Bill Sittig:
Good morning everyone.  If the people in the back could please take seats.  Thank you.  I know the food is a big attraction, but I think our speaker is a better attraction.  
	
Welcome to today's program featuring author and cook, Laura Schenone.  I'm Bill Sittig, Chief of the Library's Science, Technology and Business division.  And this event is one in our series in which we learn from important writers and practitioners in the various fields for which our division is responsible.  

These events are also designed to highlight the Library's collections.  If you haven't done so already, I urge you to take some time after the program to look at the wonderful displays of over 300 books that have been specially selected from the Library's extensive collections in the field of cookery and the history of cookery.  We hope that they will wet your appetite to come back to use our collections in this and other related fields.  

Before I introduce today's speaker, I would like to mention a few of our upcoming programs, which I hope will be of interest to you.  This Friday, Professor Charles Smith of Cornell University will present a lecture and slideshow on bird conservation on farmlands and open lands.  On May 11, Holly Shimizu, Director of the U.S. Botanic Garden will talk about some aspects of her garden.  And I think of special interest to this audience, will be a lecture on June 24th by Steven Raichlen, author, columnist, teacher, and expert on American barbecue.  He may also have a variety of barbecue on hand for us to sample, we hope.  
	
I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Alison Kelly and Connie Carter of my Division for all their good efforts they put into making today's program a success.  They assembled the exhibit you see in this room and outside and were responsible for the cookies and punch, which they hope will tempt your taste buds.  With the assistance of Laverne Paige [ spelled phonetically ] and the LC Cooking Club [ spelled phonetically ], Allison and Connie collected many old family recipes, which have been copied and are available for you to read and take away a copy of those recipes that you find particularly appealing.  

It is now my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Laura Schenone.  Ms. Schenone is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Post, and numerous other newspapers and magazines.  The title of one of her articles that appeared in the Newark Star Ledger that particularly intrigued me is, "In Search of Gnocchi," if I pronounced that correctly.  A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove:  A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances" is her first book.  And she just informed me that she's working on another book, which I think is supposed to come out later this year, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.  

[ laughter ]

I wonder how we'll do that program.  

No stranger to cooking, she has cooked for many years, not quite a thousand, for her husband and two sons at her home in Montclair, New Jersey.  In an interview that appeared last year in The New York Times, Ms. Schenone explained that although she is interested in food and how it tastes, her real interest lies in the stories behind the food and what food says about the women who serve it up.  She is more interested in the products of everyday working kitchens than she is in what is cooked up by the world's finest chefs.  

In the preface to A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, which, by the way, is for sale and signing right outside this room after the event, Ms. Schenone recounts how:  

One day while I was steaming the skins off some tomatoes, in that hot August kitchen, it dawned on me that I could tell my life story through food.  Since food is such an eternal thread through women's lives, I wondered, perhaps naively, if I could tell other women's stories that way too.  

First I examined the women of my own family line, from the stench of grapes fermenting in the living room, homemade wine, of course, to bread lunches, excessive holiday tables, first communion feasts, crock pot dinners and take-out foods.  I could trace immigration, poverty, marriage, children, work, love and death.  

But beyond these pieces of personal history, I saw a larger scope of history.  I saw women changing over time, both creating around responding to the world around them.  Almost always, these changes showed up on the dinner tables.  Through the path of food, I easily found way back into the 19th century, and I realized that I could keep on going further and further into the past.  

And now to hear about the past, and I hope, the future, Laura Schenone.  

[ applause ]	

Laura Schenone:
Thank you, Bill.  That was a wonderful introduction.  I'm very happy to be here today for a few reasons.  First of all, I had no idea what kind of an event this was going to be, and I was astounded when I walked in to see all these books and the food.  And I just don't know if I'm of more interest than that food, to tell you the truth.  That was kind.  I don't know.  And I'm going to talk about history today -- food history and women's history and recipes.  

