Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 2 (#365FeministSelfie 2)

#365FeministSelfie, August 26
Banana muffin for my son's birthday
celebration at school

Continued from Part 1, where I explore the connections between cooking, work, and leisure.

Second in my #365FeministSelfie series 

I grew up with three main parental figures in my life: my mother, my father, and my paternal grandmother. Their stories illustrate three very different narratives of gender and cooking. 

My grandmother cared for me nearly every day after school and many weekends. In Armenian culture in general and for my grandmother specifically, food held a central place. She turned out traditional Armenian dishes—tas kebab, kefta, dolma, yalanchi—dishes that could take all day to prepare, without even calculating in the time to grocery shop and clean up. She also made decent American fare: spaghetti, meat loaf, chicken marinated in red wine, garlic, and a little brown sugar. 

Both of my parents could count on her to feed me if they were unable to pick me up before dinnertime. She would call me to the table; when I lagged, she would inevitably chastise in her Long Island accent, “Anoosh, it’s gettin’ cold!” Obviously, my grandmother could cook like this, and care for me, because she was a housewife. For her, this represented a step up from her pre-married life, when she worked to support her parents and younger brother during the Depression and World War II. 

My mother, on the other hand, held a full-time job as a middle- and high school teacher at a K–12 private school. On the nights she fed me dinner, we ate primarily what I call insta-food: buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, packets of ramen embellished with chopped scallions and cubed spam, frozen fish fingers. I remember my mother saying to me once with irritation that when she was married to my dad, he expected her to put on dinner parties. As with many second wave feminists, my mother embraced the life of a professional at the same time she rejected the foremost task of the domestic: cooking. 

My father, on the other hand, had a reverse experience. Naturally, he had expected to lead a professional life. He had not, however, expected to find himself the sole caretaker of his child for half of every week. Raised on my grandmother’s cooking, he felt obligated as a parent to provide home-cooked meals. At a time when men were being encouraged to “embrace their feminine side,” my dad decided to learn how to cook. On weekends and when I was with my mother, he would put on an apron and cook up giant pots of staples like spaghetti sauce, black bean soup (a dish he’d eaten while in Peace Corps in Costa Rica), tas kebab, and adobo (a Filipino tradition from my mother’s family) and store portions in the chest freezer he kept in the basement. (He learned this from my grandmother, who likewise had a second freezer built like the obelisk from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Dinners at my dad’s were always a complete meal: protein, starch, and a vegetable. 

When I reached high school, my dad made a new household rule: whoever cooked, the other person had to clean up. I had never felt particularly drawn to cooking, but I knew which side of that equation I wanted to be on. I pulled down cookbooks from the shelf over the telephone and started searching for easy recipes. 

And I liked it. 

Cooking took thought, but in a different way from, for example, writing an essay for an Advanced Placement course. I had the satisfaction of accomplishing something material, but without the drudgery and dirt of other types of housework. Cooking could be artistic, both in flavor and in visual appeal. It could be improvisational and experimental. And it created connection, whether it was simply a shared meal with my dad, or a batch of cookies that I gave out to friends. 

#365FeministSelfie, February 3
Making quiche, a recipe
my friend Zara gave me

The act of cooking itself created connection, too. I might spend a Saturday afternoon with my grandma as she baked a batch of churag, a kind of sweetened bread. Many recipes for churag exist, but my grandmother’s recipe was specific to her origins in Marzevan, a town near the Black Sea. Although she grew up in Istanbul, her family kept their country recipes. As we braided dough, she would tell me about her years in the orphanage after her family migrated to the United States to escape the Armenian Massacre, or her cross-country bus trip to California, or her journey to become an artist. Cooking was both the opportunity and the vector to pass down family history. 

As I’ve recounted before, my mother and I had a fractured relationship during my childhood (better now). Some of my best memories, little islands of ideal mother-daughter moments, are baking with her, the one cooking activity she seemed to enjoy. Every aspect of sifting flour—the click-click-click rhythm of the handle, the sight of flour piling up in a drift, the dusty itch in my nose, and the anticipation of cake—is suffused with feelings of love and comfort. 

