Can Women Still Cook?
We're told now that liberated females don't inhabit kitchens.
Can I offer you a cup of female emancipation? It's good.
"I don't cook. So I made my eat-in kitchen a fabulous walk-in closet," announces a young, attractive woman in the newest Citibank ad.
It's part of a $93 million campaign called "Tell your story," that's appearing in print, magazine, TV and online.
"My name is Grace and I live in a small apartment in a big city," the ad continues. "And since I enjoy a day of shopping far more than, say, cooking, I decided to do a bit of home remodeling. So with my Citi card in hand, I set out to get some closet organizers. I bought a shoe rack for the oven, sweater boxes for the lower cupboards and some 12-inch baskets for handbags up above. I saved room for plates, glasses and silverware. And one large drawer stuffed with take-out menus."
Citibank is so confident that women will identify with "Grace's" sentiment, they're even running the ad in February's issue of Gourmet magazine.
Their assumption, I guess, is that even a good number of Gourmet's readers (who are mostly women) don't actually cook; they're just sampling the food porn.
This idea -- that liberated women don't prepare food -- isn't one that Citibank just cooked up. In fact, as one female friend of mine quickly pointed out, it's still part of the Sex and the City cultural hangover. Carrie Bradshaw, of course, famously used her oven as a shoe cupboard far before Grace, as a kind of feminist triumph: she likes sex and (therefore) doesn't like to cook. Shopping, friends and men sustained her instead, along with the occasional restaurant meal.
Last of a breed?
But since Sex, the phenomenon has heated up. Recently, I talked to a middle-aged male film director about a dinner he had just cooked for friends. When I subsequently told him about a meal I'd made, he raised his eyebrows. "I don't know a single other woman who cooks -- or at least admits to it in public!" he exclaimed. "You're like a relic!" His male friends all cook, he said. But no women of his generation or younger that he knows prepares food.
Why? In short, men come across as evolved, sexy and creative when they mix things up in the kitchen. But women seem stuck in Leave-it-to-Beaver-land when they step in front of the stove: domestic suckers who aren't paying enough attention to their ambition or their libidos. They're not third wave feminists, embracing women's traditional skills or sexy, busy people who make time for health and family, but women who need a good empowerment talk.
I spoke to a few of my other female friends about it. "I never had anything in the cupboards before I had kids," one friend, a professional singer, told me proudly. "I was out having fun."
"I can't even boil water," another told me, smiling. "If my husband is away, I just eat cereal or get take out." She's never been taught to cook and has no desire to learn. Plus, her husband's dad was a chef, and he loves to cook elaborate meals.
"I put food on the table for the kids every day or whatever, but my partner does the fancier cooking for guests," said another. "It's easier than getting him to help with anything else around the house -- he knows he'll get lots of kudos for being the chef, but none for cleaning the toilet."
Cooking as spectator sport
So actually, two things are happening. One is that some women aren't cooking at all because they see it as low status or unnecessary. And sure, women have been unfairly stuck with the brunt of domestic labour for a long time in a culture that has deemed it lower status than, say, working in an office. Stepping away from the hearth is a form of rebellion and liberation and a way to gain more cultural status, which are both motivations I can sympathize with (even though I think they're both ultimately the opposite of liberated and healthy -- more on that later).
And the other is that many women do the daily food prep but don't count that as "real" cooking. For this, I blame the rise of foodie culture. There are plenty of shows on the Food Network that feature quick and easy meals. Like from one of my favourite celeb cooks -- Nigella Lawson -- in which, in the promo, she claims doing her hair and putting on lipstick takes more time than making the entrée.
But it's clear this type of cooking is very different from real cooking -- i.e. highly fetishized, specialized, time consuming, expensive chef-ing, mostly done by men, both in restaurants and at home, and often involving blow torches. It's really a spectator sport, but it's somehow become "cooking."
Michael Pollan's latest social recipe
A friend of mine, who is a chef, spent two weeks making a meal for his wife for her birthday. It was the best meal she's tasted.
But the meals they put on the table every day for themselves and their four-year old daughter are also real meals and actually more important socially, culturally and health-wise, says Michael Pollan in his new book, In Defense of Food.
In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan unearthed the rot in the food industry, and left many people scared to eat. Then, in an article for the New York Times Magazine a year ago, "Unhappy Meals," he caused an even greater cultural revolution with the following seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
In his recent book, which followed from that magazine piece, he advocated a different way of approaching food. "You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy," he writes in the book. "Nor would you eat substances like Go-Gurt, eat them on the run or eat them at mealtimes that are so out of sync with friends and relatives that the real family dinner is an endangered ritual."
