Failing at Fondue

The Daily Mail has pub­lished an arti­cle about yet another retro-living woman who has spent a week pre­tend­ing to live with the resource lim­i­ta­tions of another era. We’ve seen women of the 1930s and 1940s, and cou­ples of the 1950s… today, how­ever, we are graced with the attempt by one woman to live in the 1970s of Britain. Not the full range of retro ele­ments, mind you — no bell-bottomed leisure suits for her! Just the cooking.

The woman in ques­tion bemoans the loss of her microwave, her bread maker, her cof­fee maker, her elec­tric scales… and even her food proces­sor. Apparently she’s reliv­ing the very early ‘70s, since they were cer­tainly avail­able later in the decade. But, then, this was pre-Thatcher Britain, and peo­ple still ate twigs.

I’ve lived in Bolivia for two years. I cook two meals a day in a world with­out the ben­e­fit of a microwave or pre­pared goods. Macaroni and Cheese in boxes is con­sid­ered a seri­ous splurge in our Bolivian house­hold (it does, after all, cost more than mak­ing a beef roast stew).

She bab­bles on about how dread­fully dif­fi­cult, how mind­numb­ingly time-consuming, it all is. To lis­ten to her, cook­ing from scratch would seem to be a mis­er­able all-day task.

She’s right, in a sense. Everything does take longer. The way she whines, how­ever, sounds as if she spent hours slav­ing away each day for a week only to col­lapse at the table in exhaus­tion. Comparing her tales with real­ity, I can only con­clude that she’s just lousy at it.

Bolivia lacks easy fast food, and what exists is just as expen­sive as it is in the United States. How can one casu­ally go to the one Burger King in town when it costs just as much as going to El Porton, the nicest steak­house in the city? Processed greasy fast ham­burger or Argentine steak? Dilemma.

We do have a microwave and it has worked for a col­lec­tive six months of the twenty-six months I’ve been here. The microwave has one teensy prob­lem: plug it into the wall and it burns out.

In fair­ness, we do also have a food proces­sor and a Kitchenaid stand mixer. Each appli­ance saves at least fif­teen min­utes off each major project. This is nec­es­sary when one has to cook two sep­a­rate entrees at each meal to cover the needs of eight peo­ple, three of whom have vio­lent aller­gies to the key ele­ments which make food Taste Good.

We do not, though, have a bread maker or an ice cream maker… and I fail to see the use for elec­tric scales in day to day cook­ing. Or Thanksgivings, for that matter.

We buy sand­wich bread, but we bake reg­u­larly regard­less. Then we’ve the cook­ies. Why would we buy cook­ies from the store when we can bake them for half the price? Our Bolivian gro­cery bills are already the equal of our American gro­cery bills, thanks to Bolivia’s polit­i­cal mis-leadership.

And yet… unlike the Daily Fail’s fraz­zled idiot-cook, I still man­age to get around town, take grad courses, and, in the case of this past Tuesday, watch seven episodes of Buffy.

I’d like to see the article’s author dropped into my great-grandmother’s world of 1930s-40s coal min­ing West Virginia. A spe­cial room meant for keep­ing hand-salted meats stored away for the win­ter, end­less days spent can­ning veg­eta­bles in glass jars…

… but, then the uni­verse would col­lapse in one great big col­lec­tive whine.