Green Bean Casserole:Friend or Foe?

Green bean casserole.  Source of major disagreement. Side A: this is one of the great  inventions of the American kitchen. Side B: this recipe represents American cuisine at  its worst.

Why bring up green bean casserole? Well, Thanksgiving's coming up, and green bean casserole is a popular Thanksgiving side dish. Also, Dorcas Reilly, the woman who oversaw its development at the Campbell Soup Company has just died.

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.” This, at least, was how the

gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin saw it.  Examples reinforce the claim: the discovery of a new star has little impact on life; but, pizza, hamburgers, mac ‘n cheese, hot fudge sundae--now those make a big difference.

What’s the controversy over green bean casserole?  One the positive side, the recipe offers great possibilities for tinkering and customizing.  It need not remain “pour factory-produced cans into a casserole.” Fresh beans can be used, ditto with  mushrooms, and onions. The sauce can be a “bechamel” (French names are always a plus for epicures).

On the negative side, and it is a big one, the recipe encourages “assembling” over “cooking,.”  The word “cooking” now means a lot more (and a lot less) than it used to. Michael Pollan made the point most clearly in  Cooked,

a point well summarized in an interview.

The upshot: a lot of activities we call  “cooking” are really “assembling.”

If humans, as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham has asserted, are the “cooking

animals,” then our humanity, to an important degree, depends on keeping up the artistry of cooking. This needn’t mean fancy, complicated dishes. One of my own favorite recipes is for Carbonade Flamande whose ingredients are beef, onions, flour, salt, pepper, thyme and beer.  

If what defines us is the physical activity of cooking, the more we move away from it, the further we remove ourselves from our humanity.   The move from cooking is part of a wider trend: the desire to secure results without old-fashioned effort. If I’m sitting at a piano bench, with a sheet of music in front of me, I can only play the music if I have undertaken lots of preliminary toil and training.  The satisfaction of successful playing comes from the combination of effort-and-result. The preliminary efforts of time, practice and concentration are also important in revealing and shaping character. In our “short-cut, it’s only the results that matter” world, character development suffers, as does the satisfaction of achievement that results from struggle. “Combine the contents of three cans” may get us a quick result, but at an important price: chipping away at what makes for the fullness or wholeness (“holiness” in religious terms) of a life.    

Cooking does not just impact the aesthetic possibilities associated with life (cultivating talent, working in a way that leads to  satisfactory culminations). It is also related to another important constituent of full humanity: liberty. Someone who can cook is actually free, i.e. really able to engage in the activity of preparing meals.   “Assemblers,” and, even more, “microwavers” have

subjugated themselves, made themselves subservient. It might not be the kind of dependency that goes by the name “addiction.” Still, the constant requirement for products from a factory means positioning oneself at the indentured extreme of the  independency-dependency continuum.

So, green bean casserole. Should it be loved or loathed? Once again a continuum has to be considered. At one end: fresh green beans, real mushrooms, cream, onions, lovingly (even if not with epicurean finesse) handled by someone who does real cooking.   At the other end: mere assemblage: empty the contents of three cans into a casserole. The latter, not surprisingly, in diminishing our capacities marks us ever more as indentured.

Why? (1) The emancipatory effects, i.e. the liberation of capacities tied to effort, are marginalized, if not abandoned outright.  (2) Once this shift has occurred, freedom is diminished. The use of factory products becomes more a necessity than a free choice. Creating a dependency that is almost like an addiction represents  a real limit on freedom. Assemblers are simply less free than cooks. This increase in dependency and decrease in freedom is, of course, what the good folks at Campbell’s sought in the first place.