The good ol' days. Via Wisconsin Historical Images @ Flickr.
I watched an episode of the show You Are What You Eat on Saturday. Gillian McKeith hosts the show, doling out questionable nutritional advice to fat people. The family featured on this episode consisted of a mom, a dad, and four children, and Gillian’s goal was to get them to change their eating and exercise habits. Most of the shaming was reserved for the mother. As the man of the house stood by, Gillian told mom she’s killing her children with unhealthy food. But my jaw dropped when she blamed mom for her husband’s bad diet and poor health as well. Everyone’s waistline is at mom’s mercy, according to Gillian. She’s not the only one who thinks so.
The notion that (pro bono) cooking is women’s work is popping up all over the food movement. The first season of Gordon Ramsay’s show The F Word (which I happen to love) was based around his cheekily titled “Get Women Back in the Kitchen” campaign. Modern women “can’t cook to save their lives,” Ramsay quipped.
In his New York Times review of Janet A. Flammang’s new book, “The Taste of Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society,” foodie hero Michael Pollan wrote:
In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating “foodwork” — everything involved in putting meals on the family table — we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal.
I wish feminists were as powerful as everyone thinks we are. Some women got sick of living their lives to grocery shop and tend to the stove, and suddenly they’ve singlehandedly “wrecked the family meal.” Pollan never questions that assertion. In fact, he seems to believe it. Last year, he wrote in the Times that “The Feminine Mystique” taught American women “to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” If women were not so gullible, children wouldn’t eat so much high fructose corn syrup and play video games all day! But Pollan has some admiration for one feminist:
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex” that though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of “revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the gift.” This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c’est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.
Emphasis mine, because isn’t that fucked?!
Ernie Bufflo wrote a nice response, explaining:
The problem is not feminism, it’s that the work of feminism, which is of course true gender equality, is not done! If it were, women doing less cooking wouldn’t have to mean less net cooking over all, because men could be filling the gaps!
I might join the mourners at cooking’s funeral if a woman wasn’t lying in the coffin.
So let me get this straight. “One of the nurseries of democracy” is an institution that requires that one type of citizen provide mandatory, unremunerated, often difficult and repetitive services to the others?
Awesome. U! S! A! U! S! A!
Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.
Yep, it was news to them that housework is an endless, boring, thankless task. Before Friedan, women just danced around the kitchen, every day, 3 times a day, to prepare meals that the family expected and criticized and all without the faintest thought that this might be drudgery!
Personally, I long for the day when feminists can control their own bodies without state interference, much less control society. You know it was the northern communists who made the darkies unhappy with Jim Crow, right? /snark
Last year, he wrote in the Times that “The Feminine Mystique” taught American women “to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.”
Spoken like someone who’s never done much housework or cooking.
I was stuck in the car with a coworker who listens to a local christian radio station and they advertised an evening show geared toward women the main focus of which was wagging a finger at wives whose husbands don’t get regular check-ups. So if your hubby is unable or unwilling to get check-ups, you’re supposed to not only keep track of all of his healthcare but also make his appointments and force him to go if he hasn’t. And now this morning I read that Women are ALSO solely responsible for all the cooking and family nutrition (which means we are also responsible for the OMG-DeathFAT-Obesity-Crisis!!!1!).
Why don’t we just go ahead and officially blame Women for everything? Oh wait, too late.
Everything is feminists fault. Like you say, if only the feminist movement where this powerful.
Could it be that the “family meal” has been wrecked by longer work hours and the disappearing middle class? Because people need to work longer hours and get less bang out of their paychecks, many families no longer have time or energy to cook large healthy (or not so healthy) meals? Oh no! It’s feminists fault. Curse them.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Michael Pollan News, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: Get Back in the Kitchen @ http://bit.ly/9mQPyM [...]
