If your mother wasn't a kitchen goddess, would you love her any less?

Reading magazines and newspapers on days like Mother's Day is boring with a capital "B."

There is a plethora of stories whose writers reminisce about their precious mothers in predictable ways.

The most predictable way to give one's mother a seal of approval as the "right" or the "good" mother (and sometimes the "annoying" mother), is to remember her through a culinary lens.

As novelist Jessica Soffer writes in her story of her loving yet non-cooking mother, the "conflation of parental love and cooking" is ubiquitous, in "commercials, films, books," leading us to believe that "mothering can be smeared onto a sandwich, nurturing tucked between the wings of a garlicky roasted chicken."

Soffer's own mother was "stuff that dreams are made of, minus the meatloaf and marble cake," yet the fact that she didn't do the "meatloaf and marble loaf" thingie embarrassed Soffer to an extent that she spun her novel, Tomorrow, There Will be Apricots, around the characters of an older woman and a girl who find solace in the kitchen and in each other. Soffer allowed a perception, that the older woman's character was inspired by her mother, to grow.

Food used to be a trigger for memories of time past, as the madeleine is a window into halcyon days in Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. But today, as intelligent writers like Soffer remind us, it has become a repository of value judgment; in the case of motherhood, it's as though you are barred from loving your mother if she weren't wrapped up in your memory as a veritable kitchen goddess.

I like Soffer's tribute to what her mom really gave her: the fostering of her intellectuality:

The fact that she preferred talking to me while paging through the Times’ Book Review than while stirring a caldron of Bolognese did not mean that she loved me less, was any less motherly.

Mar(x) Bittman

Karl Marx once wondered about why the piano-maker makes substantially less than the piano.

He came up with an explanation that I can at best oversimplify thus: The value labor is typically less than the value of commodities.

As pointed out by food-critic Mark Bittman, in today's economy, certain labor gets more adulation than certain other kinds of labor.

Within the food-economy, for instance, the restaurant chef gets more publicity and money than the farmer.

Bittman asks consumers to reverse the trend: less focus on the chef and more on the farmer because the farmer has a more challenging task on hand in growing quality food against the vagaries of nature.

The chef, on the other hand, does a relatively "easier" task--transform already existing ingredients--of catering to the palate.

There is a Marxian bent in Bittman's thoughts.

Can-abyss alter your palate?

A recent story in the NY Times drew my attention to an alternative cookbook: Elise McDonough's The Official High Times Cannabis Cookbook:

This first-ever cookbook from High Times magazine—the world's most trusted name when it comes to getting stoned—is the deliciously definitive guide to cannabis-infused cooking. Easy, accessible recipes and advice demystify the experience of cooking with grass and offer a cornucopia of irie appetizers and entrees, stoner sweets, cannabis cocktails, and high-holiday feasts for any occasion, from Time Warp Tamales and Sativa Shrimp Spring Rolls to Pico de Ganja Nachos and Pineapple Express Upside-Down Cake. Delectable color photos and recipes inspired by stoner celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Cheech and Chong, and Willie Nelson will spark the interest of experienced cannabis cooks and "budding" chefs, whether they're looking for the perfect midnight munchie or just to take dinner to a higher level.

I don't expect either "Chopped" or "Sweet Genius," both popular Food Network shows, to have these as "surprise ingredients," though I wish they would!