My TV is broken, and I can only play one channel: the 24-hour Jamie Oliver Channel. British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is known for his casual recipes that make cooking simple. “Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals,” a series where Oliver makes three dishes all in under 30 minutes, shows just how quick and easy cooking can be. Oliver describes the show as “all about cooking food that’s full of flavour at top speed.” Sounds fantastic, right? Between classes, work, clubs and the endless Cal et cetera, who has time to make elaborate, time-consuming meals? Stumbling across this show felt like a godsend. I could become a culinary wiz, all while maintaining my packed schedule. But can cooking ever be as easy as Oliver makes it seem?
“Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals” only includes the time it takes to make the meal. We don’t see him go grocery shopping, make ice or wash all the dishes. But in order for us viewers to make these meals, we do have to complete these extra tasks. In the real world, things are going to take more time than they do in a studio kitchen. According to The Guardian’s Vicky Frost who tested Oliver’s speedy recipes, Piri Piri chicken with dressed potatoes, rocket salad and quick Portuguese tarts, a recipe featured on the show, can take around 55 minutes for an amateur to cook. Frost’s main concern was juggling the various cooking and prep times; it was difficult for her to keep track of what was in the oven and when it had to come out, which caused her to end up with dry chicken. Trying to condense a meal into 30 minutes is all about multi-tasking, which is something I, much like Frost, struggle with. Frost also calculated the cleaning time, which added 45 minutes to the already 55-minute cook time. So, all of a sudden, Jamie’s 30-minute meal is taking 1 hour and 40 minutes to make — and the chicken’s dry. When we tack on all those other little tasks — time for waiting in lines, commuting to and from the supermarket — us amateurs at home might take a lot longer than the titular 30 minutes. But when does the cooking and the preparation for our meal actually begin? Are we only counting our own labor, our own time? Does it start when we pick out the potato from the little pyramid at the grocery store, or well before then? To understand just how long it takes to make even one part of a 30-minute meal — dressed potatoes — we have to go way, way back to the potato’s big domestic debut some 8,000 years ago.
The potato was first cultivated by Indigenous communities in the Andes mountains innorthwestern Bolivia and southern Peru8,000 years ago. The potato as we know it today has come a long way from its toxic ancestor thanks to years of careful cultivation by the Inca, who transformed the poisonous weed into 3,000 unique varieties of potato. The potato played an important role in the diet of many Indigenous groups in the Andes, including the Inca, and their agricultural feats didn’t stop at domesticating the potato; they also developed frost and drought-resistant strains of the plant. Other agricultural techniques included the long-term storage of potatoes through the utilization of freeze-drying, or chuño, which allowed the potatoes to be stored for years. Chuño became a staple practice both in times of food scarcity and in the Inca armies.
Europe’s first encounter with the potato was by Spanish conquistadors in Peru in 1537. For the first Spanish colonizers, eating potatoes became imbricated with the roles of hard labor. The Spaniards would not eat it themselves, and they viewed the food as something only Native people should eat as it provided sufficient fuel for completing arduous manual labor. When the potato was transported to Europe in the late 16th century in the Great Columbian Exchange, the association with consuming the tubers and doing hard labor stuck, and the potato was seen as the food of the working class. It took decades for potatoes to flourish in Europe because the climate of the Andes differs so greatly from that of Europe. However, after the Irish autumn provided enough similarities in climate to successfully produce the crop, decades of selective breeding by farmers produced a variety that could grow in the long summer days of Europe. Once the potato could grow in Europe, it was only a matter of time before it took the continent by storm: It was cheap, satiating and could stay fresh for long periods of time. By the early 17th century, Ireland was growing potatoes on a massive scale. Because Irish landowners used their fields to farm cattle and grain exclusively, Irish potato farming boomed thanks to landless laborers who used small plots of rented land to cultivate the cheap crop. The Irish practiced a method of farming called “lazy beds” — fertilized banks of ridge and furrow with drainage channels that allow crops to be grown in poor quality soil. This technique made potato farming more effective, protecting the plants from frost and increasing the nation’s yield. Yet, protecting the plant via the lazy bed was not as easy as the name might suggest. This practice was actually very labor intensive as the ridges were formed by hand using spades.