What bluebears said. Also: mom’s not home (curse that feminism) to give the kids a healthy snack after school because she’s at work or else they couldn’t afford the mortgage and so the children are either latchkey kids, they’re overworked with after school activities, or they’re in after school care. Snacks at after school care are either things like kids clif bars (actually pretty good for you if you’re not worried about consuming too much soy protein, which I know some people are) OR Oreos/Cheetos/etc, depending on what gets donated. And if they’re latchkey kids, well, parents are going to buy groceries their 5th graders can make themselves without danger, so nothing on the stove, and nothing in the oven. That means Easy Mac or pop-tarts.
I’m disappointed in Pollan-I would have expected better from him. How dare he attack Friedan and feminism in general for giving us the kinds of live and choices that men like him have taken for granted forever?
And not only is bluebears right, it’s not like meals in the ’50s onward were full of healthful food. Canned and frozen foods, laden with sodium and packaged foods with tons of high-fructose corn syrup became staples of American diets at that time, a nd that’s because Big Agriculture wanted it that way. Prepackaged foods can be made without all the junk, right? But salt is a cheap and easy way to enhance flavor, and corn…well, we all know the story there.
Nowadays, finding and cooking fresh foods is a time-consuming luxury most women have neither the income nor the time to indulge in. It’s just infuriating that we are being blamed for circumstances entirely outside our control.
I’m the blogger otherwise known as Ernie Bufflo. As a cook and an advocate of most of what Pollan stands for, though I’m not a fan of his weird ish with feminism, I have to take issue with mischiefmanager‘s assertion that “finding and cooking fresh foods is a time-consuming luxury most women have neither the income nor the time to indulge in.” Granted, I’m not a parent, but I’m a secretary and my husband is a medical resident. I happen to *enjoy* cooking and count it as a leisure activity for myself after work, BUT, I pretty much only cook using fresh and local-as-I-can-get ingredients, and most nights I have a dinner in under an hour, 30 minutes usually, and we’re not exactly breaking the bank.
There is a LOT of elitism and privilege in the slow food movement, which is unfortunate, because I don’t think eating real food has to be the domain of only the privileged.
(That said, don’t cook if you don’t wanna. I’m all about doing what you like.)
(I guess what I’m saying is: yes, for many many men and women, cooking is too time-consuming and expensive. But I wouldn’t say it’s the case for “most.”)
As a semi-professional chef, I find cooking one of the weirdest areas of sexism. Professionally, cooking is still very much a man’s world. Women can be personal chefs, pastry chefs, and sometimes caterers. If you go to work in a restaurant kitchen, expect to be pushed into the pastry chef job. If you’re a caterer, expect to be patronized by the male caterers. Personal chef (which is, after all, just cooking for families) is really the only area where women are accepted on equal grounds.
On the other hand, non-professionally, cooking is still very much seen as women’s work, to the point where people would never blame a father for their kids’ eating habits. I don’t understand the disconnect, but it’s been around forever.
Incidentally, I’m a personal chef, which is allowed for women, but as I said, is really just cooking for families not my own. To restaurant chefs, I’m more a domestic worker than a chef.
@funnyface: well, right. If it’s something you enjoy, then you make the time for it. Not all women enjoy cooking to that extent or make it their activity of choice after work. Nor does everyone have a farmer’s market or a CSA available. What the percentage is, I don’t know. But do know that women shouldn’t be guilted for trying to allocate their time and energy in ways that seem best to them.
Why isn’t there an uproar about how cooking has gone to shit because men aren’t picking up the slack that happened when women went to work in huge numbers?
I think it’s hilarious that women somehow didn’t know housework was drudgery until feminists told them :::snort:::
Women doing all the cooking also assumes that women have the ability to do the cooking. I don’t work (I’m disabled, my term, not anyone else’s term for me), and some nights, it’s all I can do to get a meal on the table for my husband and myself.
