way it’s impressive to watch a handful of eager young chefs on “Chopped” figure out how to make a passable appetizer from chicken wings, celery, soba noodles and a package of string cheese in just 20 minutes, said starter to be judged by a panel of professional chefs on the basis of “taste, creativity and presentation.” (If you ask me, the key to victory on any of these shows comes down to one factor: bacon. Whichever contestant puts bacon in the dish invariably seems to win.)

But you do have to wonder how easily so specialized a set of skills might translate to the home kitchen — or anywhere else for that matter. For when in real life are even professional chefs required to conceive and execute dishes in 20 minutes from ingredients selected by a third party exhibiting obvious sadistic tendencies? (String cheese?) Never, is when. The skills celebrated on the Food Network in prime time are precisely the skills necessary to succeed on the Food Network in prime time. They will come in handy nowhere else on God’s green earth.

We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow; the contests fly by much too fast for viewers to take in any practical tips; and the kind of cooking practiced in prime time is far more spectacular than anything you would ever try at home. No, for anyone hoping to pick up a few dinnertime tips, the implicit message of today’s prime-time cooking shows is, Don’t try this at home. If you really want to eat this way, go to a restaurant. Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, “How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?”

What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!) Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous consumption. (I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves. . .)

Surely it’s no accident that so many Food Network stars have themselves found a way to transcend barriers of social class in the kitchen — beginning with Emeril Lagasse, the working-class guy from Fall River, Mass., who, though he may not be able to sound the ‘r’ in “garlic,” can still cook like a dream. Once upon a time Julia made the same promise in reverse: she showed you how you, too, could cook like someone who could not only prepare but properly pronounce a béarnaise. So-called fancy food has always served as a form of cultural capital, and cooking programs help you acquire it, now without so much as lifting a spatula. The glamour of food has made it something of a class leveler in America, a fact that many of these shows implicitly celebrate. Television likes nothing better than to serve up elitism to the masses, paradoxical as that might sound. How wonderful is it that something like arugula can at the same time be a mark of sophistication and be found in almost every salad bar in America? Everybody wins!

But the shift from producing food on television to consuming it strikes me as a far-less-salubrious development. Traditionally, the recipe for the typical dump-and-stir program comprises about 80 percent cooking followed by 20 percent eating, but in prime time you now find a raft of shows that flip that ratio on its head, like “The Best Thing I Ever Ate” and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” which are about nothing but eating. Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” ducks into the kitchen whenever he visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time he’s wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations: a 16-ounce Oh Gawd! burger (with the works); battered and deep-fried anything (clams, pickles, cinnamon buns, stuffed peppers, you name it); or a buttermilk burrito approximately the size of his head, stuffed with bacon, eggs and cheese. What Fieri’s critical vocabulary lacks in analytical rigor, it more than makes up for in tailgate enthusiasm: “Man, oh man, now this is what I’m talkin’ about!” What can possibly be the appeal of watching Guy Fieri bite, masticate and swallow all this chow?

The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit. It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

Buying, not making, is what cooking shows are mostly now about — that and, increasingly, cooking shows themselves: the whole self-perpetuating spectacle of competition, success and celebrity that, with “The Next Food Network Star,” appears to have entered its baroque phase. The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about what’s cooking than who’s cooking. A few years ago, Mario Batali neatly summed up the network’s formula to a reporter: “Look, it’s TV! Everyone has to fall into a niche. I’m the Italian guy. Emeril’s the exuberant New Orleans guy with the big eyebrows who yells a lot. Bobby’s the grilling guy. Rachael Ray is the cheerleader-type girl who makes things at home the way a regular person would. Giada’s the beautiful girl with the nice rack who does simple Italian food. As silly as the whole Food Network is, it gives us all a soapbox to talk about the things we care about.” Not to mention a platform from which to sell all their stuff.

The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch — into yet another confection of spectacle and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch. The formula is as circular and self-reinforcing as a TV dinner: a simulacrum of home cooking that is sold on TV and designed to be eaten in front of the TV. True, in the case of the Swanson rendition, at least you get something that will fill you up; by comparison, the Food Network leaves you hungry, a condition its advertisers must love. But in neither case is there much risk that you will get off the couch and actually cook a meal. Both kinds of TV dinner plant us exactly where television always wants us: in front of the set, watching.

4. WATCHING WHAT WE EAT

To point out that television has succeeded in turning cooking into a spectator sport raises the question of why anyone would want to watch other people cook in the first place. There are plenty of things we’ve stopped doing for ourselves that we have no desire to watch other people do on TV: you don’t see shows about changing the oil in your car or ironing shirts or reading newspapers. So what is it about cooking, specifically, that makes it such good television just now?