I can’t help but want to pass this down to my own children. 

Cooking is a microcosm of my family’s dynamics. It promotes tolerance of difference, because my husband is vegetarian and I am not. It embodies my family history through smell and taste. It retains the identity and memory of my immigrant origins. It symbolizes our togetherness and our cohesion as a family, not only when we sit down together to a meal, but also as we assemble it together, sometimes with a lemon from our tree or tomatoes from our garden. 

It can also provide a platform for strife, which is still a part of family life. Sometimes I want my kids to help, and they don’t want to. Sometimes they want to help, and I just want to make a meal in peace, alone. Sometimes I create a dish with love and devotion, and they just don’t like it. 

On the other hand, I have those times when my son says, “Thank you, Mama, for making a yummy dinner!” 

I persist in the face of my children’s disapprobation of my cooking because I want them to know that if you live a rich and varied life, you aren’t going to like everything. 

When I lived in Senegal, I ate some things that I did not care for: a slimy okra-based dish called suppu kànja, dried sea snails called yéet. In Fiji, I downed some chicken livers that not even cumin, coriander, and turmeric could make palatable for me. These were meals I ate in people’s houses, people who were not rich by the standards of their own countries, much less ours. The women prepared food for me with kindness and generosity, and yes, it took them hours to make, and to turn up my nose at it would have been the pinnacle of ingratitude. (These dishes were the exceptions—in the main, I love Senegalese, Fijian, and Indo-Fijian cuisine.) 

The first time I tried bitter melon at my great-aunt’s house in Hawai’i, I didn’t like that, either. Everyone laughed as my mouth puckered and my eyes started to water. When I was served bitter melon in Fiji, I was prepared for it, and I started to acquire a taste for it. Eventually, I learned how to prepare it myself, and I found a recipe for it I like. (My husband is still resisting its charms, however.) 

Cooking is not just about feeding the body. Food is heritage, tradition, family lore. It holds valuable knowledge about plant variety, preparation, and use. Our farms are becoming vast corporations; our fields are becoming monocultures. Do we want the same to happen to our kitchens and our bellies and our palates? 

I feel very lucky to live in a city where I can find nearly every ingredient that I can imagine to cook with: grape leaves for dolma and yalanchis, bitter melon for ginisang ampalaya, epazote for beans, cassava for Fijian pudding and West African stews. I can’t find these in my local supermarket, but instead must go to “ethnic” groceries and farmers markets. The simple act of food shopping ties me into the specificity of my place: people, communities, traditions, and economic networks that are marginalized yet still so central to what makes Los Angeles, Los Angeles. 

And so I choose to keep cooking. But for many mothers, to cook or not to cook is not a choice they can make, but a decision bounded on many sides by traditional sex roles, economic pressures, food insecurity, and poor urban planning. In Part 3, I address the authors’ argument point by point and examine some of the structural barriers to cooking, as well as some of the ways parents are trying to reconfigure domesticity to be more gender equal.

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 1

Barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen... and feminist
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen... the iconic image of a woman in need of feminism. Interesting to me that we say “in the kitchen.” “Barefoot” is self-evident, as is “pregnant.” “In the kitchen” is oddly coy. What is she doing in there? Well, she could be doing a lot of things, just as I do: washing dishes, paying bills, chatting with a friend. Doing a science experiment with a child. Heck, she could be sitting at the counter with The New York Times and a cup of coffee. 

But we know that’s not what she’s doing. We know she’s cooking. 

Recently, three sociologists at North Carolina State University published a study entitled “The Joy of Cooking?” pushing back against the narrative that a home-cooked meal is an essential part of familial harmony and a key step in reforming the food system. “The message that good parents—and in particular, good mothers—cook for their families dovetails with increasingly intensive and unrealistic standards of ‘good’ mothering.” This ideal, they argue, serves only to push working women back into the kitchen, where they find cooking unfulfilling. Moreover, their efforts are often met by family members with disinterest or complaints. Cooking, they assert, only continues to oppress women. 

