Stepping back

When I was in sixth grade, oh-so-many years ago, our Teutonic red-haired teacher transfixed us with a cautionary tale: it seems a man had a magic machine that could add, subtract, multiply and divide. He carried it everywhere with him, and any time he needed to do any arithmetic, his magic machine did it for him. One night, as he slept, machine on his nightstand, a fire broke out in his house. He escaped just in time to save his life--but not his precious machine. He found himself bereft of the ability to perform even the most basic mathematical functions that we need in everyday life. Obviously, we were the last generation to not have calculators in the classroom, but I doubt we were the last to question why we had to learn this stuff.

So here we are a generation later, where art classes give way to "calculator skills" and our Swiss-army cell phones take the care of any mental math (calculate the tip? There's an app for that!) that we may encounter. But we know computers aren't perfect--they are programmed by people, after all. If your phone-cum-adding machine told you 2+2=5, only a person with some real math under their belt would know something was wrong.

But what of other "old-fashioned" skills? Europeans are finding it increasing challenging to find stonemasons capable of restoring Gothic cathedrals, and even here in the New World, it can be difficult to find someone to float plaster over cracked walls, or make pendulum clocks tick again, or handily use a light meter and a film cameras (to say nothing of finding someone to develop said film). The basics of washing dishes by hand seem lost past my generation (am I really that old?). A year without a dryer--unthinkable in this country--forced everyone in our family to learn how to hang (and how not to hang) laundry. Thank heavens we old folks were around to help out the young'uns learn that clothespins have a use other than craft projects.

But the biggie these days is the age-old craft of cooking. As the machines and services have made our lives "easier," we have become more and more removed from our physical world. We all should know by now that the supermarkets have erased all semblance of seasonality from our food supply, but it is truly appalling to see how many people simply don't use their kitchens for more than microwaving and refrigeration, taking their Styrofoam clamshells into the living room to watch the Iron Chef.

I put to you that reheating a burrito is not the same as making one. Takeout teriyaki is cheating. Delivered pizza pales in comparison to the real thing. Rolling a feast of sushi takes less time--and is certainly cheaper--than driving to get it. Even confirmed bachelors and Cosmo girls deserve a home-cooked meal, and deserve the satisfaction of knowing they can care well for themselves. Like basic arithmetic, it is not rocket science. You get better at it the more you do it. And the veil of the commercialized, commoditized substitute is brushed aside, revealing that the emporer is in fact, naked.

Let us relegate convenience food, drive-ins, and restaurants to the celebratory, the exception. Let us return to our kitchens and entrust paring knives to our children's hands, model good habits for their lives, and put good food in their bellies. For our future.