It’s worth keeping in mind that watching other people cook is not exactly a new behavior for us humans. Even when “everyone” still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men, for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat. Watching my mother transform the raw materials of nature — a handful of plants, an animal’s flesh — into a favorite dinner was always a pretty good show, but on the afternoons when she tackled a complex marvel like chicken Kiev, I happily stopped whatever I was doing to watch. (I told you we had it pretty good, thanks partly to Julia.) My mother would hammer the boneless chicken breasts into flat pink slabs, roll them tightly around chunks of ice-cold herbed butter, glue the cylinders shut with egg, then fry the little logs until they turned golden brown, in what qualified as a minor miracle of transubstantiation. When the dish turned out right, knifing through the crust into the snowy white meat within would uncork a fragrant ooze of melted butter that seeped across the plate to merge with the Minute Rice. (If the instant rice sounds all wrong, remember that in the 1960s, Julia Child and modern food science were both tokens of sophistication.)

Yet even the most ordinary dish follows a similar arc of transformation, magically becoming something greater than the sum of its parts. Every dish contains not just culinary ingredients but also the ingredients of narrative: a beginning, a middle and an end. Bring in the element of fire — cooking’s deus ex machina — and you’ve got a tasty little drama right there, the whole thing unfolding in a TV-friendly span of time: 30 minutes (at 350 degrees) will usually do it.

Cooking shows also benefit from the fact that food itself is — by definition — attractive to the humans who eat it, and that attraction can be enhanced by food styling, an art at which the Food Network so excels as to make Julia Child look like a piker. You’ll be flipping aimlessly through the cable channels when a slow-motion cascade of glistening red cherries or a tongue of flame lapping at a slab of meat on the grill will catch your eye, and your reptilian brain will paralyze your thumb on the remote, forcing you to stop to see what’s cooking. Food shows are the campfires in the deep cable forest, drawing us like hungry wanderers to their flames. (And on the Food Network there are plenty of flames to catch your eye, compensating, no doubt, for the unfortunate absence of aromas.)

No matter how well produced, a televised oil change and lube offers no such satisfactions.

I suspect we’re drawn to the textures and rhythms of kitchen work, too, which seem so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs nowadays. The chefs on TV get to put their hands on real stuff, not keyboards and screens but fundamental things like plants and animals and fungi; they get to work with fire and ice and perform feats of alchemy. By way of explaining why in the world she wants to cook her way through “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” all Julie Powell has to do in the film is show us her cubicle at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, where she spends her days on the phone mollifying callers with problems that she lacks the power to fix.

“You know what I love about cooking?” Julie tells us in a voice-over as we watch her field yet another inconclusive call on her headset. “I love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I mean nothing — you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends — assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.

5. THE END OF COOKING

If cooking really offers all these satisfactions, then why don’t we do more of it? Well, ask Julie Powell: for most of us it doesn’t pay the rent, and very often our work doesn’t leave us the time; during the year of Julia, dinner at the Powell apartment seldom arrived at the table before 10 p.m. For many years now, Americans have been putting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking — but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has among women who do: in both cases, a decline of about 40 percent since 1965. (Though for married women who don’t have jobs, the amount of time spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.

Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.

Harry Balzer’s research suggests that the corporate project of redefining what it means to cook and serve a meal has succeeded beyond the industry’s wildest expectations. People think nothing of buying frozen peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their children’s lunch boxes. (Now how much of a timesaver can that be?) “We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods,” Balzer told me, “and now we’re going to have a hundred years of packaged meals.” Already today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say to industrial cooking and packaging and marketing. Balzer is unsentimental about this development: “Do you miss sewing or darning socks? I don’t think so.”

So what are we doing with the time we save by outsourcing our food preparation to corporations and 16-year-old burger flippers? Working, commuting to work, surfing the Internet and, perhaps most curiously of all, watching other people cook on television.

But this may not be quite the paradox it seems. Maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on TV is that there are things about cooking we miss. We might not feel we have the time or the energy to do it ourselves every day, yet we’re not prepared to see it disappear from our lives entirely. Why? Perhaps because cooking — unlike sewing or darning socks — is an activity that strikes a deep emotional chord in us, one that might even go to the heart of our identity as human beings.

What?! You’re telling me Bobby Flay strikes deep emotional chords?

Bear with me. Consider for a moment the proposition that as a human activity, cooking is far more important — to our happiness and to our health — than its current role in our lives, not to mention its depiction on TV, might lead you to believe. Let’s see what happens when we take cooking seriously.