He advocates eating local, organic food, even at the risk of elitism. He says to buy fresh, local organic food (which is more expensive) but eat less of it, and you'll still be ahead financially. He says eating at home is better than eating out. And that eating simple food together is the highest form of health and happiness.
Hand me that spatula
"We have more choices now than we've ever had," Pollan says in a recent interview, "An Omnivore Defends Real Food." "There is organic food at Wal-Mart. The big challenge is that you do have to cook. A lot of us are intimidated by cooking today. We watch cooking shows on TV but we cook very little. We're turning cooking into a spectator sport. This process of outsourcing our food preparation to large corporations, which is what we've been doing the last 50 years, is a big part of our problem. We're seduced by convenience. You're going to have to put a little more time and effort into preparing your food. I'm trying to get across how pleasurable that can be. It needn't be a chore. It can be incredibly rewarding to move food closer to the center of your life."
Who knew liberation would found in a kitchen cupboard full of produce, not purses?
In fact, anyone who's ever cooked will tell you the act of preparing food makes you more powerful and sexy. The old saying, that a way to a man's heart is through his stomach, always seems to hold up for both genders in my experience. Who can resist a warm hearth as shelter from storms of all kinds? And as for a spatula making a woman into a relic, it's all about the glint in the eye.
Related Tyee stories:
- Cooking Up New Collective Kitchens
Tasty social change, one meal at a time. - How to Be a Good Wife
In 1913, that is. 'Perpetual Honeymoon for the Vancouver Bride' told how. Part of a two-day series - Bourdain Lifts His Lid
Interview with Anthony Bourdain, author of The Nasty Bits
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
Jeffrey J.
08-02-2008
Good Insights
It is interesting that when men cook, the media fawns all over them. When women cook, or do virtually anything else, the media is silent. The amount of equality that women obtained in the 60's and 70's has clearly been stalled lately, and big media appears bent on regressing society back to the 50's. This theme was identified in Thomas Frank's excellent book One Market Under God. Excellent article Ms. Richmond and Tyee!
Rhea
08-02-2008
Optics is all in our society...
If the people who didn't cook were as concerned about their own health as they seem to be about appearing "hip" or "with it", perhaps they'd actually figure out that knowing how to select and prepare food is a critical skill for a healthy, self-sufficient lifestyle. We have the deceptive luxury in our society of not needing to know basic life skills to get by, but this can all too quickly bite you in the ass. How many young people get into huge debt over restaurant meals, fill their bodies with unhealthy pre-frozen crap, and then wonder why they have weight and financial issues? Buying into the advertisers' ploy of "don't waste time learning a skill when you could give us money to do it for you" is idiocy of the highest order.
My husband and I both cook well and enjoy it very much. We don't have kids, but it's important to us to sit down together each night and catch up over a well-cooked, good meal. An average dinner takes us less than 30 minutes to prepare and serve. We also spend far less money on food and eat better than the average family, because we understand how to choose quality raw ingredients and produce good food from them.
IMO, all high school graduates should have a basic set of survival skills for life. They include basic cooking and nutrition skills (not cordon bleu - basics), budgeting, sexual and basic health knowledge, and a few other things. People who loudly claim to prefer to eschew basic cooking skills for consumerism are neither trendy nor liberated - they're narcissistic and immature morons.
Fiat lux
08-02-2008
If women knew the garbage
If women knew the garbage they're eating when buying ready made foods, laden with chemicals, preservatives, artificial colouring and flavours, they would soon change their minds, unless they've gone completely crazy with brainwash.
We can't eat in restaurants any more, apart from the odd pizza, because my wife gets violently sick every time. This means that the pre-prpared junk they're serving is full of chemicals that obviously leaves residues in the bodies of people, even if they don't show immediate reactions.
Whenever we walk by some of the fast food joints, especially the chicken kind, the reeking smell of burned, rancid grease is enough to make one sick. Yet, people are lining up to eat that stinking crap.
Then people are wondering where all the cancers etc. are coming from, that didn't exist when women used to cook for their families?
What is there so great and liberating in commuting for hours to dead end, minimum wage jobs and sitting by computers counting the money the corporate mafia steals from our pockets?
Aaaah....the power of faith induced by the propaganda for voluntary enslavement !!!!!
Ed Deak, Big Lake.
Rhea
08-02-2008
This quote from the "Unhappy
This quote from the "Unhappy Meals" article referenced above really sums the whole thing up (bolding mine):
Now, if we throw the whole peak oil scenario into the mix (as most of our grains are now mega-farmed using mass amounts of fossil fuels), the concept of a population where people don't or can't fend for themselves about food gets really scary.