He works 12-hour days so I don’t expect him to help with cooking when he gets home from work (that would be a bit much, IMO), therefore I have figured out meals that can be put together with very little hassle and time and cooked either in the oven or in our large, deep electric skillet. He cooks on his days off, which is a fair division of cooking labor, as I see it (he also does his own laundry and I do mine). And no, he’s not a younger man, he’s 54 and I’m 56 (but he’s also one of 6 boys, no girls, so he had to learn these things, also spent 20 years in the Navy).
I grew up with a dad who, after us kids left home, if he got home from work before my mom got home from work, he started supper. They took turns doing the dishes, he did his own laundry, she did hers (and when I was a kid, he always helped with housework and laundry, etc because she worked). So it always seemed natural for me to assume that men should help around the house if both parties worked outside the home, and that’s always the way it’s been in all the relationships I’ve ever been in (I negotiated that right up front when we moved in together, before any bad habit of expecting me to work and do it all in the house could ever get started, bitch that I am).
I can only echo what you have all said especially about the “nursery of democracy”!
But I’ll add this small tangent. Lately I’ve started to doubt that high fructose corn syrup is any worse than regular sugar. Maybe we can talk about that one day…I suspect there’s some disinformation and exaggeration bound up with that topic.
and did I mention that I don’t really buy into the whole “family dinner” as solution to all life’s problems?
We should also be able to distinguish the occurrence of a family dinner from what is served there.
Bluebears, you hit the nail on the head.
And Av0gadro, I didn’t know that the chef world was like that – very interesting, so thanks!
When my parents married my Dad was a superb cook – my Mom was able to make toast and boiled eggs. In later years Mom would half-jokingly say, “learning to cook was the stupidest thing I ever dad; I had it made when I married your Dad.” Of course he was the ‘breadwinner’ and that was the 1950s when the pressure on wives to be “homemakers” was huge – and with 2, later 3 kids Mom was definitely busy with our home. I was the oldest kid & the only girl, so I helped out early & often; luckily Dad would cook on weekends and the like, and both my younger brothers turned into excellent cooks. My ‘middle’ bro’ was a professional baker in a health-food bakery for years for example. Both still do the majority of the cooking in their relationships. I was a single mom for most of my adult life though & so even though I’m a major cook/foodie person I was often so exhausted as far as not only cooking but getting the food shopping done on our budget, on the weekends. Didn’t have a car for years/nearly zero child support/etc.
And then there’s the whole issue of trying to afford healthy food versus the crapola and toxic sh*te that’s available in ‘affordable’ food stores. Anyway, way too much pressure on women to make major food magic on top of everything else.
We should also be able to distinguish the occurrence of a family dinner from what is served there.
QFT. My family ate dinner together almost every night until my teens, and the benefits of sitting down and talking to each other were not dependent on the nutritional value of the food.
It would be nice if we could quit conflating home cooked and healthy. The Thai street food vendor I walk past on my way home has meals that are full of veggies and low in sodium and fats. Even better, I can get dinner in about two minutes. The potato and protein based farm food my grandmother spends hours cooking is just as full of “empty” calories as fast food is. I realize home cooking gives you more control, but that doesn’t mean it’s a requirement for balanced nutrition!
High fructose corn syrup isn’t bad for you because it’s a worse substance to put into your body than sugar is. HFCS is bad for you because the American industrial agricultural system rapes the land and ruins the nutritional value of your food with severe over-production and proliferation of corn. Because it is the single most subsidized farm commodity, the American agricultural system has shifted to make it an ingredient in everything. Animals that aren’t supposed to eat corn are now fed a diet made entirely of corn and so we are fed meat lacking vitamins and dripping with fat. Valuable land has been converted from spaces that could once produce multiple, nutritious crops during appropriate seasons to corn fields that must be drenched in chemical fertilizers and pestisides to produce anything because decades of hard-to-grow corn has completely depleted all the soil’s nutrients. Corn has ruined the essential diversity of Americans’ diets and most of them don’t even know how.