6. THE COOKING ANIMAL

The idea that cooking is a defining human activity is not a new one. In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that “no beast is a cook,” called Homo sapiens “the cooking animal,” though he might have reconsidered that definition had he been able to gaze upon the frozen-food cases at Wal-Mart. Fifty years later, in “The Physiology of Taste,” the French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had “done the most to advance the cause of civilization.” More recently, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing in 1964 in “The Raw and the Cooked,” found that many cultures entertained a similar view, regarding cooking as a symbolic way of distinguishing ourselves from the animals.

For Lévi-Strauss, cooking is a metaphor for the human transformation of nature into culture, but in the years since “The Raw and the Cooked,” other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the idea that cooking is the key to our humanity. Earlier this year, Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, published a fascinating book called “Catching Fire,” in which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors — not tool-making or language or meat-eating — that made us human. By providing our primate forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet, cooked food altered the course of human evolution, allowing our brains to grow bigger (brains are notorious energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day. (That’s nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.) Also, since cooking detoxifies many foods, it cracked open a treasure trove of nutritious calories unavailable to other animals. Freed from the need to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would likely have fed himself on the go and alone, like the animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we’ve become, grazing at gas stations and skipping meals.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, all served to civilize us; “around that fire,” Wrangham says, “we became tamer.”

If cooking is as central to human identity and culture as Wrangham believes, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking in our time would have a profound effect on modern life. At the very least, you would expect that its rapid disappearance from everyday life might leave us feeling nostalgic for the sights and smells and the sociality of the cook-fire. Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray may be pushing precisely that emotional button. Interestingly, the one kind of home cooking that is actually on the rise today (according to Harry Balzer) is outdoor grilling. Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture. (While men have hardly become equal partners in the kitchen, they are cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals, many of them on the grill.)

Yet we don’t crank up the barbecue every day; grilling for most people is more ceremony than routine. We seem to be well on our way to turning cooking into a form of weekend recreation, a backyard sport for which we outfit ourselves at Williams-Sonoma, or a televised spectator sport we watch from the couch. Cooking’s fate may be to join some of our other weekend exercises in recreational atavism: camping and gardening and hunting and riding on horseback. Something in us apparently likes to be reminded of our distant origins every now and then and to celebrate whatever rough skills for contending with the natural world might survive in us, beneath the thin crust of 21st-century civilization.

To play at farming or foraging for food strikes us as harmless enough, perhaps because the delegating of those activities to other people in real life is something most of us are generally O.K. with. But to relegate the activity of cooking to a form of play, something that happens just on weekends or mostly on television, seems much more consequential. The fact is that not cooking may well be deleterious to our health, and there is reason to believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to corporations and 16-year-olds has already taken a toll on our physical and psychological well-being.

Consider some recent research on the links between cooking and dietary health. A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. Mass production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of price but also in the amount of time required to obtain them. The French fry did not become the most popular “vegetable” in America until industry relieved us of the considerable effort needed to prepare French fries ourselves. Similarly, the mass production of cream-filled cakes, fried chicken wings and taquitos, exotically flavored chips or cheesy puffs of refined flour, has transformed all these hard-to-make-at-home foods into the sort of everyday fare you can pick up at the gas station on a whim and for less than a dollar. The fact that we no longer have to plan or even wait to enjoy these items, as we would if we were making them ourselves, makes us that much more likely to indulge impulsively.

Cutler and his colleagues demonstrate that as the “time cost” of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up, particularly consumption of the sort of snack and convenience foods that are typically cooked outside the home. They found that when we don’t have to cook meals, we eat more of them: as the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.

Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and found that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not.

So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences.

The question is, Can we ever put the genie back into the bottle? Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work? One in which the cooking shows on television once again teach people how to cook from scratch and, as Julia Child once did, actually empower them to do it?

Let us hope so. Because it’s hard to imagine ever reforming the American way of eating or, for that matter, the American food system unless millions of Americans — women and men — are willing to make cooking a part of daily life. The path to a diet of fresher, unprocessed food, not to mention to a revitalized local-food economy, passes straight through the home kitchen.

But if this is a dream you find appealing, you might not want to call Harry Balzer right away to discuss it.

“Not going to happen,” he told me. “Why? Because we’re basically cheap and lazy. And besides, the skills are already lost. Who is going to teach the next generation to cook? I don’t see it.

“We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket.”

Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he finds it in the survey data he has spent the past three decades poring over. But for a brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different reality. This took a little doing. Many of his clients — which include many of the big chain restaurants and food manufacturers — profit handsomely from the decline and fall of cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself made it clear that he recognizes all that the decline of everyday cooking has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health.

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

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