By: Todd Wheatley

The FOOD & DRINK portion of this website has been a poor quality eye sore since 2014 with the exception of some improvement started in the last year or so. Now a total overhaul is underway including this bit of history to chew on (pun intended) ....

The desire for quality food is highly dependent upon the individual and has changed over the past 50 years. The widespread shift began slowly with the advent of "flash frozen" fish and vegetables in the 1950s. A few years later saw the birth of fast food into popular culture. Next, the "TV dinner" helped the push out of the kitchen. By the 1970s the number of women in the workplace created a wedge. Afterwards "gender workloads" within homes changed. That shift coupled with the pervasiveness of fast food and national restaurant chains have all but supplanted home cooking.

Now, unlike the women dominated households of the past, attitudes towards foods have changed. Take my parents, for example. They were part of the change generation and raised their children accordingly. With a busy working mother my indoctrination into the kitchen came early as did our increased use of prepackaged food. Little changed as I became a working teenager except a new reliance on fast food. Fortunately events moved quickly to get me out of the house and at Texas Tech University by the age of 17.

After ten difficult and fruitless years of college I became the most educated "ditch digger" in Texas. Maybe even the United States. As my difficulties grew, food was never a priority. To complicate matters, my job has odd hours and often takes me out of town. As a result I have paid extra for food convenience. More often valuing speed and ease over quality. Even with the trade off it's highly disconcerting to get substandard food.

Over many years of paying extra for bad food I had had enough. It was time for good quality, tasty food even on my tight budget. Luckily the savings came as I turned my back on convenience. Quality, on the other hand, took time. My cooking skill required a great deal of trial and error to improve. Ironically the women in my life (aside from my mother & sister) have been the non-cooking types. So coupled with my job, restaurants have been a food staple. Now with the COVID CRISIS, restaurants are failing everywhere not to mention capacity restrictions and a new aversion for crowds.

So now, as in days past, it seems home cooking has once again become necessary. As has the need to grocery shop. Something the stupid politicians who killed the restaurant industry didn't consider when they put lockdowns into place. "They" actually made things worse by consentrating people and, more importantly, the disease into local grocery stores. Instead of dispersing the population into socially distanced ECONOMY DRIVING restaurants. Even with a vaccine soon to arrive the current spike in infections could also land in the local store with the rise new shoppers. That means time, money, knowledge, and convenience are only a few of the variables that will drive people towards or away from good quality food.

In recognition of this new reality and assuming that you are tired of Crummy fastfood the DR-KNOW WEBSITE is upgrading its FOOD [ topic ]

=======================================
(12-30-20) addendum - the holidays have provided ample opportunity to work on my cooking skills. Both the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were a complete success. The biggest surprise was my 2nd perfect brisket in as many months. After more than ten years of sub-par briskets and seeking advise from everyone I now seem to have a working technique. Added to the surprise of cooking delight, the meat had been frozen since the March 2020 Covid lockdown which totally dispells the myth that a quality brisket can only be achieved by a fresh, UNFROZEN cut ... along the same line, "hardwood charcoal" is unnecessary. It's EXPENSIVE and environmentally damaging. Personally, I'm waiting for my PECAN trees to mature so I can prune a quality source of BBQ cooking material for FREE. Till then I will continue to buy HICKORY LOGS despite being a Texas sacrilege who mostly favor mesquite.


[ up ]      [ ALL TWEETs ]      [ back ]


(c) 2020-2016    DR-KNOW
IQ-2k Information Services


TOP     HOME     TOPICs

articles     podcasts     videos

Information eQuation (BOOK)
Information eQuation (examples)

EMAIL COMMENTS to DR-KNOW

Please support this web site: give any amount via PAYPAL ("money TRANSFER") to todd@dr-know.biz