A few writers picked this up, including Amanda Marcotte in Slate and Anna North in The New York Times. Predictably, a conservative in “The Federalist” responded: “It’s I guess what you can expect from feminists—sniping that the stress for women of at-home cooking isn’t worth the benefits.” 

So is cooking anti-feminist? 

I have certainly had my share of family meals where I have labored over the actual cooking—never mind the shopping beforehand—for at least an hour, only to have my efforts rebuffed by my kids. I have certainly experienced my share of anger and frustration over it, seasoned with the peculiar bitterness that comes from the ingratitude of children. I actively dislike cooking with my kids, because it takes twice as long, and the resulting mess is twice as big. I am a work-at-home mother, which means that my work hours end when school does, and shopping and food prep, tasks I accomplish faster and more easily without offspring, take a bite out of my precious work day. 

Yet I am not ready to concede the kitchen. 

What makes cooking oppressive? The authors detail the challenges facing the women they interviewed: unpredictable work hours, long commutes, difficulties procuring fresh foods and using them before they spoil. Cooking, they argue, is an unnecessary stressor in these women’s already-overburdened lives, so why not just taking cooking out of the equation? 

The irony is that at least two of the women, Wanda and Leanne, work in fast food, as does Wanda’s husband, while another, Greely, has her own catering company. They can’t cook at home because, between work hours and commuting, they are too busy providing food for other people—perhaps some of them overburdened parents like themselves without time to cook. 

The line between domestic work and wage work is highly charged for women, and is further tangled up in class and race. A century and more ago, upper-class women, usually white, were expected to eschew all forms of work. “Housekeeping” for these women meant managing the servants, who performed all the actual labor of domestic tasks. In contrast, middle-class women handled much or all of their own domestic work. Their exemption from wage work delineated their difference from lower-class women. For women of the lower classes, of all races, domestic work was wage work. One glaring exception, pre-Civil War, was enslaved women, who received no wages at all for the tasks they performed, either in the house or in the fields. African-American women who were freed still performed domestic tasks, but freedom made the difference in doing the work for nothing versus doing the work for pay. 

During the first and second waves of feminism, many white women agitated for the right to work; many women of color, on the other hand, wanted the right to leisure. Since then, women have gained the right to wage work—if not to pay equity with men—but the right to leisure remains elusive for many in the United States, women and men. 

Is cooking work or leisure? It can be hard to say. For a cook at McDonald’s, providing food is her job. When she comes home, the pressures that spill over from her wage work—time constraints, financial limits, physical exhaustion—make cooking stressful and anything but leisurely. 

What about a stay-at-home mother? For her, cooking might be a leisure activity and a pleasure, a domestic task she chooses to do. Alternatively, maybe she works—and cooks—at home because child care costs more than she would earn out of the house, and so economic necessity makes the choice for her. Either way, she does it and receives no compensation, even though the annual value of a stay-at-home mother’s labor is calculated to be $112,962. 

When parents work outside the home, the family often outsources those jobs and pays for them. Restaurant workers (likely immigrants of both genders) prep and cook the food. Day care workers or nannies (usually women) care for the children. Maids (women again) clean the house. When these jobs are paid, they count as part of the GDP. 

But to reduce cooking to labor is to collapse it into a singular, capitalistic dimension. Food and cooking have larger resonances than simply economics, however, as the study authors acknowledge when they discuss the ideological values placed on “the family meal.” Yet even this analysis is reductive and ignores the many other possible emotional and cultural dimensions of food, cooking, and the struggle for gender equity. 

In Part 2, I unpack the relationships between cooking and gender by recollecting my own experiences with cooking, food, and family from childhood.

In Part 3, I respond to the authors’ argument point by point. 

Keystone, Climate Change, and My Children's Future

Image by Jmcdaid via Wikimedia Commons

I haven't written anything in about two months because my kids have been sick, I have been sick, my husband has been sick, the holidays happened, and now my grandmother is in the hospital.