This article makes me very sad because, in general, I tend to love Michael Pollan and I think the work he has been doing is so important. Those words discredit him as an advocate for all people victimized by the American industrial agricultural system (read: everyone.) Throughout his career, he has attempted to educate Americans about the importance of shifting the sources and methods of food consumption to those that are sustainable and generally more socially responsible. Obviously, advice for “teh womins to get back to kitchens b/c mens can’t cook and it’s ur job so everybody can eat good” does not qualify as socially responsible advice and completely undermines him as an educated person looking out for the best interests off all people.
Recently, I feel like he has shifted his tone from “sage observations and suggestions from a highly educated expert” to “small things we can all (being white, at least middle class and part of a ‘traditional family’) do without really having to change.” This new tone may be an attempt to be more “accessible” to the general American populace, but the idea that he can’t convey his point to everyday Americans if his plan eschews traditional gender roles is preposterous. But, then again, I think that idea might fit right in with the tone of his new, watered-down book that reads more like a diet pamphlet than a practical guide for participation in fixing our broken agricultural system.
Also, I think he uses terms like “family meal” because they are words he thinks everybody recognizes as “the way we all eat.” I think what he means is that all people need to avoid eating certain ways on a regular basis and it should start from childhood. His error was to over-generalize and assume that his target audience is members of traditional nuclear families who do things a certain way. He’s not being all-inclusive and that will ultimately hurt his mission.
The fight for food education and sustainable agriculture is a feminist issue because we are people who recognize injustices when others may find it too inconvenient to do so. We advocate for those who, at times, may not even notice that they are part of a collection of people who are victims of an unfair system. We recognize the danger of doing things the same old way just because that’s how it’s done. And, we’re not afraid to shake things up and make people mad if it means educating them about the wrongs of our society.
This is a very important issue and it breaks my heart that those in a position to really draw some positive attention to it are ruining it by offending an entire classes of people.
Sorry, that last post is lacking in readability and proper paragraph arrangement. I guess it didn’t copy well from MS Word.
I actually really enjoy cooking (and find it an infinitely relaxing thing to do in the evening) but that said one of my favourite things recently was the fact that my husband who has never cooked before has taken to making one meal from scratch a week (and hopes to do more as he gets better) because in his words ‘I don’t want my daughter to grow up thinking that cooking is something only women do’.
Rodriguez: RE: High Fructose Corn Syrup– it really is worse for you than sugar. I got an actual explanation from an endocrinologist. Our bodies are made to process normal sugar, glucose. In fact, as our bodies break down glucose, it produces a particular biproduct that, when it reaches a certain level, tells our bodies to stop processing the sugar and excrete the rest of the sugar through our urine. This way, we only break down as much sugar as we need. With HFCS, as our bodies break it down, that same biproduct isn’t produced. As a result, the mechanism that triggers our bodies to stop breaking down the sugar when we’ve had enough doesn’t work. So, we just keep breaking down the HFCS and storing the excess as fat.
Ugh, I read that NYT op-ed by Pollan last year, as it came out to honor the movie Julie & Julia. He had a paragraph or two in there reminiscing about the good ol’ days when his mom spent practically every waking moment in the kitchen, then asserting that feminism has single-handedly ruined the home-cooked meal.
Funny, there was no mention of his father doing any cooking, nor are there any armchair observations about how the majority of men STILL do not know how to peel garlic properly (I happened to teach my boyfriend how to do this last night).
Hey Pollan, want a REAL food revolution? Why don’t you stop blaming feminism and start advocating that EVERYBODY needs to get their ass in the kitchen.
@funnyface I wonder if the endocrinologist can point to some lay articles about how the sugars are broken down or maybe our resident chemist Av0gadro can?
Because I had heard a similar explanation to yours, but I heard that the sugar and HFCS break down to the same two components. I don’t claim this is correct, it’s just hearsay.
And I think ARachel’s discussion of how HFCS is bad for our agriculture is a topic worth pursuing too.
