‘Store Bought’ Spoils the Potluck Spirit (Published 2011) (2024)

THE baking life is one of many sorrows, and I have seen or tasted them all.

My grandmother’s fallen cream puffs, courtesy of the stomping feet of small children across a hardwood floor. Salt mistaken for sugar; dough that never rises; the breakfast-meeting muffins that were raw in the middle; and the layer cake that slid gently from the pan straight to the floor, where it promptly cracked in half, which mattered, since I would have shamelessly pulled it up and frosted it for dinner guests arriving in 20 minutes.

But among all debacles, nothing is quite as depressing as the modern bake sale, where amid the veritable celebration of poundcakes and misshapen cookies are the inevitable Ziploc bags filled with Oreos or perfectly formed bakery-bought treats.

In the countless sales I have attended over the years, I have been amazed by the number of packaged cookies, high-end cupcakes and impeccably round marzipan-covered confections that people plop down on the table, with no compunction, to be resold.

While certainly not a felony (though there have to be less egregious crimes that are felonies, and I will get back to you on that), selling store-bought cookies seems weirdly like cheating and more than a little tacky: a re-gifting that does not even try to hide the price tag.

I do not have anything against people who do not bake. The culinary arts, for those with no interest in them, are nothing more than housework. While some of us hammer out life’s frustrations with a whisk to batter, or sharp knife to shallots, others prefer to take a toothbrush to the kitchen sink. Or they ride a bike or something. I couldn’t say.

But no one says you have to be Ina Garten here, kids. To wit: I took a cookie-decorating class last weekend, failed at advanced icing and quickly became the one student in the class who kept demanding more alcohol. So my mittens looked like stealth bombers! They tasted great!

No question, some people cannot afford the equipment needed to bake, even if they wish to, though flour and sugar are cheaper than Chips Ahoy. And in my observation in the four American cities where I have lived, income does seem to be the underpinning of the problem.

Indeed, I have witnessed the reverse: the more upscale the community for the bake sale, the fancier the store-bought cookies. (Sprinkles Cupcakes may be the single biggest supplier of bake-sale goods in West Los Angeles.) Lower-income parents, especially first-generation immigrants, often turn up at school parties with the best-tasting homemade treats.

“I have gotten kind of aggressive about it,” said Abby Arnold, a grant writer in Santa Monica, Calif., who once looked over in horror to see store-bought Easter-themed cookies being sold at a PTA bake sale a week after the holiday. Ms. Arnold said she has taken to calling people out on the practice. Well, actually, she admitted, she mostly just gossips about them with their friends.

Some pull out the “lack of time” card when it comes to baking (though in truth, Rice Krispie treats take less time to make than going to Safeway for cookies) and thus we have the tired meme sparked a decade ago by “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” with the moms (yep, always moms) doctoring store-bought goods to look homemade.

Don’t do that. Just take napkins. Look at it this way: You would not resell socks you bought at Macy’s on the art-sale crafts table. Respect the cookie!

The practice has also crept into potlucks, where Whole Foods containers of chicken and endless boxes of pizza have replaced the disposable flats of ziti and divine chicken tetrazzinis that have marked holiday parties and hockey award ceremonies for years.

We stick up our noses at out-of-season blackberries, and compete over the brands of our stoves and dishwashers. We moralize about the family dinner, outdo one another by killing and plucking our own turkeys and plan vacations around a dinner reservation.

Then, when it comes to sharing the most basic of our bounty, we punt.

“The underlying social issues unleashed by bake sale and potluck donations are the culinary snakes writhing beneath Medusa’s toque,” Lynne Olver, the editor of Foodtimeline.org, the indispensable if quirky outpost of food history, wrote in an e-mail. “In sum, traditional American society associates ‘homemade’ with love and caring. Which mean contributors choosing to buy goods are regarded as cheap and dismissive.”

There is something unfair about such rendered judgment, Ms. Olver conceded. And I confess I question my own sanity at times,as when I drove to an event at my synagogue the other night, steadying a plate of frosted brownies in the passenger seat, which resulted in a chocolate thumb at every stoplight. (That same bounty included Munchkins, requested by the honoree, from a Dunkin’ Donuts. Those boxes caused a knot in my stomach the entire drive.)

I am not alone in my insanity.

“For me, it comes down to the essence of what baking is,” said Waverly Gage, a mother of three in Houston whose favorite contribution to bake sales is Bundt cakes, and who bristles, too, at the store-bought fare. “Whether it is to raise money for your school or your church or whatever group, you’ve been asked to bake something and put something of yourself into it, and when someone goes and buys store-bought cookies, it misses the entire point,” said Ms. Gage, who blogs at the Web site peaceandloveinthekitchen.com. “Baking is supposed to be an expression of you.”

Store-bought potluck offerings are also a deviation from deeply rooted traditions, sparked centuries ago, of food sharing, which became central to American social customs in the middle of the last century.

Foodtimeline.org dates the potluck as far back as the 16th century, when people would stop by the host’s home, often at the spur of the moment, and try their “luck” at whatever was being offered. The notion was captured in a 1592 missive from an English citation that reads: “That that pure sanguine complexion of yours may never be famisht with pot luck.”

The concept caught on in early America, and, according to the site, in the West “pot luck” meant food brought by a cowboy guest.

Bake sales, which also rose in the mid-20th century, leveled the ethnic playing field, letting people branch out into one another’s kitchens when lines were still firmly drawn around eating “one’s own” food, baked by family or members of the same ethnic group, said Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a professor emerita of history, human development and gender studies at Cornell.

“A brownie baked by an Italian woman versus one baked by a Protestant woman was not that different,” she said. “And by the 1950s a lot of mothers had received a home economics education which had hom*ogenized food in a way that was very concentrated on nutrient value of food more than aesthetics or taste.”

Some schools and other institutions have undermined these efforts in recent years by insisting that baked goods for sale come from the store, so that ingredients can be clearly known, an accommodation to allergies and other health concerns.

But there is still ample room for sharing. So the next time your school has a Halloween bake sale, consider pulling out a few pumpkin-shaped cutters. You may be punished for your good efforts, as I was when my chocolate ginger snaps were passed over by a 5-year-old for the box of cookies from Ralph’s, the Food Emporium of the West Coast. But you will have the pride of effort, and tradition.

Oh, and here’s the felony I find to be not so egregious as taking store-bought: bear wrestling in Alabama.

But I digress.