But we are in the 30-day window for the public to weigh in on the Keystone XL Pipeline. Every day that we go without rain in California makes me nervous and edgy. This photograph makes it abundantly clear that a severe water shortage is coming, worse than any in living memory. I can feel, in my bones, that everything we have experienced — hurricanes, the Polar Vortex, record-breaking droughts — is only the beginning of the effects of global climate change. I honestly worry that my children will inherit a planet less able to support life than any time in human history. I had to speak up.

I decided to post this because I am hoping that others will also be moved to write. Please make your voices heard. Comments close on March 7, so please write today.

I stand against the Keystone XL Pipeline. The U.S. State Department has determined that the extraction, refinement, and transportation of the tar sands will not increase the effects of climate change, but ONLY because the Department claims that the tar sands oil will find its way to market one way or another. In other words, the State Department is advocating in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline because it is protecting U.S. interests without accurately accounting for a rapidly warming planet and its effects on future generations.

Yet the Keystone XL Pipeline, in fact, threatens U.S. interests precisely because it will have climate effects. The U.S. is a global leader, and the action we take on Keystone will signal to the rest of the world whether we intend to take material action on the changing climate, which will affect every person on this planet, or whether we will ride cheap oil to oblivion.

If we wish to remain a global leader, must take a stand on climate change and our dependence on oil, for the sake of our homeland and for the home of our entire species. I have heard arguments that Keystone XL will make the U.S. energy-independent. Yet we cannot deny that oil will not and cannot be the fuel of the future. Our continued dependence on oil is a testament to the industry's powerful influence on national policy rather than an argument in favor of the status quo. Rather, if we continue to rely on oil, we will no doubt fall behind in the development of alternative fuel and solar technologies. Our country uses oil as a crutch, and it is holding us back.

During my childhood, during the administration of President Carter, the U.S. made first steps towards solar technology. The Reagan administration turned our economy back towards oil, bringing all that innovation to a halt. Imagine where we might be if we had, instead, aggressively pursued solar all those decades ago. Only now are houses and cars beginning to be heated by our most abundant energy source, and we are in competition with other nations to retain a slim edge. Are we going to turn the clock back again?

Our planet is already in turmoil due to human-created drastic climate change. Most of the country is suffering from frigid temperatures and massive snowfall due to the Polar Vortex. Here in California, we are laboring under the worst drought in our recorded history with no relief in sight. Our agricultural economy is threatened by a dire water shortage. Food prices are already rising. Across our entire nation, we are only beginning to feel the climate crisis that is building, threatening our economy, our food security, our infrastructure, and the very lives of our citizens.

The Keystone XL Pipeline marks a watershed moment. Our decision to exploit the tar sands oil will not be a final carbon "push" that will send us into irrevocable disaster; alternatively, our decision not to exploit it will not halt climate change. Nevertheless, the world awaits our decision as a signal. The symbolism of the Keystone XL can be as influential as the movement of the markets that signal confidence or lack thereof in a stock or a country's economy.

For this reason, I urge you to in the strongest possible terms to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. We must send a clear signal that we will forge a new energy future rather than drain oil down to its poor, dirty dregs in the tar sands. Not only our nation's citizens, but our entire species is suffering from what are only the first effects of climate change. We must do everything in our power to halt our current path.

Oil is the handbasket. It's time to get out.

For a deeper analysis of the calculations regarding the carbon effects of Keystone XL, see this. For a more eloquent argument on behalf of the planet, please read this. Ultimately, I decided the numbers were less important than the symbolism of the pipeline, since the calculations are elastic and the effects likely won't be entirely known unless/until we go through with it. To my mind, the potential risks far, far outweigh the potential benefit.

Finally, if you still aren't feeling alarmed enough, there's always this: "How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt."

Two Children in Poverty, a Century Apart

At the orphanage. My grandmother is in the center row,
fourth from the left. Year and photographer unknown.

