致不爱做饭的你

Though I'm a woman with children, I should confess that I'm not the target mom-reader for the latest avalanche of family cookbooks, which bear titles like "Dinner: A Love Story" or "The Family Cooks." This is my shortcoming: Where I ought to have a lively intellectual curiosity about food preparation, I generally have a despairing blank.
虽然我是个母亲，但我必须承认自己并非《晚餐：一个爱的故事》(Dinner: A Love Story)或《家庭厨师》(The Family Cooks)最近这一大堆家庭烹饪书的目标读者。这是我的缺点：我本该对烹制食物产生强烈的求知欲，但通常我只感到绝望的木然。

"Have you figured out dinner yet?" my daughter Susannah, who's 5, asks me. Figure out. Not "fix" dinner; not "make" it. She gets that phrase from me. A vague neural itch sets in around 5 p.m. when I recognize that something must happen, and soon, involving plates and macronutrients. I do not move. Dinner preparation is all mental around these parts: I figure out who's had enough protein or carbs for the day, who can bear eating the other's favorite food, or whether I must figure out two meals; figure out which is more endocrinologically devastating, highly processed soy milk or not-entirely-organic lactose-free cow's milk.
“你想好晚饭做什么了吗？”5岁的女儿苏珊娜(Susannah)问我。“想好”。不是去“弄”也不是去“做”晚饭。她是从我这儿学会这个说法的。下午5点左右，我隐隐感到不安，觉得需要赶紧做点什么，这事跟盘子和大量营养素有关，但我没有行动。这个阶段的准备工作都是在头脑中进行：我要想清楚今天谁摄入的蛋白质或碳水化合物已经足够了，谁能忍受吃另一个人最喜欢的食物，还是说我需要搞出两道菜；我还要想清楚，从内分泌角度讲，深加工的豆浆和不完全有机的无乳糖牛奶哪个危害更大。

Then comes the real intellectual heavy lifting, revisited like a private, pointless Fermat's Theorem: Why is food such a big part of rearing children? Why me? And why can't I just crack open a half-dozen Clif bars and keep playing with my children?
然后才是真正的精神折磨，它像毫无意义的私人费马大定理一样不断纠缠我：为什么养孩子过程中要花这么多时间做吃的？为什么非得我做饭？为什么我就不能撕开几个克利夫能量棒(Clif bar)充饥，然后继续跟孩子们玩呢？

Cooking! Aren't we past that? In 1982, Jessica Lange as Julie, the glamorous single working mother in "Tootsie,” became my ego-ideal when she sexily told Dustin Hoffman's character that she was a "born defroster." Lord, how I loved that expression. Women of the '80s did not sweat meal prep for their little Amys and Scotts. They defrosted. They took children to diners and bars. They ordered pizza.
做饭！我们不是已经不用做饭了吗？1982年，杰西卡·兰格(Jessica Lange)在《窈窕淑男》(Tootsie)中饰演的迷人单身职业母亲朱莉(Julie)成了我的偶像，她性感地对达斯汀·霍夫曼(Dustin Hoffman)饰演的角色说，自己“天生就只用解冻食物就行了”。天哪，我爱死这句话了！80年代的女性不用大汗淋漓地给小孩子做饭。她们只要解冻就行了。她们可以带孩子去小餐馆和酒吧吃饭。她们也可以点披萨外卖。

That was ages ago. And I imagined that matters would only improve from there. By the time my son arrived, I vainly believed that I should be able to not just defrost food but conjure it — by means of the web or a 3-D printer or at least a game male, close at hand, whose ego had been serendipitously formed by Emeril or "Top Chef.” But instead, to my horror, home cooking had made a hideous comeback. Noble food philosophers preached the retro virtues of slow, real food instead of the quickie, frozen stuff that had once spelled liberation to me.
那都是很多年前的事了。我以为从那以后情况只会变得更好。到我儿子出生时，我还以为自己应该不仅能解冻食物，还能召唤食物——通过互联网、3D打印机，或至少通过一个尽在咫尺、心甘情愿下厨房的丈夫——艾梅里尔(Emeril)或真人秀节目“顶级大厨”(Top Chef)意外地让他以当奶爸为荣。但可怕的是，家庭烹饪卷土重来。高尚的美食哲学家们鼓吹慢慢做成的真正的食物的好处，把能快速做好的、原本让我看到解放希望的冷冻食物打入了冷宫。