I am glad that this terrible problem has come to Mr. Pollard’s attention, it appears that he and I are on the same page because I think serving my family wholesome, sustainable food is of supreme importance. In fact, I am going to diligently apply myself to yummy organic food making, and perhaps also some hay bale gardening, just as soon as I receive the $30,000 check that I am sure Mr. Pollard is sending to support me (and my family) in this, the upmostest importantest work of our age.
*crickets chirp*
Will see what I can do re: finding an article that explains what the endocrinologist told me about HFCS vs. table sugar.
This is a major source of my ever-simmering, sometimes explosive RAGE.
I love to cook. But it’s not my job. It’s not my job to care for anyone other than myself – unless I so choose.
Adults don’t need Mommies – and if I were one, you can be damn sure the entire family would attend to the needs of the entire family in an equitable manner. This includes the hunting, gathering, planting, harvesting, prepping, and cleaning of the recepticles of the family nutrition. You appreciate what you have a hand in.
I don’t have a family, and I suspect it’s partly because the expectations of far too many men are that I’ll (we’ll) do this GIANT NEVER ENDING THANKLESS JOB on top of the other seven thousand things we’re tasked with – on top of the one that pays the fracking mortgage.
Women are not responsible for the obesity crisis. Food/farm subsities, a conspicuous consumerist society, sheer bloody GREED and gluttony (both by irresponsible corporations and individuals) are responsible for the obesity crisis.
Put that on your plate and NOM it.
ARachel and Funnyface? Love you!
HFCS is not bad for us in moderation (as the ad that makes me want to smash to bits my incredibly expensive flatscreen every time it comes on says), the problem is that SH*T is in everything.
@funnyface Don’t stress it, I don’t mean to give you any assignments!
@funnyface: I don’t want you to stress it, either, but I’d like to see an article as well. I recently asked an endo friend about this and she said some endocrinologists really believe there’s a harmful difference in the metabolism of HFCS vs. regular sugar, but she wasn’t sure there was any research to back that up.
I don’t buy the “we only break down as much table sugar as we need” explanation — if that were true, we could eat as much table sugar as we want and never gain weight. Also, excreting glucose in your urine is abnormal and is a sign of diabetes.
My husband is the primary cook in the home (and I am happy to be his sous, prepping veggies on weekends and the like) because he has always had the easier commute since college, and his cooking has advanced to a level where eating out is something we save for a Friday night break and/or extreme heat that makes firing up the stove an uncomfortable proposition.
One of the problems I think is how male chefs/cooks are portrayed in the media: men are only allowed to be “grillers” if they cook at all, and the male TV chefs on Food Network are either douchebags, doofy, arrogant or forgettable (Alton Brown being the sole exception). AB aside, there are no male analogues to Giada or Ina or even Rachael; think of how the so-called stigma of cooking would change if it highlighted more of the creativity and enjoyment that can be derived from cooking rather than the drudgery of it.
(This, incidentally, is why I LOATHE Sandra Lee–she perpetuates the lazy, mediocre standard and clearly gets no enjoyment out of cooking save for those hefty royalty checks).
I google-fu’ed sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and this popped up.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
The article went into how hfcs and sugar are constituted, and how they are metabolised differently.
Any more info, gladly appreciated.
@Mackey That’s a really interesting article! Thanks for that one.
[...] SarahMC has done a bang-up job of collecting instances where feminism is blamed—either directly or through implication—for why less cooking gets done, since it’s apparently just fine and not at all offensive and sexist now to suggest that cooking is solely a woman’s job. (Unless, as Sarah points out, someone gets paid. Then it’s men’s work.) Conservatives are often happy to trot out the story about how feminists tricked women into thinking they liked sex and didn’t love housework, but that’s not surprising—conservatives think women are biologically predisposed to be stupid, and thus easy to trick. But when Michael Pollan goes there, it is disappointing. [...]
Some great points SarahMC.
I am so fed up of only women being blamed for what others put in their mouths!