I have been very sick for a week, and no end in sight. So today, while trying to force myself to stay in bed, I finally read the New York Times’ profile of Dasani, a homeless girl living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Once I started, I had to read the entire gripping, heart-wrenching account. 

“[Dasani] belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.” 

It made me think of another person I know who grew up in New York in poverty: my grandmother. 

My Armenian grandmother was born in Istanbul when it was still known as Constantinople. She arrived in New York at eight years old (although officially only five years old, for a lower fare in steerage), a refugee from Turkey who had escaped the Armenian Genocide. Her mother couldn’t support her, so she sent my grandmother to live in an orphanage for several years, until her mother married again and could afford to bring her home. My grandmother grew up in the city through the Great Depression. She was able to attend a public arts high school, which led to her first job copying French perfume bottles for a department store. She gave all the money she earned to her mother. 

In the course of her life in the U.S., she skyrocketed out of poverty into prosperity, a world away from where she started. She had a house in California with her own studio. Her husband owned his own business and passed it onto their sons. She died, essentially of old age, at ninety-seven and a half. 

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother safeguarded herself from deprivation, even in the midst of plenty. She bought oatmeal, canned tomato sauce, and soup in bulk. She cooked huge amounts of Armenian food—kufta, berag, lamajoon, kata, churag—and packed the leftovers into a second freezer. She hid money throughout the house; sometimes she forgot it, and we only found it after she died. 

Certain habits of caution and protection have lasted three generations, carved into my dad and me even though we have never known such want. 

When I read this story, about all the structural barriers that keep Dasani’s family trapped in a shelter for more than three years, I cried. My grandmother horrified me with stories of conditions at the orphanage, but the shelter trumps the hardships she endured. Adding insult to injury are the examples of Dasani and her family disregarded and unheard by those who are ostensibly charged with protecting children and the poor: housing inspectors, the Administration for Children’s Services, the shelter director. And above them all, the mysterious figure of Mayor Bloomberg looms, enacting laws from an abstract distance that affect their lives in concrete terms. His philosophy of ending poverty, based on ideology, instead closes down the family’s potential exits from the shelter to stable housing. 

In stark contrast, Dasani’s teachers and principal stand out as they try their best to keep her in school, to teach her the kind of impulse control she will need to succeed, and to provide structure and stability that she can find nowhere else in her life. 

America’s promise is deeply, deeply broken. That homeless children must survive in these places, just blocks away from $1.9 million condos, is profoundly immoral. We have absolutely no claim to the title “the greatest country in the world” as long as we are willing to allow children to grow up in circumstances like these. We must take steps to end such escalating inequality now. 

Charity is not enough. We need a transformation of how we conceptualize poverty. We need to take a hard look at the way inequality is built into the very bricks of our society. To provide Dasani with the same opportunities my grandmother had, we need to reconsider access to quality education, living wages, child care services, prenatal care, drug addiction and its criminalization, mental and physical health care, welfare, urban planning, and our institutional prejudices against women, against people of color, against the poor themselves. Most of all, we need to listen to the voices of people in poverty and take them seriously when they vocalize their needs. And their dreams. 

No easy task, certainly. But we have a choice. When faced with the problem of every child like Dasani, will we throw up our hands? Or will we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work?

The Personal Is (Still) Political

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I want to stay in bed.

It feels like too much. The government shutdown and the debt ceiling showdown. Attacks on SNAP and ACA. Funerals of victims from the Westgate Mall in Kenya. The Canadian government muzzling scientists. The ongoing deaths of honeybees. The continuing gun debate after the mass shooting at the Navy Yards. And on and on and on.

When I was a child, my mother and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad boyfriend would sometimes have screaming fights after my bedtime. I would wake to the crashing of things being broken. I huddled under the covers, terrified, paralyzed, eyes closed, wishing it would stop. On the worst nights, my mother would scoop me up, pajamas, comforter, and all, and bundle me into the back seat of her car to flee to my dad’s house. My mother and I would squeeze into my twin bed. The next morning, we returned to her house, and the clock would reset until the next time.