But I'll tell you, Washington is a part of my personal history.  I lived -- I was raised in New Jersey and spent most of my time around New York and New Jersey.  But for a few years, I moved down here when I had a six-month-old baby and a half-written book proposal for A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, and still the dream that I could write a book.  I was a freelance writer, but when you're -- I didn't know if it would work.  And I couldn't have wound up in a better place to be in Washington.  My husband had a job here.  Like only a gazillion women in this town, I came because my husband had a job.  We moved here.  And I came to this Library.  

I began in the Science and Technology Division at the Adams Building looking at the old Home Ec. books.  I sat under that beautiful dome in the Jefferson Building where my imagination could wonder.  That building is beyond the physical place for me.  It's a state of mind of imagination and connection.  

I was in the Manuscript Division at the Madison Building.  I looked at the America Eats Project.  A gem in this place is the Folklife Room.  Pretty much a hidden gem, I would say.  What a wonderful place.  And of course, the Catherine Biding Collection [ spelled phonetically ].  I was all over the place, and in the prints and photographs, you'll see loads of pictures in this book that came from here.  

So this place is very special to me, and it's very wonderful for me to be here now after all these years.  That was nine years ago.  That little by a now nine and a half.  So, you know, I -- the book that I wrote is a history of American women told through food.  And I used food to tell what seemed to me to be important stories.  And by food, I don't only mean antique recipes.  Those are very, very important, but I also mean women's work with food.  I also mean growing food, how we preserve food, how we celebrate with food, the way that women have worked in food factories.  So much of the job of feeding and nurturing the human race, since the beginning of time, has fallen upon women, and few people, really no one, it occurred to me, ever took the time to write that story.  So, that's what I wanted to do.  

And I'll tell you, the way I got the idea is that -- first of all, I was in the kitchen with my mother and grandmother.  I was one of those people.  I was lucky enough to have that.  I was very close to them.  They were hard working, working-class family.  Life had definitely a grind quality to it.  But what I saw in the kitchen with my mother and my grandmother when they cooked and brought us together was a form of redemption and beauty that stayed with me my whole life.  

But I didn't get the idea for this particular book until -- another job my husband had that I moved for was I found myself living on a farm in central New Jersey.  I didn't want to go.  We were living in New York.  I'm a very urban person.  And we cut a deal.  I said, "I'll go if I can have a garden."  So we rented this farmhouse, and I grew all kinds of vegetables.  And I fell in love with vegetables and with history.  

I began looking over my shoulders for the ghosts of the farmhouse women who lived there before me.  The house was from the 1860s, and I started to believe I could hear them.  I was spending a lot of time alone.  

[ laughter ]

I got the idea for this book.  And it was kind of naive, because I was not a historian.  So, it was a long way of going.  But I was a writer, and I knew how to look at texts.  That was very important.  The texts that you have here formed the basis of the research.  But after that, because so much of history -- women's history is not recorded in texts, you have to look other places, so I used oral history.  I talked to people.  The photographs and pictures and images help.  Many, many, things, even songs.  In the Folk Life Room, I listened to some grinding chants -- some chants.  They have a great collection of music there, as you know.  But, I believe, it was Navajo women doing.  It didn't wind up in the book, but to hear that, and to imagine doing that work, grinding.  You know, how did they get through all that labor?  And then to hear those chants.  So sometimes for women's history you have to go to other places, archaeology, anthropology.  Women have not left behind a lot of written documents until fairly recently.  

Okay.  I did have a little talk prepared.  I was going to give you some of the theoretical ideas and then tell you some surprising research facts I found, and then read a little bit from the book.  But, since there's so much wonderful stuff here, I think we should take a look of at them also and kind of go a little bit off.  And I definitely want to hear your questions at the end.  

So, you know, when I decided I was going to do this book that would tell the story of women, from prehistory, very naively, from the beginning of time to the present day, I had to ask myself who was the first woman who cooked on this continent.  And as far as we know, the only proof that I could get -- I've heard different things.  I talked to a lot of archaeologists.  But the only thing absolutely for sure right now is the 12,000-year-old mastodon bones, I believe, in New Mexico.  And anthropologists tell us that women probably did that job.  We can't know for sure.  Mastodon bones don't talk.  But we can only guess.  

