It's no surprise that the ever growing sustainable and fair food movement may next turn its attention to food preparation--namely, cooking. In light of Nora Ephron's new movie Julie and Julia, Michael Pollan wrote about Americans' exodus from the kitchen in the New York Times Magazine last week. Pollan argues that we will be healthier, better eaters if we cook more. The question then becomes, who will do the cooking?I've written before about the interesting position women find themselves in when it comes to food. Food technology, along with convenience stores and fast food restaurants--all of the things we food activists abhor--has, to some degree, coincided with liberating women from the kitchen into the workforce. "Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing," Pollan says. But cooking may be a silver bullet for our declining health, and even our cultural dignity. (Pollan cites a few anthropologists who identify cooking as a key evolutionary distinction between people and animals.)
Julia Child was a contemporary of Betty Freidan (The Feminine Mystique was published when "The French Chef" first aired, in 1963), and Pollan writes about Child as a woman who was empowered by, not enslaved by, cooking. "It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself."
In bemoaning the demise of cooking, it is easy to blame women for leaving the kitchen. "It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking — but so do women without jobs," Pollan writes. If we are to succeed in a food revolution, it may be best to start in the kitchen, not with ingredients, but with gender roles. If men and women opt to share the time and responsibility for cooking, this just may be a golden opportunity to redefine gender roles in the household. -Sara
8 comments:
*shrug* My parents decided they wanted someone to stay home so my Dad took 10 years off to look after me and my brother. Cooked and meals and all the other stuff. As a result I've never understood the whole 'women in the kitchen' idea as my Dad was the ones staying home while my Mom worked her way into management.
Canageek,
I do think our parents' generation was less likely to adhere to strict gender roles than their parents' generation. But your situation still strikes me as very anomalous.
I also grew up in a household where my dad did all the cooking and grocery shopping - this was in the 60s and 70s and he was teased about it incessantly. He grew up in extreme rural poverty during the Depression and for him, cooking was all about empowerment.
While I too come from a household in which household chores were divided according to traditional gender roles--my dad has done the grocery shopping forever, and both parents shared cooking and cleaning--it has still been the truth for many families, especially before women began working en masse after World War II, that women bore the responsibility for feeding the family. Perhaps this notion is more archaic than I think, which is good news for us going forward and reinventing a cooking culture.
My impression of the Food Network is that it seems to be instigating a shift in the right direction in terms of gender roles in the kitchen. I like to see a soft-spoken guy harvest greens from his own garden (in an apron of course) and then whip up some kind of vinegarette for them. Likewise, they show strong, independent women travelling, speaking intelligently about cuisine and culture, and creating adventurous new dishes. It's a shame that these deviations from traditional notions of gender are so rare in the mainstream media that the Food Network deserves praise for showing them.
Just to throw a monkey wrench into this: of the men shown sensitively picking sprouts of chervil on the Food Network, how many of them are gay and how many are straight? And of the women shown truly running a kitchen, bossing around an army of sous's, how many of them are gay and how many of them are straight? So if you answered, "most of them are gay" to both of these questions, are we really doing anything to advance the perception of gender roles as they apply to the kitchen and/or household duties?
I haven't thought about the sexual orientation of food network personalities. I was thinking specifically of Jamie Oliver and Giada de Laurentiis, neither of whom is gay as far as I know. You may be right; I haven't been watching lately so I don't know who's on food network these days.
While I'm not certain about Jamie Oliver's sexuality, doesn't the food network always show Giada in a home kitchen, cooking "family" meals? Oh, and let's not forget the propensity of the aforementioned network to choose camera angles that accent her breasts more than the breasts of chicken with which she is working (not that I'm complaining, but I'm stating in the interest of
full disclosure and because it supports my argument). I'm thinking more along the lines of the shows that actually show chefs working in commercial kitchens....that's where I see more of the masked stereotypes.
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