On “mother’s day” this year, my husband went for an early morning surf only to return to find me making breakfast in the kitchen clad in pointy high heels, red lippy, a 50′s dress, vintage apron tied at the waist and string of blue beads round my neck; my idea of a little joke.
He and my two teenage kids burst out laughing- then he took over; he’s the better cook and he thoroughly enjoys cooking. I choose to mow the lawn because I prefer the throb of the mower to the whine of the mixer. And I am infinitely grateful to be living in OZ and for both of us to be able to make this choice. (Men cooking here is perfectly acceptable- “manly” and generally encouraged these days.)
But, here’s a thought- just to be able to turn on the tap each day and have water run straight into my sink is a small miracle. And often, when I turn on my kitchen tap, I think of all the very bright women and girls, in all corners of the world, who are relegated to spending every waking day of their lives in the harshest of environmental conditions, walking many kilometres just to collect water, gather fire wood and cook for their men. These slave women and girls often eat last.
In the greater scheme of things, whether I cook or my husband cooks, could seem insignificant when so many women have no choice. But for Western women it is a vast change from 50 years ago. I hope change from domestic slavery will follow for the rest of the world.
And I choose to blame myself and no one else for the food that I put in my mouth!
If I may separate gender roles from food issues, I think most people would agree to these two principles:
1. There should be gender equality, with both sexes sharing duties, although they may decide to do different duties.
2. Nutrition and other food issues are extremely important, and there is nothing demeaning about food planning and preparation, regardless of who does it.
I am a widower, living alone, so I usually prepare my own food. And, since I have strong opinions about proper nutrition, I wouldn’t want anybody else preparing most of my meals, anyway.
But, hey, I wouldn’t be above wanting a future wife to have some clearly defined roles.
Like changing the car’s oil and spark plugs, and mowing the lawn.
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From the author of “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” on her new cookbook (http://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/index.ssf/2010/06/we_have_to_go_back_to_the_kitc.html). Cf. especially the last sentence:
“So many women are spending their lives struggling with weight, whether it’s five pounds or 50 pounds. These are bright, successful businesswomen, and when it comes to their relationship with food they behave like kindergartners. To them, food is the enemy. Food is guilt. They don’t know how to deal with stress, and they eat when they’re not hungry and get fat. They don’t know how to cook, because feminism taught us that cooking was pooh-pooh.”
Mackey says:
June 8, 2010 at 12:37 am
I google-fu’ed sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and this popped up.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
The problem is, that there is no link to the research paper so that a trained scientist could look at the numbers. There is a large picture of three, smiling undergrads and one lecherous old prof. But I digress.
Think about this. An orange has sugar. 100% fructose. Are people becoming obese from eating oranges (or apples for that matter)? Honey is a mix of sugars; about 55% fructose, 45% glucose. Agave syrup is up to 90% fructose. Are these sugars making people fat? Yes, if consumed immoderately and overall caloric input is greater than expenditure.
I wrote about this in 2006, when the controversy was at its height: http://healthyness.blogspot.com/2006/07/hfcs-controversy.html
I have since abandoned the blog, but kept the info up because I believe in it strongly. Research often is blown out of proportion by media writers who won’t or can’t read the original paper and rely on the press release.
With all due respect, I believe those endocrinologists you spoke to are seriously misinformed.
This does not make HFCS good for us, however. It is still cheap and empty calories created with a lot of waste. But so is sugarcane. Growing and manufacturing sugarcane on the islands was and is disastrous for the environment. Also, the amount of sugar consumed has steadily increased as it is a cheap, filler substance. There is sugar in savory crackers, in hearty breads, in spaghetti sauce (not just a pinch). Read the labels and find out how much you are eating.
As for the other topic, everyone should learn to cook and feed themselves so they can free themselves from the greed of large corporations – at least a bit.
[...] to “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” is NOT a good answer to our dilemma - despite what some professional “Foodies” think. I watched an episode of the show You Are What You Eat on Saturday. Gillian McKeith hosts the show, [...]