And then the next thing -- the next big issue for me was I really wanted everyone at the table.  So often when you read the history of women or of cooking you hear something like, women had servants in those days.  Oh, what did the servants do?  Who were they?  I really wanted to know.  And so sometimes when I look at this book, it looks a little dense to me.  And I think, "My god, all these pictures, all these recipes.  It's so dense."  And sometimes I think, couldn't I have done it in a simpler way?  But, I guess I'll share with you what I say to myself, which is, I wanted everyone at the table.  

I wanted to start with natives in prehistory.  I wanted to include the story of slavery and civil rights.  I wanted to include conservative religious women.  I really wanted to include Asian women.  They're often excluded.  So in a way, I was making room for a lot of voices that I felt hadn't been heard.  So not too much on Martha Stewart; she's had enough.  And I brought in some other people.  

And then the other thing was, I'm really a writer first, not a historian.  So I was very concerned about the narrative and trying to make it beautiful and wanting it, again, to be very inviting, as at a table.  I use that metaphor often for myself.  But sometimes when you write the story of us, of women, it's hard to keep the interest going because you don't get intimacy with a single character, the heroic, the struggles of one individual.  I tried to bring in as much intimacy as I could by going out and talking to people, including their talks.  I include a little bit of myself in the book.  I think some people might be jarred by that.  You're reading history and then I come in and tell you, "Well, I went to go cook over hearth fire, and here's what it what it was like."  But I wanted that sense of warmth.  And then also the photos, the wonderful photos I got here and other places, help, I think, bring that intimacy and poetry to history to be able to see.  So those are some of the ideas.  

I was at IACP this last weekend.  That's the International Association of Culinary Professionals.  I've never been before.  I was on a panel there, and there was some very smart people.  And I'll throw out an idea that I just -- I can't get off my mind since then.  A terrific scholar, her name is Rachel Louden [ spelled phonetically ], writes about -- she writes a lot about technology.  And she was comparing the shift of food away from the home through history, to textiles the way that -- she says, "I'm here today.  You're here today.  We didn't make our clothes.  We bought them somewhere."  

Somebody did make that food, but that slowly and slowly food is leaving the home and that basically the home is an assembly place now for food.  We don't make anything anymore, and that this isn't necessarily isn't bad.  And that, you know, we've got to get on with it through history.  More people get to eat.  And why should some woman in New Mexico have to spend five hours grinding corn to make really good tortillas?  So the quality of tortillas has really declined in Mexico, but that woman is not on her knees.  She's really got a point.  

Women have spent a lot of time throughout history doing a lot of work.  In the book, I came across so much research that really had me pulled between my sense of beauty and nostalgia and the love of food and cooking, and then the very realistic fact that women have done an awful lot of work and hard labor putting it together.  And I think is a very fundamental issue today where we are -- you said, where we were in the past and where we are here.  I think I started very quickly with where we are here.  

But I really think that food, when you get deep in the questions of its meaning, there is a sense of both beauty and power for women in food throughout history.  But there is also this sense of oppression because it is a lot of work.  And I tried to resolve that, and I would shift and shift and pull myself back and then finally I really came to believe that it's two sides of the same coin, and that the labor and the love are all part of what make it so interesting.  

So, I don't know, how many people here think that food will become like textiles that it will leave the home and will give it up, and it'll be okay?  No one?  [ Laughs ].

[ laughter ]

I feel that what we put into our bodies, the biological reality of food is so different than what we put on our bodies.  And I love textiles.  They're a beautiful art form.  But I also, I don't know if I'll ever give it up.  And when I come here to an event like this, I feel, as I did many times when I was doing the research, that food and cooking is really part of our better side of humanity.  Human beings are quite a mixed lot.  We have wars.  We don't also do the right thing, but that cooking really is a brighter side of ourselves.  So those are some of the bigger ideas when I went along.  

And now I'll share with you some of the surprising research discoveries, and then we'll take a look around here.  I don't know how many people this would surprise, you can tell me.  I was surprised to find that women were probably the first farmers.  Is anybody surprised by the that?  No one.  Okay, Bill isn't either.  I was really surprised.  I guess if I thought about it, I might have figured it out.  