And worst of all, as the mother-cookbooks make painfully clear, the daily work of feeding children doesn't fall to the sages. Neither does it, notably, fall to the dads, whom the cookbooks commend for having signature dishes or being grill-masters, but not for punching the clock at breakfast, lunch and dinner. No, cooking belongs, inevitably, to the moms. I've tried to find outrage among my sister mothers about this reactionary development. But here's the unkindest cut: It turns out that other women — traitorously — now like to cook. They find cooking expressive and fascinating. No one but me wants to be a born defroster anymore. "I hear you, but I like to cook," said one feminist the last time I tried my bold association of foodism with rank misogyny.
最糟糕的是，就像母亲烹饪书所明示的那样，喂养孩子的日常工作不是圣人们的责任。显然也不是爸爸们的责任，那些烹饪书鼓励爸爸们有几样拿手菜或者擅长烧烤，但是没让他们定点做早餐、午餐和晚餐。做饭必然是妈妈们的事。我想从其他妈妈那里也听到对这种后退的愤怒。但是我被非常不友好地打断了：现在其他女人居然喜欢做饭！她们觉得做饭有意义，也很有趣。只有我还想做“天生的解冻者”。上一次和一位女权主义者交谈时，我大胆尝试把食物嗜好症与可恶的厌女症联系在一起，结果她说，“我明白你的意思了，但我喜欢做饭。”

"I like to cook"? What about "I like not working and having no opinions and being everyone's handmaiden"? Hasn't women's false consciousness about their "preferences" always been a part of the sexist equation? Or is theirs the true 2014 consciousness — the liking to cook — and I just would have fared better in the heyday of Salisbury steak? (Dr. J. H. Salisbury, wouldn't you know: Civil War-era food faddist and earliest known carb-hater.) Among my newly foodie friends, I couldn't get a witness to my bewilderment. At the same time no MakerBot is going to roll in and cook for my family. I'm going to have to find an apron and make real food happen daily for my children, lest they be poisoned by phthalates, dextrose and heavy metals while I'm pretending to be Jessica Lange.
“我喜欢做饭”？你怎么不说“我喜欢不工作，没有思想，当所有人的女仆”？女人对自己“偏好”的虚假意识不一直是性别歧视者理念的一部分吗？还是说喜欢做饭是她们在2014年的真实感受，而我更适合生活在索尔斯伯利牛肉饼盛行的时代（你不知道J·H·索尔斯伯利博士[Dr. J. H. Salisbury]吗？他是内战时期的食疗信徒，是已知的最早憎恨碳水化合物的人）？在我新结识的美食家朋友中，没一个人理解我的困惑。与此同时，也没有3D打印机来为我的家人做饭。我必须去找个围裙，每天给孩子们烹制真正的食物，以免在我把自己假想成杰西卡·兰格时，孩子们被邻苯二甲酸盐、葡萄糖和重金属毒害。

Thus we get the mother cookbooks, stuffed like Cornish hens with their whimsical anecdotes and their photos of stylish children helping to cook like cheerfully indentured galley slaves. These books do much more than prep you to opine grandly on nutritional fallacies. They bark out actual marching orders for making meals. The lively food seminar, which only demanded that I read and talk, is over; the dread hard labor of cooking has begun. Not only are these women (or their trusty co-authors) ace home cooks, they have also figured out dinner once and for all and are extraordinarily self-assured about their axioms. They heard the clarion call of real food a decade ago and resolved (for Empire?) to work tirelessly over hot stoves to save our sons and daughters from the packaged and the processed and the highly destructive myth of low-fat.
所以我们就有了这些母亲烹饪书，里面除了康沃尔菜鸡，还有很多奇闻轶事和时髦孩子的照片，那些孩子像苦力一样快乐地帮厨。这些书不仅让你能对营养谬论侃侃而谈，它们还大声发出做饭号令。只要求我阅读和发言的活跃的美食研讨会结束了；可怕的烹饪苦役开始了。这些女人（或者她们值得信任的联合作者们）不仅是一流的家庭厨师，而且已经一劳永逸地想好了晚餐做什么，并且对自己的理念很有信心。她们在十年前听到关于真正食物的感人号召，下定决心（为了帝国？）在热炉灶旁不懈努力，使孩子们免受打包或加工食物以及非常有害的低脂神话的毒害。

I find discouragement, typically, on Page 1. In the introduction to “100 Days of Real Food,” Lisa Leake calls my hasty, anxious, food-delivery way of figuring out dinner "fall[ing] prey to" the lure of convenience. That is indeed what I feel like at dinnertime: prey. Instead of hunting down healthful, real, inconvenient food, dinner-shirkers like myself are menaced, in Leake's dark vision, by such predators as restaurants, takeout, "cans of cream of mushroom soup" and what she calls "even the occasional frozen dinner." That includes virtuous-enough-seeming Amy's Kitchen burritos and Health Is Wealth chicken nuggets. (Die, born defrosters. Your glory days are over.)
我往往是看完第一页就读不下去了。在《100天真正的食物》(100 Days of Real Food)的引言中，丽莎·利克(Lisa Leake)说我以匆忙、焦虑以及配送食物式的想法思考晚餐是在图省事。那的确是我在晚餐时间的感受：像个猎物。利克阴暗地认为，像我这样图省事的人不是在追逐健康的、不省事的、真正的食物，而是被餐馆、外卖、“罐装奶油蘑菇汤”以及她所说的“偶尔的冷冻食物晚餐”这样的猎食者吓倒了。还包括貌似健康的艾米厨房(Amy's Kitchen)的墨西哥玉米卷饼以及“健康就是财富”(Health Is Wealth)的鸡块（天生解冻者，你完蛋了，你辉煌的日子结束了）。

