My summer reading list this year included several books
about food, in particular Year of No
Sugar: A Memoir by Eve Schaub and Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (and family).
Both books were about the families’
attempts to do something “extreme” with their eating habits over the course of
a year. Schaub’s book describes the
family’s struggle to eliminate added sugar from their diet. Kingsolver’s follows the family’s quest to
eat only locally grown food in season.
I read them mostly for my interest in health and
sustainability, but they left my feminist brain confused and conflicted about a
seemingly straightforward topic: cooking.
Since both books are at least nominally about food, they included a lot
of material about cooking. Both authors
were very much in favor of cooking, spent a fair chunk of their time doing it,
and were encouraging others to do the same.
But wait! my brain kept saying. Wasn’t the point of feminism to get women out
of the kitchen? Should we really be saddling
ourselves with the cooking chores again?
What’s next? Wouldn’t feminists
scream at this?
Let me take a step back and say that both women freely chose
to undertake these food experiments.
Given their interests, education, work flexibility, etc. they were in
the position to make this choice for themselves. No one was pressuring them to cook or telling
them to stay home because that was all they were good for.
However, I do think there are broader feminist issues here.
While both women freely chose to undertake their yearlong
food experiments, both expressed a feeling that in the broader scheme of things,
they did not have a choice. They believed
they were poisoning their families, ruining the planet, and/or eliminating
their children’s prospects for a healthy and prosperous future. Saying no to the food experiments did not
seem like an option.
What does this have to do with feminism. Well Kingsolver stopped me in my tracks when
justifying her time in the kitchen. I am
paraphrasing, but she basically said:
We (professional women) got our educations and joined the
workforce with the implicit promise that society would help us take care of our
families. The schools would make sure our
kids learned what they needed to know.
The food industry would provide nutritious, responsible food requiring limited
preparation. New products and
technologies would keep us safe, healthy, and clean. They lied.
She could go out and maximize her earning potential, but to
her, the bargain was not worth it. She
would rather make sure her family was healthy and that she was leaving the
planet in better state for her children to live in when she was gone. Similarly, Schaub was dismayed by the amount
of sugar her 1st grader was getting in school and by the sugar hiding
in her emergency chicken with pasta and cream sauce meal from the grocery store
freezer isle.
My feminist point? I
have two.
Point 1: Society promises a mother everything but on closer
inspection, she gets very little in return.
We no longer resign women to the kitchen as their rightful place in a patriarchal
society, at least not explicitly. But do
we actually give them a choice? This gets
back to a point I made in my
More Work for Mother: Part 2 post. In that discussion, I concluded that
“internet access has placed the burden of research on the
consumer. Whereas once you paid a travel
agent to book your flights, now you spend several hours researching and
comparing prices. The variety of
products available also means you spend a lot more time researching the perfect
backpack for your child or the best rice cooker. All this research time seems like an added
burden on working mothers that we take for granted.”
All this leads us to feminist goals regarding social support
for women's empowerment. Obvious
examples include affordable childcare or flexible work schedules, but maybe
feminists should expand their thinking to include basic things like education
reform, food safety, and sustainable agriculture. Yes, moms can drive markets, but they deserve
to be astrophysicists or chief operating officers rather than the country’s
unpaid food inspectors or agricultural watchdogs.
Point 2: Cooking
itself is not the enemy. This might be
obvious, but I missed this point and maybe other feminists do too. I grew up in an environment where cooking was
a chore and food was either a haven for allergens or a problem for the latest
diet fad. I never ended up with an
unhealthy relationship with food, but only recently did I realized
that cooking can have its own rewards.
Cooking can be an exciting and creative process as well as a way to
make delicious AND amazingly healthy food.
This is part of Kingsolver’s argument in favor of home cooking. In addition, besides the obvious health benefits, she
lays out a range of other family benefits: time together in the kitchen sharing
stories, making memories, experimenting, and learning new skills; setting up a
designated family meal time; interacting with the past through family recipes
or foods that remind you of Thanksgiving with Grandma; taking time from a crazy
schedule for some quiet and reflective time.
Obviously all these wonderful things don’t happen every
day. Sometimes cooking IS a chore and we
want to make sure mom is not the one stuck with it all the
time. But in these books, especially
Kingsolver’s, cooking is family work. Dad makes the bread daily and plows up the garden.
The children look up recipes, work in the garden, help with the cooking,
or even run the family’s egg business. Everyone works, everyone learns, everyone benefits. As a result, bringing
a feminist view to cooking can
be very rewarding for everyone in the family, not just the women.
So there you go . . . food can equal feminism.
