The Privilege of Cooking

Posted on 20. Aug, 2010 by Dan Ruth in Lutherans

Over the past few years, I’ve become a lover of cooking, especially baking. Baking bread, to be more precise. I am currently nursing a Minnesota sourdough starter back to health in my refrigerator. It doesn’t have quite the delicious bite that a San Francisco sourdough might, but I love the whole process of combining water and flour and creating just the right environment for natural yeasts to take root and create a wonderful bouquet of aromas and leaveners that can last for years.

Lately, though, I’ve realized how lucky I am to be able to revel in the slowness of bread. Spending an hour (or four) mixing, kneeding, proofing, shaping and baking the perfect Pain a L’Ancienne is something that I’ve not recently been able to fit in my quickly-filling schedule. Instead, after a full day I’ve come home just in time to throw a frozen Morningstar Burger in the microwave, smear some ketchup on it and wash it down with whatever cold beverage we may have in our fridge.

This has me thinking: the joy of cooking (for me) is in the choice that I have between good artisan bread and a microwaved frozen food.

Because I happened to be born into a middle-class family in the United States I have the ability to take four hours to devote to baking. Or not. I do not need to bake to survive. I could easily spend $2.50 at any grocery store and have enough bread to last me two weeks.

That, of course, is a huge privilege. Having the option to come home from work and throw a certified organic meat-flavored black-bean patty into the microwave shows how little work I need to do to have a nourished, calorie-filled body.

This makes me think long and hard about the people with whom LWR works. Millions of people around the world don’t spend two minutes preparing their dinners. They don’t even spend four hours perfecting the art of the stretch-and-fold method. Millions of people around the world spend nearly their entire day, every day, gathering just enough food and water to sustain themselves and their families.

I have a choice between home-cooked, slow food and microwaved, fast food. For that I am thankful. I have access to choice. And what I love about the work of Lutheran World Relief is that access to choice, over the long-term, becomes a reality for many people who have never had that opportunity in the past. Now, people around the world have stories of hope to share because of access to sustaining food and water.