Increasing the food vocabulary

Words matter

By Culinate staff

February 1, 2010

In yesterday’s Oregonian, guest columnist and longtime teacher Jaime O’Neill lamented the loss in vocabulary among students — especially in the kitchen. He argues that cookbooks have removed such words as “dredge” or “truss” because too many people aren’t familiar with them. We don’t cook, he argues, so we don’t eat what’s good for us:

We don’t know or care much about what we’re ingesting — tons of high-fructose corn byproduct in nearly every package of prepared food we eat or every fast-food meal we wolf down. Relatively speaking, this stuff is cheap; most of all, it’s quick. And we don’t need much of a vocabulary to get it from the package to our paunches.

O’Neill argues that with better vocabularies (via education) we would eat better, too, and in turn we could tackle obesity:

Eat better. Lose weight. It begins with the words.

What would Michael Pollan say? Last week on Oprah he said we all need to cook — instead of letting corporations cook for us. No word on words, however.