But after a millennia of developing botanical expertise as gatherers -- sometimes we think of gathering as just berries, you know, berry picking.  Berry picking, frolicking.  The Native Americans who were here gathered thousands of different kinds of foods.  And it was not just berries: roots and nuts and shellfish, all kinds of things.  And they were really botanists, and they're knowledge had been developed over millennia and passed on.  There was trial and error.  I'm sure people died.  There's no doubt.  But, it was only a matter of time.  

If you really think about it, men were the hunters.  And there were aberrations.  There were plenty of men who gathered and plenty of women who hunted.  But generally that does hold up.  So, who was the one who was likely -- which gender -- to figure out, "Oh, we can help along this plant we like by weeding it," or "Look, this thing sprouted here where I dropped my seeds," and we could go by the bread oven or something.  Women probably figured it out and were probably the first farmers.  

I was surprised that food history to know that some of our most favorite food myths have to do with men or food legends.  And one of them that really bothers me is the Earl of Sandwich.  

[ laughter ]

So please don't ever believe that again.  I would say that at least tortillas, we know, were being made in Central America before the time of Christ.  And they were almost certainly being used to wrap around food to make it portable.  So probably in the Middle East also to make it portable.  

Fruit roll-ups, they're not invented by Kraft.  I want you to know that.  

[ laughter ]

There are cookbooks in the 19th century with recipes for fruit leather, which is the same thing.  But even further back, Indians in the Upper Northwest, who lived in this wonderful climate and did not farm, went on big gathering expeditions, huge amount of work, and would gather berries and cook them down in the sun and dry them out in the sun and pound then and then roll them up and save them for winter in a big roll.  And then tear off a little bit as you needed throughout the winter until the berries came back.  

I was surprised -- I'm from the north -- that in the sea islands of South Carolina, many people still eat rice every day and that this is a memory of Africa.  There's an amazing story about the way that Africans during the 17th and 18th centuries brought so much skill and expertise to South Carolina.  A lot of times people think that slaves were here bringing labor, but they brought all kinds of skills and expertise that built the gold empire.  

I was surprised to find out how many times women have taken to the streets throughout history to protest when they couldn't get the food they needed to feed their kids.  And there really is something about women in the streets protesting about food that gets action.  And there is actually a picture in the book in 1914 of a woman in New York City on the eve of World War I.  There was such a food shortage here that poor women actually could no longer buy food anywhere.  They were taking their kids out of school and sending them to work so they could buy food.  And this mayhem broke out in Brooklyn, and all these riots started spreading up and down the Northeast in the big cities.  And sure enough, this event pushed aside news of the war, and President Wilson set up a council to deal with the problem, and some steps were taken.  

I think women have a lot more power with food than they realize.  Right now there's a lot of talk about obesity with kids and the diabetes rate and that they're not going to outlive us.  And I feel like women really have a lot of potential there to take action.  I don't know if they're going to take to the streets, but I do believe in that potential.  

I don't know if we realize -- another thing I was surprised -- I sensed it but, just how very much women have invented some of our most-treasured foods.  I think we really forget that jams, chutneys, flavored vinegars, catsups, butter, cheese, smoked fish, bacon, and pies, were are not invented in the factory by Heinz or whatever.  Women were probably the ones who invented these technologies as a means to preserve the bounty of summer.  We often think of men as being so excellent with technology and invention, but women were amazing at what they did with food.  

And then finally, I was really interested because I have a background in literature, to see the cookbook as a real source of the female voice in our culture, a real source of political opportunity for expression.  If you think about it, women were not widely literate before the American -- before the early 19th century.  And when cookbooks first started coming out, it really was a venue for women to have a place to express what they believed in, the way they thought society should go.  It was a new country.  They used cookbooks -- they would give all kinds of polite etiquette, recipes, and then kind of stick in little opinions here and there that women should be educated, that alcoholism is bad, that health is important, their faith in science, that the cookbook really is a place for our voice.  

And I think, now, I'm going to take a look at some examples of that.  Does this work?  All right.  That was seamless.  Okay.  All right.  We'll start over here.  

