wtf how did so many of you end up with the impression that the Ortbergs are a normal white trash family (that's not normal middle class food guys, if that's what you ate growing up you were not middle class)
During Mallory's upbringing, John Ortberg upgraded his megachurch gig from suburban Chicago to *Menlo Park.* He is the author of multiple evangelical bestsellers. He is a celebrity. His family is part of that.
en.wikipedia.org
We are critiquing her writing and choice of images because they convey nothing about her family. The food is not overly healthy or overly priced or overly granola or overly lower class. "Generic," as
@2525ABC said. Knowing the Ortbergs, I would expect them to be more precious about their food than this. So whatever Mallory is trying to convey about them is not working.
Having now read
the full article, I think she is attempting to give the "bland," "commercialized," "generic" food of her childhood the same treatment as you would find in high fantasy novels, the big feasts at the end of Lord of the Rings. That's the kind of food she wanted, the kind that you slave away in the kitchen all day to make and share with the community after slaying a dragon. ("the dizzying array of savory pies available to Bilbo Baggins and the mice priests of Redwall, which often melded together into a single feast in my imagination." - Mallory)
She then says the reason she enjoyed fantasizing about these foods is that you make them yourself, little cheese sandwiches that you carry around in your pocket all day: "To be responsible for one’s own coziness was the most ambitious promise of these books, to store up one’s larder with future treasures, to catalog and memorize the scale and remit of all future meals in a fat lump wholly unrecognizable to the carefully apportioned, managed, and throttled allowance of pleasure of a SnackWell’s cookie."
The Medieval Times is what she wants, and she associates good food with "leaving home": "I knew then, and tucked the knowledge safely away, that there was glory and satisfaction to be wrung from the world, if only for those willing to leave home in order to find and eat it. There were a thousand SnackWell’s cookies to be chewed through first, but I had strong teeth from all that skim milk and could already see my way through to the other side."
This does sound to me like she's mad at modern American food culture, which is highly processed, and within that, she is mad that her mother chose somewhat safe, bland, "healthy" options sometimes, like the SnackWell's, and didn't buy whole cakes directly from the bakery. The portion control comes as much from her mother as it does from American branding and packaging, but there's not really any critique of mass food production, just her mother's refusal to stock an old-fashioned pantry and spend hours at the stove.
It does explain for me why she swallows down Joe's insane recipes, lmao.
