What DO we want?

I was recently interested by an article published in Refrigerated and Frozen Foods Retailer magazine (www.rffretailer.com) about consumer research done this November (2005) by Insight Express, the Stamford, Connecticut based online market research firm. Insight surveyed 503 shoppers (supermarket and Wal-Mart shoppers). Two specific areas of inquiry particularly caught my attention.

The first item was that 29% of the respondents stated that they would be willing to pay 15% more (than existing prices) for “higher quality” products, particularly when it came to frozen seafood. 20-23% said the same thing about frozen pizza and frozen dinners, respectively.

On a second question, though, supermarket shoppers rated “taste” as the overwhelmingly most important reason to buy a product by a whopping margin over “quality” (49% ranked “taste” as the most important reason to buy, while 29.9% chose “quality” as their most important reason to buy), and the spread was even larger with Wal-Mart shoppers with 54.4% choosing “taste” and 26% choosing “quality.”

My question is this: how do we make the distinction between “taste” and “quality?” Is it by taste, ironically? Is it by the ingredients list? Is it by price, or brand name? Or is there any distinction? Perhaps the simplest equation is that to many consumers, good taste equals quality, nothing more and nothing less. And, despite the numerous food tortures we all put ourselves through in limiting fats, counting carbs, cutting back on calories, etc., at the end of the day, don’t we all want food that just tastes good?

I know that at the Diner people write reviews of their frozen food experiences based upon taste. They’ll deduct a fork or make a negative comment about pricing, or ingredient lists, or the amount of fat/carbs, but they still rate the entrees and meals by how much they like them.

So…I’m curious…what is quality if it isn’t taste?

Everybody Does It! (Part 2)

Perhaps the feeling that not cooking is “bad” is subconsciously tied to the inherent belief that cooking is an act of love, an act of sharing, a way of demonstrating that you care for someone else. Is the inverse that if you just nuke and serve, you love your family less than a “real” cook? Was Julia Child the new archetype for love, or perhaps Martha Stewart? Somehow, regardless of the success achieved by both, it’s hard to picture Julia or Martha as usurping Aphrodite.

That home cooking is inextricably bound to concepts of love is demonstrated through our most precious rituals – the holidays. It is true that we equate homecooked meals with love. Why else is food so bound up with our holiday rituals? We have laboriously prepared dinners on the holidays that we eat at no other time of the year – stuffed roasted turkeys at Thanksgiving, Roast Prime Ribs of Beef and Smoked Hams at Christmas, (or even a goose!), and fresh hams at Easter. We swoon over family favorites, dishes that Moms have served for generations. We gush and coo over new dishes provided by our family members, while at the same time surreptitiously reaching under the table to slip Rover the items we can’t stand.

Nonetheless, whether homecooked meals equal love or not, the truth is that North Americans are consuming vastly ever-increasing amounts of prepared meals, arriving at a love-hate relationship with the TV Dinner.

Given our zeitgeist about the stuff, it’s amazing that frozen dinners aren’t sold in plain brown wrappers.

It's All Macademic, Anyway....

I’m interrupting the regularly-scheduled Blog program – the recent discussion of frozen meals as analogous to dirty secrets – to relate to you the sorry saga of my most recent holiday cookie test-bake.

My husband’s family doesn’t cook at all, which makes me the Julia Child of my particular clan of hairless apes. More particularly, it makes me the Pillsbury Dough Girl of the group, as the idea of baking cookies or anything trickier than Poppin’ Fresh dough leaves them prostrate. A series of events over the years – starting with me being too poor to buy Christmas gifts for anyone, coupled with my disbelief that my in-laws could celebrate Christmas sans Christmas Cookies – have conspired to make me the official Baker of Christmas Cookies for all of my husband’s family (and in recent years a few of my own, too). The net result is that we make 120-130 dozen cookies each December, which despite my moaning here, I actually enjoy.

This year, about a month ago, I was chatting with my good friend Barbara Grace the Canadian. I’ve always liked her, but now I suspect that there is evil in her heart, which I’ll get to shortly. I told her I’d been less-than-thrilled with two of the cookies I’d made for Christmas, 2004. Barbara Grace told me that White Chocolate Chip Cookies With Macadamia Nuts have become very big in Canada. Ohhhh, I breathed when she told me – that sounds luscious. So, happy idiot that I am, I decided to do a test bake for these cookies, to see if they would be good enough to be included in the Annual Sacrifice of butter, sugars and flour to the Food holiday gods.