Ed, your comment on the cancers etc. is also something that seems to be mysteriously passed over in many health studies. After all, the food additives are supposed to be HEALTHY and CONVENIENT! Never mind that the human digestive system isn't meant to cope with the chemicals involved...no, no, the big ol' food conglomerates really just have your interests at heart!
morechatter
08-02-2008
Feel Good Food
Its more about happy as a society we have many guick fixes and one of them is feel good food at your figure tips in moments much like our medicine of the 21 century. Its not about good its about happy but unfortunatley happy is short lived and then your in need of another happy fix and its one of the major reasons for over weight problems.
James Burns
08-02-2008
baby it's cold inside
The popularity of eating out has far more to do with the fact that humans are social creatures and crave each other's company.
In our culture meal preparation, most of the time, is largely a solitary activity, as is eating it at home. Even if we're talking about nuclear family activity, mealtimes often add to a feeling of social disconnection, especially for the parents.
Advertisers take advantage of that unrecognized social desire, especially in women, and convince them to fulfill it through consumption, specifically shopping. But it's really not the stuff: the shoes, the clothes, the jewelery, that's important, at least not to the women if they take the time to think about it. Although all that junk is very important to the advertisers. Really, it's the process of shopping, talking about shopping, and talking about all the junk, that creates the connection with other human beings. That's where the real pleasure comes from. People don't get all dressed up and looking fine if there isn't going to be anyone else around to see them.
In plenty of other cultures the preparation and consumption of every meal is a collective activity. Instead of feeling alone, locked away in a kitchen, slaving over a hot stove, women get to engage in precisely the sort of social interaction that women now in our culture engage in over shopping.
The problems brought up in the article and the comments aren't going to be solved merely by educating people how to cook, or on the pollution dangers of food you don't choose and prepare yourself, or on the financial benefits of avoiding eating out. The problems will only be solved when people have enough time and understanding to engage in cooking and eating as a collective activity. Given our ever increasing need to work ever longer hours, our obsession with productivity, and our emphasis on consumption as the primary economic good; the need for convenience and speed in what time remains will be paramount, because "going out" whether shopping, or eating at restaurants, or clubbing, are really the only way people have the chance to engage in any kind of fulfilling social interaction, and given the relatively small slices of time they have to do it in, those activities have to be as convenient and as time efficient as possible. Now note, I emphasized time efficiency and not financial, or energy or any other kind of efficiency.
What we really need is a cultural rethink that begins to look closely at what we really value, and what our obsession with consumption to fuel our economic model is doing to us socially. After all our social milieu is just as much a part of our environment, as the trees and the fishes, and for most people it is far, far more important, because we have evolved to have social concerns foremost in our minds.
NDN_Coach
08-02-2008
Not sure its a gender issue
Perhaps the question should be, "Can anyone still cook?"
I am alarmed at the amount of folks, male and female, who have grown up with the idea that cooking is a life skill that one can do without, or is a skill to look down on. I, at my fathers insistence, learned to cook at a young age and I still do to this day. My gf, bless her heart, can't cook and often relies on stuff you buy and heat. To her credit though, she manages to find the organic stuff and insists that I cook veggies for each meal. Fine, as long as she stays out of my kitchen when I'm cooking (my inner Dennis Ramsay).
When one realizes that a $50 meal for one could actually feed a family of 4 quite easily, just the economics of learning to cook make sense.
Sex in the City did as much to set back civilization as Jackass. Both need to be viewed as something that is purely imaginary.
lynn
08-02-2008
The joy of cooking
....and at times quite lethal. ;-).
Thanks NDN_Coach. I never quite got Sex in the City.... or why it portrayed women as constantly on the prowl.
I finally get it. They were just hungry.
I love to cook. I basically learned by just doing it, much like sex.... and riding a bicycle. But not at the same time.
Canis Latrans
08-02-2008
And the negotiations continue...:-)
My old man brought in the paycheque from working in an oil refinery (shift work for 40 years), did all the cooking, laundry and housekeeping etc.. Ma was a poetess and dreamer. A Goddess.
I can distinctly remember wondering at one point in my life, what the hell it was men needed women around for anyway. Nothing but hassle was involved as far as I could see.
I did eventually get it all more or less sorted out, of course, and the central conclusion of it was, first, some folks, men and women, just make bad choices for themselves. And the other part of the conclusion was, that men and women are endlessly negotiating and renegotiating the terms their relationship. It has certainly been going on for as long as I can recall-, achieving new levels of conflict in "more modern times." :-) At least as what has passed for "modernity", like what still passes for "democracy".