Decades have gone by, but it still comes: paralysis; hopelessness; the feeling that I can’t escape, I can’t make it change, I can’t make it stop. I want to stay in bed, but I’m a mother now. My family needs to be fed. My children need to be cared for. My household needs to keep going. They require money, effort, time, presence.

It comes particularly when I am sick, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or underslept. At least one of these conditions accompanies me every day of parenthood.

Parenting is hard for everyone. No less true for being oft-repeated: each child is unique, which makes advice by experts, family, and passersby of limited utility when raising your own child.

Most exhausting are the echoes of my own childhood that run in the background of my mind, the constant, constant, every-single-interaction fight I wage with my past whenever my kids are squirrelly, fussy, or just plain defiant. My goal is to be patient, to listen, to maintain firm limits while allowing my children to express their “big feelings.”

When I am tired or hungry (again, most of the time), I eventually start to lose the battle. My intellect gives way to patterns deeply etched in my psyche, patterns of yelling, of biting sarcasm, of calculated grown-up words to make a child feel small and ashamed to push against parental power. I am learning to bite my tongue and walk away, which only leads my daughter to run after me, hold my legs, cry, and otherwise completely exacerbate the situation I am trying to escape. I go to my bed and lock the door. Mama time out.

I want to be there for my children; but sometimes, I dread the emotional minefield.

It’s layers upon layers. Near the surface, stresses of adult life: finances, politics, family, sex, time pressures, obligations, balancing. Underlying these, trauma from my childhood dredged up as I relive it through my own children. I push back against ingrained habits carved into me before I knew childhood could be different. The mother-drive pressures me to make it better for my kids, I have to make it better for my kids.

I inherited a history of depression passed down generation to generation, a switch flipped in my genes for self-preservation, a legacy that means that any setback or barrier puts me in fight-or-flight. In clinical terms, I have anxiety and panic attacks. In non-clinical terms... I don’t know how to describe it. Like walls closing in. Like a personal raincloud. Like the apocalypse coming and everyone is going to be raptured except me.

I just want to stay in bed.

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I don’t write this to say poor me. I am hardly unique. I write this because none of us parent in a vacuum, because no day is a discreet moment in time. Every day is a convergence of the past—history, ancestry, echoes and reverberations. We try with every fiber to make the past clean for our children, a source of strength, not a weight holding them back. We look at them and see expanding possibilities. I want to lift my children up, not push them down.

Remember your diaper bag? Remember how light it was unwrapped at the baby shower? And then you put so many small objects in it. Diapers. A pacifier. Wipes. Changing pad. Extra clothes, each piece so tiny. A jacket. A blanket. Clothespins, to hold the blanket on the stroller. A bottle and extra formula, maybe. Or a nursing cover. Plastic bags to hold pooped-on clothing. Teething ring. Snacks. Water. Phone. And then, with the baby on one arm, the diaper bag on the other no longer felt light.

I feel this way now. Each piece by itself is not so weighty, but taken together, they burden me. What if we could lighten the load? What if I didn’t have to worry about affording enough child care? What if I knew I could get a job and still be available to pick up my kids after school, stay home with them when they are sick, go to parent-teacher conferences? What if I didn’t have to add fundraising for our schools to my to-do list? What if I could feel confident that we would have enough money to put our kids through college and retire? What if I didn’t have to worry that my husband or I might get seriously ill and drain our account on medical bills?

When I say universal child care, single-payer health care, a living wage, flexible work, paid family leave, accessible education, it all sounds so abstract. But when I live the worries, every day, it feels beyond real—it feels material.

I can’t escape my past. I can’t change how I grew up. I can’t stop the way memory and history trip me up on the path to being the kind of parent I wish to be. But with a little more support, maybe it would be easier to get up in the morning.

Resources

National Organization for Women
Moms Rising
National Partnership for Women and Families
National Center for Children in Poverty