This is such an amazing.  First of all war -- I'm not doing women's voice here -- but war.  The wartime cookbooks are very interesting because wars always change everything, and they change gender roles.  And through each of our big wars, women have become extremely involved in the public sphere, very often through food up to World War II.  And from that, they've leapt off into better places or gotten more power for themselves or influence in society.  

One example of this is, during the Civil War, there was such immense suffering that women went out and they were cooking for soldiers.  They were doing all kinds of jobs, taking care of the farms while soldiers were away, doing all kinds of things that women do during war, that everyone does.  They have to stretch themselves.  When the war ended they didn't necessarily want to go back to their same roles in the home.  And they embarked on a new period of women's history, the Progressive Era, where they created all these clubs, charitable leagues, do-good societies of all kinds.  And one of their favorite fundraising devices was the charitable cookbook.  And back here is, I think, the "Cooking for Cause" section.  

I'm so in love with charitable cookbooks.  They are so quirky and individual.  You can find little ones that are put together by hand, maybe a few hundred were made.  But "Cooking for a Cause" -- the Children's Hospital at Stanford, they had a cookbook.  Churches all over the place.  I see the Portland Symphony, another hospital.  You really can see that during the Progressive Era women built so much of what we know to be America now, with libraries and hospitals and, some people would say, the base of our public health and social welfare system.  Some people would say that.  

Okay.  Now, I just need to read this before we go to this item.  I made a mark.  Really, this makes sense what I'm doing.  So, very much the story of women and cooking has to do with technology, and I hold up this amazing piece of technological invention here.  These were -- this is a modern one.  Yes, we have plastic, which we'll never get away from again.  But here we have a picture of one of the original ones in the book.  Okay.  

I really need to read you the copy line.  There it is.  They were called the Dover Eggbeater.  People would call that a "Dover," not a beater, a Dover.  Now, here's the copy line.  "Beats the whites of eggs in 10 seconds!"  This is a miraculous thing.  And some people the argument of technology is that the more technology we get, the higher standards we have, and we all know this, the more productive we're supposed to be.  Once this was available, guess what came into style?  Angel food Cake.  So you could work all the harder to get this fluffy cloud-like cake.  

This is one of my very favorite books, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine.  That's what I was thinking of.  I don't know if any of you -- you all should go get this book.  It's a great book.  It's by the Darden sisters.  They're really one of the first people to turn the -- I shouldn't say the first.  They did a great job in the '70s of turning the cookbook into a memoir and a family story.  And that's actually what I'm doing with my next book, a personal book.  They did a wonderful job, recipes and family history told together.  Many people have come after trying do as good a job as they did but haven't.

I'm going to read a little bit from the book.  Just a little bit.  Okay knocked off the microphone I hope.  Okay.  This comes from one of my favorite books, Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden.  Buffalo Bird Woman was a Hidatsa Indian, and this was written at the end of the 19th century, when people were absolutely sure that Indians were going to become extinct.  And all these people fashioned themselves into anthropologists, which was a new field, and ran off to collect their experiences and record and document then before they became extinct.  And a Presbyterian minister named Gilbert Wilson found this amazing woman, Buffalo Bird Woman, who was a consummate farmer and had just an incredible amount of farming knowledge.  She was a real culture bearer.  She understood so much.  And he recorded her life story and all of her knowledge about gardening.  

"We cared for our corn in those days, as we would care for a child.  For we Indian people loved our fields, as mothers love their children.  We thought that the corn plants had souls, as children have souls.  And that the growing corn liked to hear us sing, as children like to hear their mothers sing to them."  They would sing to their corn growing in the field.  Isn't that amazing?  

I was also taken by how often I came across women using entrepreneurial activities with food, setting up baking businesses or getting involved in, you know, opening restaurants or trying to make money with their food skills, to advance themselves and get what they wanted out of life.  This comes from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs, 1861.  And she writes about her grandmother, who got her mistress's permission to start a baking business.  
	