To now, in my little world, it has been women constantly driving the endless bargaining-, with men variously submitting, depending upon how much they want peace or a piece, dragging their feet in resistance, or going into what I call avoidance mode, when they decide they've gone about as far as they are going to go, in the endless work order women seem, I think erroneously, bent on creating-, for them and us. (The kids are a separate issue, suffering as a result of the conflict in their own particular way.Sometimes silently. Often not.)
Where it goes from here, I hesitate to guess.
And I really do wish women well, and that many of them find the happiness that so seems to elude, at least, a great many of them. (Including a daughter or two of ours.)
But men, for yourselves, do learn to cook and entirely look after yourselves. It truly is liberating. My old man taught me that, if nothing else. (Though I haven't achieved it entirely yet myself.) And I know from a lifetime of living that there are many of you out there that are so capable, than generally you are given credit. (It's not only women who are survivors. Men know a thing or two about it as well.)
Indeed, peace to us all, men and women. And not so much goddamn endless work and pursuit of stuff-, to which The System has us both hoodwinked and chained.
Hmmm. Wonder what it is the old lady is cooking tonight. Smells really good. Garlic, ginger. Chinese leftovers tonight it smells like.
Play, It's more time to play that we need. Frig the goddamn "careers" , which is really just a fancy-dancy word for "jobs" anyway. We need to work to live, no more, not live to work, which is the squeeze capitalism seeks to put us all in.
Fug the mansion on the hill.
Andrea from Bec...
08-02-2008
I can cook. When I got to
I can cook. When I got to university, I was shocked to discover that other people didn't know how to handle food safely, let alone prepare and cook it (or clean it up!). Now that I've got kids, it's far easier to eat at home than to go out. I must admit that I've been experimenting with high quality frozen veggies since the birth of my second child, though. I treated such things with scorn before, but now I am pressed for time and struggling to get the 5-10 veggies/fruits a day.
Andrea
http://www.consultantjournal.com
zalm
09-02-2008
There's a difference...
...between men and women, as if you hadn't figured it out.
While women still seek emancipation from the drudgery of the kitchen (remember the old Betty Crocker books? "Have a smile on for him when he comes home. He's had a hard day....") men look on it as the new (socially acceptable) workshop. Many's the time I've found myself turning into the kitchen store, instead of passing it by, not looking at the latest fashion, but at the new models of flan pans, the futuristic pepper mill, the sil-pat baking sheets, and that one more salmon slicer that will REALLY finish off my knife drawer. Not to mention the stainless-steel six-burner stove with heavy cast-iron grille bars and a full 34" wide enamelled oven big enough for a side of elk.
Bah. I've cooked for years, and really well for the past four or five, but it's taken me a long time to realize I've just turned my hobby from the workshop (where I spend a lot of time each day anyway, at work) into the kitchen where I get social approbation, marital rewards and an enlarged waistline. It's not so much about making home or hearth, it's about conquering another task or mastering a difficult technique or gaining a new experience. The wife's not unhappy, but even she recognizes that we're different in our approaches to cooking.
It's not bad. It's just that women should recognize that men aren't about to take over the women's role in the home. Her role is still to manage the relationship. It's just that now she has one less tool to do it with. And men have one more way to get distracted from the effort the woman puts into maintaining the connection, excitement and fulfillment.
Sex in the City is so obtuse, so reductionist in its protrayal of modern relationships. I know they're not all that way, but heaven help the ones that are. Buckle your seatbelts - divorce is on the way!
Fiat lux
09-02-2008
What is the difference
What is the difference between drudgery in the kitchen, as opposed commuting, spending time and money to drudgery in dead end jobs....both for men and women, waiting to be fired and etc. ? So that the waste of lives can be called a "career"?
This whole propaganda gimmick is sold to people to accept lower wages at both end and now the "breadwinner" for the family has been replaced with "family income", so they can buy more junk they don't need and fill the pockets of the middlemen holding them by the short hairs.
Over many years I've had the opportunity, and the capability, to interview hundreds of people in all walks of life and professions, right to the very top names and found how unhappy many, if not most, have been and are.
I'll never forget a former head of the then largest lumber company in BC, whom I caught doing a large embroidery of a sailing ship on the sea. I had to swear never to tell anybody about it. The guy was unhappy as hell in his job and had to do something to break out of the pressures.
Some in top business positions often told me that they would drop anything if they had the chance and come to apprentice with me.
Some of you may still remember the WoodCuts magazine series published by Lee Valley Tools, still available in their catalogues.
I wrote several articles in them and also did all the Shop Tips illustrations. What surprised me, and the editors, that the vast majority of articles, on the most intricate woodworking skills, came from people in other professions, who had to use their heads and hands to create things.
