Homemade, home played

Wholesome entertainment or the Fourth Horseman?

Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a lively eight-year-old girl. With the holidays upon us, she was hard at work refining her Christmas wish list. Her top requests for Santa? Cooking Mama and Gardening Mama, video games simulating those domestic tasks. (I can’t in good conscience recommend you do this, but if you’d like a nails-on-a-chalkboard video glimpse at each, check out their respective websites here and here.)

Now, I’ll admit to a little knee-jerk anti-video-game reaction to this girl’s enthusiasm, but I also get that this is what The Kids These Days are into. Having a committed gamer in the house, I can also acknowledge that video games aren’t quite the calamitous harbingers of obesity, imbecility, and sunlight-and-fresh-air-deficiency that some have made them out to be. All things in moderation, dontcha know.

But here’s where things got a little weird: Thinking that her wish list was rooted in a real-world interest in the food-prep and veggie-growing arts, I asked her if she had a favorite dish, what she most enjoyed helping mom or dad make in the kitchen. I asked her if the family had a garden, or if she’d grown a pea plant in a milk carton (didn’t we all do that in kindergarten?). What she said surprised me. Actually, it shocked me. (There. My fuddy-duddy credentials are on full display.)

She’d never cooked anything, or coaxed a seed to sprout. She’d never helped bake a cake or picked a ripe tomato off its vine. Never chopped onions, never planted them. And she wasn’t terribly interested in trying. To her, food comes from microwaves and drive-thru windows; the yard is where you keep the grass that no one walks on. Cooking meals and growing the ingredients are activities that take place in a climate-controlled rec room, on a 52″ flat-screen TV.

No disrespect to the girl or her parents, but I couldn’t decide if I wanted to gag, scream, or cry first.

You know that I’m given to frequent bouts of existential angst of the where-are-we-going-and-why-am-I-in-this-handbasket variety, but this really can’t be good. Can it? I’m reminded of Michael Pollan‘s piece from a few months back, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” in which he examines our strange modern relationship with food preparation. Pollan points out that cooking has, for so many (most?) Americans, become merely a spectator sport, something we enjoy watching but don’t dare try ourselves. One more fragment of reality moving into the virtual.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the cooking video game will spark an interest in the real deal. Maybe Cooking Mama will lead this little girl to actually cooking with mama. But I don’t hold out much hope. When your tastes are shaped by the hyperbolic–heavily seasoned and processed food, overly loud and flashy entertainment–it’s difficult to change the palate. When extravagance and immediate gratification are your normal, how can you learn to appreciate the subtlety of lightly steamed chard? Where do you get the patience to wait for seed to become sprout, sprout to become stalk, bud to become flower?

For my small part, I’m asking Santa to bring that little girl a love of beets, a yearning for dirt under her fingernails, and an adorable accessory or two. Maybe she’ll be enticed to put down the stylus and pick up a spoon.