Leake outlines her own Puritan conversion narrative in which she progressed from a bleak existence, blinded and hobbled by the Standard American Diet (SAD, so sad); through faith healing at the hands of the real-food evangelist Michael Pollan; to a wholehearted embrace of organic living and her own blog-and-cookbook ministry. A version of this conversion informs several of the family cookbooks, and the story never fails to move me. I want to eat these women's dinners, sure. But more than that, I covet their confidence.
利克概述了自己改变美食信仰的经历：最初她被标准美国饮食（Standard American Diet，真是悲哀）蒙蔽，活得凄凄惨惨；后来在真正食物传播者迈克尔·波伦(Michael Pollan)的引导下改变了信仰；最后全心全意投入到有机生活和自己的“博客加烹饪书”的事业中。有好几本家庭烹饪书都讲述了这样的转变，但这样的故事从未打动过我。我当然想吃这些女人做的晚餐，但我更多的是羡慕她们的信心。

"I don't think there is ONE THING MORE IMPORTANT you can do FOR YOUR KIDS THAN HAVE FAMILY DINNER," is how Ruth Reichl, of Gourmet, is quoted (italics and caps not mine) in "The Family Dinner," by Laurie David, with recipes by Kirstin Uhrenholdt. Pomposity of this kind abounds in Laurie David books, and ultimately the books' apotheosizing of home cooking is more memorable in its aggression than the somewhat meeker recipes (Easy Cheesy Dinner Frittata, Turkey Meat Loaf, Your Favorite Grilled Cheese). No one thing more important for children than family dinner? I might have put "send them to school" or “hug them occasionally" at the top of that list.
“我觉得你能给孩子们做的事情中，最重要的莫过于做一顿家庭晚餐，”劳丽·大卫(Laurie David)在《家庭晚餐》(The Family Dinner，书中的菜谱是希尔斯廷·乌伦豪尔特[Kirstin Uhrenholdt]写的)一书中这样引用《美食家》(Gourmet)的露丝·雷切尔(Ruth Reichl)的话。这样的炫耀在劳丽·大卫的书中随处可见，结果这本书对家庭烹饪的神化比其中略显平庸的菜谱（简易晚餐菜肉馅煎蛋饼、土耳其肉糕和你最喜欢的烤奶酪）更令人难忘。对孩子来说没什么比家庭晚餐更重要吗？我倒是可能会把“送孩子上学”或“偶尔拥抱他们”排在前面。

Such bunk continues in "The Family Cooks," another production by David and Uhrenholdt, who turns out to be David's private chef. (Aha, the secret to "The Family Cooks" is . . . the family cook.) This time the book has Katie Couric laying down the law: "The single most powerful thing anyone can do to protect their health, to live a healthy life and to have a healthy future is to go into their own kitchen and cook food themselves." As if to blow all these superlatives away, David eventually brings in the master stylist and vegetarian-food thinker Jonathan Safran Foer for the coda to "The Family Dinner." Foer's own "food is everything" aria does not disappoint: "Every meal," he writes, "is a chance to get it right or get it wrong, to approach or withdraw from our ideals. Does anything in our lives matter more than how we set our tables?" I tried hard to connect this question to the Easy Cheesy Dinner Frittata but couldn't. I'm telling you: I'm not cut out for this.
乌伦豪尔特后来成了大卫的私人厨师，她们后来又合着了《家庭厨师》（The Family Cooks，啊哈，《家庭厨师》的秘密是……家庭厨师）。这一次，大卫引用凯蒂·柯丽克(Katie Couric)的话来动员读者：“要想保持健康，过上健康的生活，拥有健康的未来，任何人能做的最有用的事就是走进厨房，自己做饭。”好像是为了避免这些极端的说法，大卫在《家庭晚餐》的结尾部分请来了文体大师、素食思想家乔纳森·萨弗兰·福尔(Jonathan Safran Foer)。福尔“食物即一切”的咏叹调没有令人失望：他写道，“每一餐都可能做好，也可能做砸；有可能更接近或更远离我们的理想。生活中还有比布置餐桌更重要的事吗？”我努力把这个问题与简易菜肉馅煎蛋饼联系在一起，但是没有成功。我告诉你吧：我不是这块料。