After our children were old enough, my wife went back to her old profession, as a 2-3 day a week giftwrapper at Woodward's, because we just moved our shop and needed the money. It was a so called "creative job" but she hated every minute of it, as have most women we talked to in all kinds of jobs.
What we have now is a bloody mess of unhappy people, of both sexes.
I was in my own "creative" business for 35 years and hated 90% of the junk I had to build, because that's what people wanted.
So, nobody can tell me that either sex are happier sitting in stupid offices, doing stupid jobs makes them happier than any form of "drudgery" at home.
Ed Deak.
alive
09-02-2008
eat less
watching the waistline of cooks, it is obvious that they do not make meals just for the purpose of sustaining life!
We are far too obsessed with how food looks and taste, to the point where a meal is rated on its visual value.
There is more to life than filling your guts, and the less you stuff your faces the better your health will be!
That females have dropped the age-old tradition of spending hours preparing meals, is great, if only men would do likewise!
Healthy food need not be such a mystery, it begins by only buying essentials and ensuring they are not poisenous garbage.
Preparations likewise is easy as long as you do not get lost in some fancy cookbook!
Life is about living, not about eating!
Fiat lux
09-02-2008
Alive, try to live without
Alive, try to live without eating.
All life forms survive for every second of their existence on the conversion of resources into forms of energy, which in animal life forms, such as humans, means eating. So, food might as well be an enjoyable experience.
Should try to experience what long periods of starvation mean to human psychology, followed by years on short rations and I think, your opinion about the importance of eating would soon change.
Ed Deak.
lynn
09-02-2008
Enjoyable thread
alive, but there is pleasure to be found in cooking...not all the time I admit but living is also about cooking and eating as well - sometimes just for the sheer enjoyment of it. I really enjoy that cooking show, I can't think of her name right now, she's British and beautiful, but she really enjoys food in a nice kinda lusty way.
This has been a great thread to read - I never realized that cooking as a skill was looked down upon by some people. I do know that once after taking a couple that we were friends with out in our boat for the day and from our catch of salmon and prawns I made a big seafood dinner. When it came time to do the dishes, her husband asked her "Aren't you going to help Lynn do the dishes" and she replied ( She had a big career in hospital management) "No, I've worked all week". The silence was stunning. But it was my husband who was really incensed at that remark and volleyed back "So has Lynn." ( I wasn't teaching anymore but taking care of our young son.) I said nothing - there was already enough tension in the air. She refused to budge and both the guys helped me with the dishes. One of those moments you never forget.
We did invite them back, second chances and all, and when it came time to do the dishes, she excused herself to our bathroom and never came out until her husband and I had once again finished doing the dishes. That was the end of road for that friendship.
dr evil
09-02-2008
After the first dinner
did your friends have you back for dinner?
If so what happened with the dishes? Seems like a hell of a way to end a friendship..over dishes. When I`m a dinner guest ( and thats not too often) I usually don`t expect to do the dishes..I`ll offer but its usually declined. Not knowing what stuff is to be kept..where stuff goes..I`d probably get in the way. I don`t expect guests to look after the post dinner cleanup either though I do appreciate the offer of help.
When its family over everyone pitches in automatically.
With your salmon dinner the guys should have just done it ( the dishes)..and left you ladies to your brandy and cigars on the terrace.
Dr. Phil
lynn
09-02-2008
Dr. Phil
Dear Dr. Phil,
These weren't old friends but very new ones, and let's just say I am leaving a lot of details out. I think it's always nice to ask if you can help with the dishes and with most of my friends it's always a communal affair and we enjoy all the conversation while helping with the clean-up. But I don't expect people to do the dishes either - sometimes I leave them for later, sometimes others pitch in, it all depends on the evening. And I didn't expect her to help either but when I had made the picnic lunch and made dinner an offer to help might have been nice.
It was more about her response - implying she had worked all week and that I had done nothing....this was way less about dishes and more about an attitude expressed where it became quite evident throughout the day that someone sees you as servant girl to busy working, career woman.
The friendship didn't end just over dishes, - it ended as some friendships do when you realize you have nothing in common - and when my husband got fed up with her boasting how she had managed to cut her assistant's coffee break time down to next to nil. At which point my husband said, "Well, she won't be working for you for very long then."
My husband's a big defender of worker rights and let's just say, being diplomatic about it, that he thought she was a jerk. So the friendship eventually dwindled down to nothing - which happens now and then through life.
I'm off the couch now, I'm sure I'm a jerk at times, too...remind me not to do this again. ;-)
Beresford
09-02-2008
Basic Life Skills for all!
