STYLE MD
|Giving thanks to those that feed us| B Y D A W N H A R R I S S H E R L I N G , M . D . , F. A . C . P.
Lately, I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about food. Essentially, this is because that’s what I do every day, but also because Thanksgiving is approaching. Most of what we know about Thanksgiving is apocryphal. The only thing we can count on as being true is that there was eating. And probably giving thanks. Which actually makes it a pretty good holiday. While we have plenty to be thankful for, now seems like a good time to be especially grateful for food. First off, if you didn’t make it yourself, someone else sure as heck did. Thanks to the restaurant workers spending hours behind a hot stove and the servers spending just as many hours running around. And now we have the delivery folks to extend thanks to. These men and women have become the newest addition to front line,
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essential workers. And thanks to the home cooks (usually the moms, but also some dads) who toil without much in the way of gratitude for most of the year. They might be working for free, but their time is worth something—a lot actually. Thinking about what to make in the coming week and making sure the ingredients are on hand, requires a great deal of mental energy and also time—let’s estimate this at about ten minutes per dinner per day. If we consider the fact that the clean-up involved in a homecooked meal is often fifteen minutes or more, the dinner that our handy recipe said would take only 20-25 minutes to make, is now pushing up against an hour. Including time spent planning, time spent cooking, and then the clean-up, what’s the real cost of all this? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the
average hourly wage of a worker in the U.S. was around $27 in 2019. That means, on average, we value fifteen minutes of an American worker’s time at around $7. If ingredients to prepare a meal at home cost a family $15, but the time required to plan, shop for, make, and clean up the meal takes an hour, the meal really just cost about $42, but was free for you (if you weren’t the one who just fed everyone). The second group people to thank are the people who grow, harvest, and transport our food. About a year ago, my husband and I decided to plant a garden. Since we are Floridians, we also got a couple of citrus trees, a banana tree, and a mango tree. To date, we have successfully harvested about 2.5 lemons (one had a bad spot that needed to be cut out so we lost a half), a few bunches of green beans, and about five servings of broccoli. The herbs did okay until it got hot.