When we look at how potato farming was established in the United States, we can get an even deeper understanding of the labor involved in growing this humble crop. The U.S. joined the potato craze in 1719 when potatoes from Londonderry, Ireland were transported to New Hampshire. By 1838, potatoes had found their home in Idaho via missionary Henry Spalding. Spalding established his mission in Lapwai, on Nez Perce land. Spalding, whose horses were overworked and unable to plow the land, relied on Nez Perce labor to cultivate the potato. James W. Davis and Nikki Balch Stilwell, authors of “Aristocrat in Burlap: A History of the Potato in Idaho,” describe the missionary distributing “30 hoes” amongst the Nez Perce and telling “them to work a week for him and two weeks for themselves.” Although the first year’s harvest was minimal, the Nez Perce potato farms soon boomed, growing up to 100 bushels per family. However, American historian Alvin M. Josephy Jr. sheds light on the nefarious intentions behind Spalding’s choice in labor: The potato requires year-round cultivation, and growing potatoes meant that Nez Perce growers had to stay in the same area year round rather than migrating seasonally to the plains for buffalo as is traditional for the Nez Perce. Idaho has since become the nation’s largest potato producer, contributing to almost one-third of the country’s crop yield. So many of the potatoes we use to replicate the quick and easy meals we see on TV have their origins in the labor of Nez Perce and Spalding’s attempted cultural erasure.
The potato crop has a long history, stretching from the Andes to Spain, to Ireland and becoming a global food staple. The species’ development has not been quick and easy and neither is the process of growing and harvesting an individual potato. The life cycle of a potato plant runs from spring to autumn: An individual potato crop is planted in spring and takes around 110 to 120 days to grow. For example, in Washington, the field soil is monitored before planting, and each field receives a specific fertilizer cocktail to ensure a high-quality plant. The plant itself takes two to six weeks to emerge and is watered by an irrigation system, which can run for 24 hours a day in mid-summer. In July, the plants are “killed” — all watering stops so the leaves and stems die — and the potatoes are left underground for 10 days. The harvested potatoes can then be stored for up to 11 months before they are sorted, packaged and transported to the potato pyramid at a grocery store near you. This long, laborious process is facilitated by hundreds of people. In California, 30% of the field labor force is composed of Indigenous migrant workers. According to People’s World’s David Bacon, farm workers toil in harrowing heat, face frequent abuse and have low wages, “since the more workers are pushed and the lower their wages, the larger the profit margin” for the farm. In organic farms, the work is particularly laborious as workers have to remove thousands of weeds by hand. In 1975, the use of the short-handled hoe was banned because it required workers to bend over for hours at a time, which led to permanent back injuries. However, organic farming still requires workers to weed manually, which can result in similar postures and subsequent injuries. Non Organic farms are not necessarily safer, however, as workers get exposed to high levels of pesticides.
These aren’t just fun potato facts; they are snippets of a living and very real history that we are probably unknowingly interacting with on a daily basis. Our search for convenient cooking has alienated us from the labor and history behind producing food. Our 30-minute turned 3-hour meal is only a fraction of what it takes for a single potato to get into our hands. Potatoes have traveled through thousands of years and miles, survived the colonization of multiple continents, been agents of missionary cultural erasure, catalysts of famines and mass migrations and have been part of the exploitation of the many workforces, all of which have longer and more complex histories. And that is just a single ingredient in a three-dish meal. Producing the raw materials of our food is not a quick and easy thing; so maybe cooking them shouldn’t be either. And while we do have to find ways to feed ourselves in the limited time we have as busy people, cooking is how we participate in the meaningful history of food. The food we eat holds thousands of years of evolutionary leaps, ecological relationships and socio-political significance. Messing up a 30-minute recipe can help us recognize the labor of food. Our frustration and toil can be ways for us to interact with the history of the things we eat, for we can find continuity in our mutual experience within food labor. What if instead of just juggling cooking times, we juggle cooking our meal with meditating on the work and people that have made our meal possible; research where our food comes from, who is impacted by it and whether there are more sustainable or ethical options for our produce. Our one-hour meal can inspire us to join community gardens, plant some potatoes ourselves or perhaps even motivate us to bring our plates of home-cooked meals out into the community, whether that be just by sharing with the people in our apartment buildings or through mutual aid groups. Yes, we cook to sustain the exhausted bodies we haul from class to class, and yes, we want it to be quick and easy. But maybe dragging out a 30-minute meal into a 100-minute meal, messing it up and drying the chicken is an important reminder of just what we’re dealing with: a long, long history.