"She became an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse, to seamstress.  She was much praised for her cooking, and her nice crackers became so famous in the neighborhood that many people were desirous of obtaining them.  In consequences of numerous requests of this kind, she asked permission of her mistress to bake crackers at night after all the household work was done.  And she obtained leave to do it, provided she would clothe herself and her children from the profits.  Upon these terms, after working hard all day for her mistress, she began her midnight bakings, assisted by her two oldest children.  The business proved profitable, and each year she laid by a little, which was saved for a fund to purchase her children."  
	
I talked about charitable cookbooks before.  A lot of people think that suffrage was probably a really big cause during the 19th century.  It wasn't.  They were considered very radical.  The leading cause was -- women's cause -- was temperance and the fight against alcoholism.  And there are loads of cookbooks fighting against alcoholism with tirades against the evils of alcohol slipped in between the recipes.  But one of my favorite charitable cookbooks has this written in the front, "Give us a vote, and we will cook the better for a wide outlook."  And that comes from the Washington Women's Cookbook, 1909, published by the Washington Equal Suffrage Association.  

When I wanted to write about natives today, it was hard because, you know, when you're an outsider, and you're doing research, you have to be very, very careful and very respectful.  And even after doing that, maybe, people still won't talk to you.  And I -- you know, we know about buffalo.  We know a little bit about the three sisters of the Iroquois, but they're such complex native food systems, and I wanted to write about something that's was a little bit less known, and I was very interest in camus.  Does anyone know what camus is?  Very few people, okay.  Camus is a root that grows in the highlands of the Upper Northwest, like Idaho.  And it's -- from what I understand -- actually someone sent me one in the mail.  I was too afraid to eat it.  This woman, I'm going to read from.  

But it's a little root, it's a bulb, and I understand that when they're baked in underground earth ovens they taste like vanilla.  They have a vanilla scent.  I don't know.  It was hard for me to believe looking at this thing she sent me.  I don't know.  

[ laughter ]

So this was a woman I met who would talk to me.  "Janet Black Eagle lives in a little town called Kooskia, in the Nez Perce Indian Reservation in Idaho, which has a population of about 300.  She, along with small groups of perhaps 100 others, still go out and dig camus each summer.  She learned from her mother's family, and her principle tool is a digging stick, with a bone handle at one end and a sharp skinny metal spike at the other." 

She's a Presbyterian, who mixes Christianity with native spiritual practices and perhaps this is why she is willing to talk to me, when other more traditional Nez Perce woman wouldn't.  After all the losses and pain, why should they reveal their sacred ways to me?"

So she describes to me about how she went out and she still has these camus every year and they last her through the winter.  And she does this, in part, because she's very worried about the diabetes rate.  Many of you may know that after natives were given a western diet, very rapidly, there's incredibly high diabetes rate there.  And she believes that women can play a very crucial role in reversing the trend by going back to traditional foods.  

So she said, "The women are such a backbone.  When a woman pulls that root out for the first time and sees the value of it and how it was part of the culture and the tradition, there's just a connection between the woman and the root.  Her ancestors before her probably pulled roots from the same spot.  Our people lived on this, and now they can go back and live on it again."  

Okay.  Now that I did like the earth mother perspective, we'll switch and do something totally different from the other side of that coin.  During the years after the Civil War, cheese production, you know, women -- farm women -- would make cheese, incredibly laborious work, an art, but no doubt.  And this historian, named Sally McMurray [ spelled phonetically ], studied these women, who, right after they had given up cheese making, to the factory, to see what it did for their lives.  So in her book I found this letter in a newspaper from a Mrs. Allerton [ spelled phonetically ], 1875.  It's called, "Dairy Factory System:  A Blessing to the Farmer's Wife."  

In many farmhouses, the dairy work loomed up every year.  A mountain that it took all summer to scale.  But the mountain has been removed.  It has been handed over to the cheese factory, and let us be thankful that time does not hang heavy on the hands of the farmer's wife now that it is gone.  She does not need the dairy work for recreation.  Hardy, honest work is a good thing for all of us, but now, how much of it?  That is the question.  

