Bread and Beauty

The magazine swears it can save me thirty minutes a day. It promises I will zip through my kitchen so fast that my stove will ask "who was that masked woman?"

"Meals you can make in ten minutes!"

"Throw a party without ever turning on your oven!"

"Prepare An Entire Thanksgiving Dinner In Less Time Than It Takes To Read This Article!"

Even my pasta water will boil faster. The secret, says the magazine, lies in all those coupons stapled at the center (all produced by the same megacorporation).

Flip to the coupons: convenience food heaven! Save a dollar on this, two bucks on that or twenty-five cents on six of those. Zap it all in your microwave, and everyone's full, even if it's just a little more preservative-laden. The coupons are there for the same reason the heroin dealer gives out the first free hit free.

But now, thus unburdened of cooking, you have a problem: what to do with your newfound acres of spare time? Relax! They're doing high-gear problem-solving today because as you turn to the second half of the magazine, it's all about beauty. And by "beauty" they mean "intimidating products in tiny bottles."

Which, by the way, also have a sheaf of coupons stapled into the center of the magazine.

The magazine went straight into our recycling (the ultimate time-saver) but not before I caught this gem: the worst problem of the winter is dry skin. Thanks for that. I'll just tell the next homeless person I see to be warm and well-fed and hand him a bottle of lotion. Problems neatly solved. Then I'll buy a meal-in-a-minute and exfoliate myself. (Doesn't "exfoliation" sound like something that would make Al Gore shoot you on sight?)

The megacorporation does have one valid point in all this: we're too busy to cook. Working moms especially, but even most stay-at-home moms are simply too time-pressured to bake bread or roast a chicken. We all take shortcuts, but these folks offer shortcuts past the shortcuts. And then on the other side, we're supposed to luxuriate ourselves with makeup, moisturizer and skin goop because we deserve it.

I'll tell you straight up that if my husband asked what was for dinner, and I said, "Nothing -- I'm going to exfoliate instead." He'd reply with something other than, "How terrific to have vital, rejuvenated skin! Dry skin is the worst problem of the winter, you know."

We won't even talk about how my kids would react if they sat down to a meal and found a bottle of moisturizing lotion.

And by consistently leap-frogging the prep time, what kind of mother-child contact are we losing? Almost every adult I know remembers standing on a chair to cook with Grandma. When we gather for holidays, is it for a big dinner or is it to brush our hair together? (Although, I’ll admit that's attractive from a dish-washing perspective.)

It was manna, not moisturizing cream, God provided for the Israelites. Even though, I'm sure they must have suffered dry skin in the desert. (The magazine neglected to mention the worst problem of the summer, so I can't say for sure.) Moreover, Jesus did not tell his disciples, "I am the conditioner that imparts a silky luster to your hair," but rather, "I am the Bread of Life."

That Living Bread doesn't come from the frozen-food section, and Jesus didn't hand his disciples a coupon. On the other hand, Jesus clearly gets it: he fed five thousand people with five barley loaves and two fish. How's that for a convenience meal?

While Jesus did wash his disciples' feet, no mention is made of an exfoliating apricot scrub.

Beauty isn't a bad thing, but neither is cooking. So the magazine gets recycled, and my kids and I bake cookies from scratch some days. Other days we buy slice-and-bake. And although it saddens me, I know we're never, ever going to defeat dry skin.

Jane Lebak is a lot more interesting online than in real life. She has one husband, four children, two cats, one novel out of print, and one novel in print. The resulting chaos ends up on her weblog at http://philangelus.wordpress.com.