I won’t bore you with the brain-damage of actually trying to find and purchase real white chocolate chips – or white chocolate of any kind. This delectable treat has apparently been replaced in large part by something called “white confection,” which not only doesn’t taste the same, it doesn’t look the same and it doesn’t cook the same. Nonetheless, for the purposes of just testing the cookie, I scored some Hershey’s White Whatever chips. And, lo and behold, a bag of Mauna Loa dry roasted macadamia baking pieces (bless their hearts) had – what else? – a recipe for “Macadamia White Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Cool! I was set, all good to go.

I fluffed the butter and sugars. I beat the eggs and vanilla. I blended in the flour, baking soda and salt. I noticed that the dough was stiff-ish, but I ignored that; I have a standby holiday cookie with a very stiff dough that is a fabulous finished product, so I wasn’t worried. I added and stirred the nuts and the white-whatever pieces. I spooned out the teaspoonfuls and baked for 10-12 minutes. I checked the cookies at 10 minutes, and they were doughy, whitish and the bottoms were barely browned. I checked at 12 minutes, and decided I’d best defer to the destructions, and took them out.

The second sheet, I cooked longer, trying to get at least a semblance of browning to the tops of the cookies. This rather amateurish production continued through 5 separate baking sheets of cookies, trying to find the right balance of crunch on the outside coupled with gooey, soft interior. Finally convinced I had it (a 16-minute-no-peekie cookie), I triumphantly slid the last of the cooling cookies onto a plate and announced the results to my husband (the Trusted Annual Baker’s Apprentice and Dough-Stirrer). I mean, just take a look at those babies – don’t they look like perfectly yummy, tempting cookies to you?

Looks are deceiving!! Those delightfully tawny things aren’t what they appear to be – they are WMD - Weapons of Macadamia Destruction. A mere hour after the last of the test bake cookies had cooled, I sauntered by and popped one into my mouth. Imagine my horror when I realized I couldn’t bite down! Those *&^% cookies hadn’t cooled…they had hardened with cement-like consistency. Even the scary-looking ones from the first sheet – the whitish, non-browned ones – had turned into hockey pucks that you could substitute for the interlocking pavers in your driveway. To eat them, you either have to dunk them into a liquid or nuke them until they soften. Of course, if you allow them to cool at all post-nuking, they regain that enviable consistency of tempered steel.

Obviously, that recipe is off of my Christmas cookie list. But that’s not the worst of it.

When I told Barbara Grace about the dreadful hockey puck cookies, she laughed. For some reason, she thinks the idea that the cookies should not be pasty white is hysterical, and that they turn into Moon Rocks is even funnier. Why is it not surprising – in hindsight – that a Canadian would think that a pasty white cookie is perfectly normal? She claims she buys and eats one of these along with her coffee from her local General Store every morning, and I believe her. Why do I believe her?

Because by afternoon, no one could eat one.



Next Wednesday: Back to our discussion of frozen food!!

Everybody Does It!

Part 1

Why is it that frozen meals – TV Dinners, if you will – are the 21st century equivalent of what we used to delicately call “self-abuse?” Yes, I’m talking about the M word, indeed.

Here’s what I find confusing: since 1998, the amount of money spent by Americans on frozen, prepared foods has skyrocketed, vaulting an amazing 58% in a mere 7 years. Based upon figures like that, you would think that everyone you know is eating TV dinners, right? Try to find one person who will tell you what frozen dinners he likes, or what prepared meals she feeds her kids. Everyone does it…and no one will admit it, just like M.

What’s the issue? Is it the psychological leftovers and detritus from the 1950’s, when TV dinners were truly dreadful? Or is it some type of urban mythology sprung full-grown from movie and television images of blowsy women (replete with unfiltered cigarettes hanging from their lips), plopping down the signature aluminum tray on a flyspecked table in front of a dirty loutish husband that gives us the shudders when we consider “TV Dinners?” We seem to be beset by a type of collective consciousness that believes that while frozen vegetables are good for you, frozen prepared foods are slatternly.

We don’t just consider TV dinners as “bad,” in a sense of merely taste or nutrition; we seem to consider them “bad” in a moral sense, as something reprehensible or evil. Heck, if you don’t believe that TV Dinners are socially stigmatized, just ask Carla Gugino. In her new TV series, Threshold, her character is shown in the first episode as an ingenious worst-case-scenario expert who dines alone on prepared dinners. They might as well have branded a gigantic “L” across her forehead to complete her identification as the unloved Loser. No wonder the show was canceled.



Next Wednesday: Part 2 of Everybody Does It!