I couldn't agree more with Rhea's comment (very much) earlier in this string:
I was probably one of the earliest 'Latch-key Kids' ever. (early 60's) At 10 I was helping with the laundry and cleaning and making my own lunches. Before long I was preparing "my share" of the family meals without thinking this was in any way weird or unusual.
Some time ago, I was appalled at the number of guys in their late 20's and 30's I met who couldn't prepare the most basic meals for themselves to save their life.
I imagined that this was the result of some old fashioned 'ethnic' point of view where Mama stayed home and cooked, cleaned and laundered for sons until they were old enough to get married and move out. (At which time the new wife would take over these housemaid duties)
So, I polled the women I worked with on the topic. These are all educated, professional women from all walks of life who balance family life with busy careers with a large corporation.
To my HORROR, many of these women were doing ALL the cooking, cleaning and laundering for their husbands and kids. I HAD to dig further:
What do they eat when you go away on a business trip, I asked. "Well, either I'll prepare a bunch of meals ahead, freeze them and they can nuke them when they need to, or I'll stock up on frozen dinners, pizza pops etc. They DO know how to use a microwave, you know!" ... thank Heaven for small blessings!
What about the laundry? "Well, that usually waits for me to get back from the trip, but if it's a crisis, there's a laundry down the street that can do it for them." ...God forbid they should learn to use the Washer and Dryer they have in their own home!
...and the tidying up and vacuuming? "Oh that definitely waits for me! Ha ha!" ... I GET the picture!!
Are you at least TRYING to teach your kids these basic life skills? "Oh no, I'm a GOOD mother; their lives are already so busy with school and sports and ballet and so on." ... and your Management job is such a piece of cake??
HOW, I ask, has this mindset survived the the cultural and sexual revolutions of the last 40 years?
Parents need to realize that they are NOT raising sons and daughters; they are raising someone else's future husband or wife! Surely, having NO life skills can't place them high on the 'Desirability List" for future spouses!
Maybe this partly explains the high number of "kids" that stay at home well into their 40's... no one else would have the little deadbeats! ... and whose fault is that?
sdgreen
09-02-2008
Silly Article
The article above is really very silly. Both men and women cook, some more than others. If one is needing of food, they will take food.
This is not a gender issue rather it is a question concerning home prepared versus fast food or resturant foods.
A non issue.
zalm
10-02-2008
sdgreen
This is not a gender issue rather it is a question concerning home prepared versus fast food or resturant foods.
Actually, I really DO think it's at least partly a gender issue. As I pointed out above, (and as I think Vanessa Richmond alluded to in the article without being so blunt about it) food - its preparation and eating - is one of the tools used to maintain a relationship in the family - with kids, without, whatever. But in rejecting the tool to chase a dream of supposed empowerment, the opportunity for many women to manage and enhance their relationship with their mate is lost.
And I'm going to be a bit chauvinistic here and say that making sure the relationship is fulfilling and on track is as much her job and perhaps somewhat more, than mine. I need to be manageable and take direction, but in my marriage, her vision of the relationship is generally fuller than mine, and often more balanced. My wife enjoys that I cook, but she makes sure that the relationship gets fulfilled and stays balanced regardless of who prepares the food.
The pop-culture-Sex-in-the-City goal that's been marketed to young women today as a form of empowerment isn't just about the food - it's about giving up power for the sake of image without replacing it with anything. And that's a bad thing for women who still culturally struggle to break the real chains of discrimination, whether that be against the glass ceiling of the workplace or the piste for Olympic ski-jumping.
I think Richmond did a half-decent job of exposing this marketing snow-job. For me, I think people who watch SITC and aspire to live the imaginary lives of its characters are wasting their lives. But that's a firestorm I really shouldn't start.
dorothy
10-02-2008
If only...
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
This is of course Robert Heinlein's sentiment, but I happen to agree with it. However, I also think these skills should be cultivated to the point where they can be done with no fuss, no muss, effortlessly, like a dance, and with no gabbing about doing or having done it. Everything in my mind gets dead boring when someone turns it into a CULT.
Ed, all thes unhappy people, can or could they not think to do something to improve the situation for everybody including themselves? It sounds so desolate, as if it was that easy to lose one's way and fall down a deep dark pit. If things are Hellish, the remedy is to set an objective about what must happen to make them not Hellish, and then never lose sight of that opbjective, but see everything that one does or finds or gets hold of or is able to influence, as an aspect of the path to improvement.