For my part, I think a little rest, a blessed little idleness now and then is good for a change.  I hate to hear it said of a woman that she is always at work.  If she can't help it, she is to be pitied.  If she can, she is to blame.  A wife should not forget that she has something else to keep clear of rubbish than the house she lives in.  If there must be cobwebs anywhere, it's better they should lurk in the dark corners of her room, than in her heart and brain.  

If the farmer wants a companion, she must have a little leisure now and then in order to be companionable.  All work and no recreation of any kind?  What does that make of a woman?"  

I agree with that.  

[ laughter ]

Very much.  As you will see, the final thing I'm going to read is a little bit about myself.  

How many people here cook?  Really?  How many people really like to cook?  How many people love to cook?  How many people hate and despise cooking?
  
[ laughter ]

Come on, come on, be honest!  Because this is -- I'm going to share with you that I think that's okay.  

[ laughter ]

Even though I cook, there's some times when I cannot.  And I'm going to share with you the story of myself flinging a couple of frozen dinners at my poor two children.  So here we go.  This is from the end of the book.  

"Can I touch it?"  My six-year-old son asks, after he had taken it out of the box.  He tentatively puts his index finger on the icy plastic package.  Then grabs the whole thing with one hand and throws it on the kitchen counter to see what happens.  It makes a loud thud, something like a brick.  This strikes him as hilarious.  He does it again.  I put the brick in the microwave, along with one for his brother.  This is their dinner, lasagna, in single serving portions, ready in just a few minutes.  

While the microwave hums and the timer counts down, I glance at the package and put a check mark on some invisible ledger in my mind.  Good.  Organic.  This is not really a TV dinner.  

[ laughter ]

A personal note declares the product's good intentions from the company's founder, along with a picture of an old-fashioned farm woman feeding a child.

[ laughter ]

They still do this on all the advertising.  They did it a lot in the '90s.  They still do it.  

In five minutes the microwave beeper goes off.  I remove the cartons, which now contain hot boiling noodles, cheese, and sauce and I mull over whether to serve them on cardboard or on plates. 

[ laughter ]

Okay, on plates.  I cut the lasagna into bite-size pieces and from a bag of presorted and trimmed lettuce, I make a salad for the big boy and I cut up fruit for the little one.  They love the lasagna.  Another check mark in the plus column.
  
[ laughter ]

Within an hour, both children have finished and all signs of cooking, eating, and cleaning up have been erased.  Dad gets home from a long commute.  All hands and faces washed.  All smudges wiped from the floor.  A final check mark, no dishes.  

[ laughter ]

Frozen lasagna gives a woman some options, and that is what my generation is all about.  Thanks to frozen lasagna, I have time to give my young children undivided attention now and then after not seeing them all day.  Frozen lasagna allows me to do other things I feel I must do -- have a career, exercise, do my laundry, go out, or simply be with my husband after a long day of work instead of cleaning dishes until nine o'clock at night.

Ah, but the fat content.  Lasagna's loaded with cheese.  A check mark goes in the bad column.  Another check mark goes in the inauthenticity column, as I remember the Italian-American lasagnas of my childhood, enjoyed two or three special times a year with many relatives for celebrations, now de-ceremonialized and isolated, frozen in a solitary block, wrapped in single-serving plastic.  What kind of a life is that?

Like many American women living at a beginning of the 21st century, I can hear an array of voices speaking to me about food.  Voices that tell me not to cook so I can have freedom.  Voices that tell me I should cook so I can be a better mother.  Voices that tell me the eat because it's sensual.  Voices that tell me not to eat because I will get fat.  Voices that tell me to measure vitamins and calories and to avoid pesticides.  

Voices that tell me to think about the lives of the people who pick and package my food.  Voices that tell me to cook because it will please my man.  Voices that call out to me from my own distant ethic heritage, 100 years after immigration.  Voices that lure me to dreams of leisurely meals in beautiful restaurants.  And a voice somewhere amidst all of these telling me to create something beautiful on the table for the people I care about, so I can help us enjoy life and one another just a little bit more during our brief time here on earth.  

And that's all I have to share with you today.  I'm ready to answer any questions you may have.  Well, thank you.

[ applause ]  

[  end of transcript  ]