Sep 5th, 2022 Monday Cloudy
When you see the word “homemade”, how do you feel? What is the association with “homemade”, for you?
When I was little, homemade products were the bread and butter of daily life. It was not economical to buy prepared food from street vendors or stores, at least not on a regular basis. My mom made almost everything from scratch, from dinner dishes, dumplings, to my sweaters and winter hats. The food was scrumptious, a flavor that still made me home sick sometimes. The clothes were functional – they kept me warm during bleak winters, but frankly neither the most comfortable nor attractive ones. There were limited options in the yarn market, so my mom only bought the cheapest holy green kind, which was not very soft, and definitely not flattering on me ?
“How I wish to live like an urban lady! Then I can BUY everything!” was a repining comment I heard so often from my mom. She was longing for a life where being a wife and a mom does not entail being a do-it-yourself homemaker as a second job.
As the economy developed, her wish became true, to a large extent. All varieties of processed foods, semi-ready dinner dishes, and meal kits appeared in the supermarkets and department stores, enabling all the increasingly busy moms to save time – a dinner can be served on the table within twenty minutes of my mom coming home after a long working day. In addition, the more affluent families even start to eat out, not to celebrate special occasions, but to satisfy the need for food so as not to worry about meal preparation and doing dishes afterwards.
“Your generation is so lucky.” said my mom, “you have so many choices that you do not even need to learn to cook!”
Maybe she is right. But she failed to notice that the convenience offered by “outsourcing” home labor came at a price of higher living cost, which had to be compensated for by increasing wages that required longer working hours and less time to relax or spend with one’s family. In my middle school and high school years, every now and then I ate the pre-made dinner at home or went to eat out in a nearby restaurant by myself, because both my parents were on a business trip.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Nowadays, homemade is the new fashion. Rather than a frugal way to make ends meet, homemade carries the labels of “healthy eating”, “made with love”, and “uniqueness”. In the hustling modern society, being able to enjoy homemade products, be it a jar of pasta sauce, or a pair of hand-knitted mittens, means you have the luxury of enough free time and energy left outside of work (to potentially learn the requisite skills), and/or someone who cares enough about you to spend hours making something that only cost ten dollars in the store. It is both a symbol of status, and a statement about one’s value – life is not only about earning money to contribute to the consumerism as much as possible. Instead, there is something irreplaceable in savoring the fruit of one’s own labor, feeling confident and proud that one deserves every bit of it.
So here are a few of our homemade goodies: pasta sauce using all home-grown tomatoes, home-grown garlic and a mixture of home-grown herbs; Chinese-style pastries with mung bean paste and dried cranberry stuffing; and a pair of auld lang syne mittens perfect for typing in the chilled weather of the coming months. While we can certainly buy similar stuff somewhere, I am sure none of the store-bought stuff, however fancy they may be, would make me smile as much as I look at these 🙂