What's for Breakfast?
Carrot-cake pancakes with whipped maple cream cheese frosting. And some thoughts on domestic labor and ultra-processed foods
Happy Monday! What’s for breakfast?
Most days, breakfast needs to be super simple. You are, after all, breaking the overnight fast, and you just gotta get some food in your belly. Despite all the stories we hear lately about how ultra-processed foods are engineered to make us over-consume, these foods were first developed because industrialization demanded we get up and out the door — to school, to work — early every weekday morning. Capitalism loves “convenience.”
As we challenge the food industry and highly processed foods, I think we need to be very cautious of the accompanying narrative that suggests we just make everything from scratch instead. This is — so obvious when you write it out — an incredibly reactionary impulse, one that expects women to undertake (even more) unpaid domestic labor. Not just the cooking and baking, but the meal-planning, grocery shopping, and all-around fretting about and responsibility for whether or not they're exposing their family to too much sugar, too much fat, too many chemicals, or whatever the latest health scare tells us our foods contain.
That's a weird introduction to a fucking pancake recipe, I realize. But pancakes, as I noted in last week's little shortcut tip, already take far more effort to make than the ol' "quick breads" label lets on. And this week's pancake recipe is even more complicated, even more time consuming (although the original recipe writer says prep-time 15 minutes and cook-time, 20). And — arguably the biggest sin of all — this recipe contains raisins. (I'm actually learning as I become an old lady that I don't mind raisins as much as I thought I did. I do, for the record, still hate rice pudding.)