I know, now someone will say that that is a very feminine viewpoint, men want to take action, preferably decisive action. Or else. But then again, this is about wimmen and whether they can still cook. Some can, even soup on a stone...
zalm
10-02-2008
Thanks
...to Canis & fiat & Rhea & James Burns & NDN_Coach. All very good comments along a line of thinking I agree substantially with. And Lynn, that's quite the hubby you've got there. Loved the story!
BC Mary
10-02-2008
Sex and Two Fat Ladies
What an interesting thread!
I'd like to add a couple of tips o'the tuque. First, to Sex and the City which I love, because it broke through harmful barriers ... and showed that sexual issues can be a topic suitable for intelligent discussion (mostly over lunch, the next day). Discussion leads to understanding which leads to good health on issues like this. When I first laid eyes on the 4, they were chowing down lunch and debating the pros and cons of oral sex. It wasn't lewd. It wasn't snickery. It was information based upon recent experience and shared sensibly among friends. I kept thinking "Jeez, I wish I had known that ..."
2) One of the Two Fat Ladies who created that god-awful but riveting cooking show has written her autobiography. The cooking show was awful because everything Clarissa and Jennifer cooked was loaded with butter, cream, fat bacon, goose livers, red meat, and like that. I was never once tempted to try any of their dishes. But these two-ton ladies ripped gaily around Britain on a motorbike, whomping up feasts for hearty young teams of, like, rowers for Cambridge (scenes of Cambridge U.) ... and that part was riveting.
Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Wright Dickson isn't so much about cooking as it is about food ... and life ... and alcohol ... and, omg, sex, lotsa sex ... and more food ... and so much else ... and you know, despite how sublimely ugly they were ... Clarissa (Jennifer has died) doesn't give a damn ... just goes on and on and on, barging and banging her way through life, and somehow it doesn't matter.
It's a cook's book about an astonishing life. Despite being a successful barrister in England, Clarissa's story would have been short if she hadn't discovered cookery.
And I realized, even before reading this interesting Tyee story by Richmond, that Clarissa sees a good cook as a good cook (even if only gifted on 2 or 3 dishes), and a chef as a chef, nothing whatever to do with male or female.
Thanks for all the interesting thoughts on this ever-present topic.
North of Hope
10-02-2008
cooking at home
My earliest cooking lessons were, as a child, watching my mother and older sisters cook when I wasn't outside playing. (Yes we could go outside and play on our own.) I saw how to knead bread, how to test for meat being done and if it was good at the meat store. I still remember my mother poking the meat to see if it was suitable for us. However I still have trouble cooking syrup as I usually overcook it even though I saw my sister do this many times. Then I have to redo it more carefully.
If you wish to see kitchen friendship in action, watch Julia Child and Jacques Pepin work. There is a warmth that makes cooking worthwhile and satisfying.
Bailey
10-02-2008
In the belly of the beast
Two comments:
Of all the art forms, cooking is the most complete. Transient it may be, but it involves every bit of whatever it means to be alive on the planet as a human.
All the senses, smell, touch, taste, hearing as you listen to the conversations and all the clatterings and sizzlings. Vision when the finished food is laid before an audience who's whole being reacts on every consious and reflexive level.
Then, in a meaningful group, we open our eyes, open our noses, open our mouths and our hearts and engulf this art into the center of our beings. Actually enclose it, take it into ourselves and make it part of our very substance.
I remember some years ago reading an article about a conference of the retail food industry in North America. The conclusions they reached stick in my mind still.
They proposed as a long term plan to create a culture in which every house would have several built in microwaves, just big enough to receive those prepackaged little trays. One for each family member. So nobody would have to cook, or eat the same food together, and all food would be "value added", and so much more profitable to the compamies involved.
Retail grocers would not display food, but only show barcoded pictures of it, and shoppers, on line or in the store, would choose like that and pay by card.
Of all the elements of human nature, eating is the most pervasive. Culturally, spiritually, physically. Even religions embrase ritual eating as a route to communion with God.
Who would resent cooking? For pity's sake why?
BC Mary
10-02-2008
Not offended. But I still like the concept.
This is so strange. I never thought of doing a character-analysis of those 4 women on Sex in the City. Never thought of emulating them. Had no urge to buy spikey shoes or crazy clothes. Never wished I could meet them for lunch. No, it was entirely their sex talk I listened to.
They made sex seem ... well, a whole lot like food ... something healthy, something necessary, something to be shared with somebody you love, and something which depends wholly upon what you do with it. Like food. Right?
All I was/am trying to convey is that the series did me a favour by talking plainly and imo healthily about sex.
My question was: can you think of any other 30-min. TV show which ever made any essential element of life more clear??
Maybe I came in on the wrong gospel meetin', but weren't folks thumping those 4 women for failing to have large kitchens and to cook lots of complicated food ... ?
So what about those Two Fat Ladies who cooked like mad fools and wore about 200 excess poundage as a result? Clarissa mentions hurling her lover out the window at one point in her book ... and had forgotten to open the window first. This isn't healthy, gentile sex (see above) but it's rich with earthy humour and cholesterol. Ya think women should emulate Clarissa?
clubofrome
11-02-2008
Getting Fresh
You knew the topic had to migrate from food to sex, might as well throw in sailing too! Because they all go hand in hand through life together. Food and beverage is the backbone off all relationships. It works just as well for two or twenty, and every number in between. Food brings us together in so many ways, those who try to deny it are just fooling themselves! Who hasn't lusted for the medieval days of feast, where the food was piled high, no utensils required, the wine flowed freely, the music was live and the uninhibited danced barely clothed! This just doesn't work without the food and beverage program. Without the Saturday night dance in town how would boy meet girl? If we can share our food and our homes with each other then perhaps one day we can learn to share the roads. If we can gather for the feast, we can talk to each other about building a better community! We'll learn to share our tools and knowledge and soon forget about fast food culture as it has no appeal for those who seek real life experience.
Oh my God, I love food... has anyone else had that dream, you know the one about the farmers market. Not any market though, the perfect summer market on a perfect sunny day. A warm breeze, the sights and smells and children laughing, and the produce... Oh, the produce... You run your hands over the soft and lush greenery, the aromas filling your senses. Next, the tubers all lined up to greet you. They're firm and rich in colour, you can smell the earth in every one. You sample the fresh peas, the pod opens before you and reveals it's hidden treasure! Your tongue and the pod become one... Then you see her, Sally-May Anderson, holding a basket of apples and she looks your way. Your eyes meet and she smiles, you find yourself floating hand in hand over fields of daisys....
Alright! Who's hungry...?
NDN_Coach
11-02-2008
Food!
Ok, all this talk of food and cooking has got me absolutely famished for a piece of my auntie Irene's bannock, stuffed with fried moose meat and smothered in butter.
Yes, that is why the Aboriginal life expectancy is only 55 years. ha ha ha!
Trust me, that type of food is a treat for me these days. When I've spent the day cutting, hauling and splitting two loads of firewood, I treat myself to a sandwich as I'm driving home.
dr evil
11-02-2008
No Sex Please
We`re the government.
Actually I think food and sex are really quite different...at least I don`t think I`ve heard of anyone getting pregnant from eating
food...not even in the city.
But there is of course gluttony.. and lust.
Gluttony and lust in the City.
I`ve never really understood the importance attached to sex in our "kulture"..though it seems very successful as a marketing tool.
I prefer Angel sex...the earthly stuff is so...not sexy usually. I don`t like having my prurient interest aroused...but I enjoy a good meal.
As a white person visiting South Africa you were continually engaged by white South Africans who..when they learn you were from North America wanted to talk racial politics and to convince you that it wasn`t really like how we had probably been told...to set the record straight...One fellow told me that " hell put a table of our food next to a table with bowls of beans and the Kaffirs will go for the beans every time.!"
When I told a black South African this story he doubled over with laughter.
Andrea from Bec...
11-02-2008
Lynn, is there any chance
Lynn, is there any chance your former friend was appalled that her husband expected her to do the dishes? Or was he also helping with the dishes? Some people believe that, when you're a guest, you shouldn't help with dishes (I'm not one of those people). Other people think women should help with the dishes. I once offended a family because I wouldn't help with dinner preparation or washing the dishes, because the men were all sitting watching TV. I asked my then boyfriend to help, if he wanted me to help his family. He refused, so I sat down. I didn't make a big scene -- I just refused to tolerate a sexist environment.
Stump
12-02-2008
Quote:Some people believe
So, essentially you ignored your own beliefs about helping with a meal to make a point about what you perceived to be sexism?
Being thoughtless because others are as well... an interesting approach.
Mkitty
12-02-2008
I live to cook
Ah..what a wonderful topic...cooking, eating...and a good dose of sex thrown in from previous posters! The best.thread.ever.
I love to cook..I live to cook. My husband also loves to cook. We enjoy both cooking, sharing our food with all of our friends (whom we never ask to do the dishes :-) - we both do them after they leave..even if it's 1am!)
I think anybody who is proud of being a non-cook is an idiot. I think the sensual pleasure in cooking and eating is one of life's truly great pleasures. I love to also grow my own food, or buy fresh and local and seasonal...it's really the best pleasure on earth that everyone can enjoy from men, women and children.