Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 3

Cousin Mary teaching my dad and me
her mother's secret kata recipe
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Continued from Part 1, where I explore the connections between cooking, work, and leisure, and Part 2, where I unpack the dynamics between cooking and gender in my own family history.

In Part 3, I want to break down the argument presented in the study, “The Joy of Cooking?”, step by step. First, the authors assert that working mothers feel duty-bound to cook because of pressure from a traditional ideal of motherhood coupled with pressure from various “food gurus” who are advocating for Americans to cook more often at home. In the course of interviewing women to support this theory, they also uncover several barriers that make cooking difficult for their interviewees: poverty, work pressures, transportation, housing, child care. Finally, they propose a number of possible “creative solutions” to feed families without forcing mothers into the kitchen. 

The authors of the study seem to contend that no working mother wants to cook, but does so due to external obligations. They write, “Mothers felt responsible for preparing healthy meals for their children and keenly experienced the gap between the romanticized version of cooking and the realities of their lives.” Women are feeling even more pressure, they argue, because “modern-day food gurus” such as Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Rachel Ray, as well as political figures like Michelle Obama, “advocate a return to the kitchen.” (I’m just going to note here that Pollan’s book, Cooked, includes a gender analysis that demonstrates he is aware of these issues.) 

Of course, the ideal of motherhood exists; of course, mothers constantly feel guilty for not living up to it. But to say that mothers are manipulated to this extent simply by unrealistic standards is to ignore the ways that we defy these standards on a daily basis. A search for “good enough mother” turns up the words of many mothers who are rejecting the ideal. Periodically, studies come out that “prove” that stay-at-home mothers are best for their children, or that day cares will damage children irreparably. Do working mothers feel horribly guilty when these studies come out? Yes. And then they go back to work, either by choice or by necessity, knowing that their work is helping their children by providing the financial support they need and by modeling working womanhood. (And those studies get refuted.)

So while I don’t deny that ideology is a factor in mothers feeling oppressed by cooking, I would add that to pin the blame solely on idealized motherhood and foodies is to miss the point. 

If the ideal—and the sexism contained within it—is truly at issue, then how do partnerships that are less traditionally gendered look? I asked several mothers and fathers about how they divide cooking and other domestic work, and I received a range of responses. (Because this post will be long, I’ll include direct most quotes in a coda to this series.) I heard from stay-at-home and work-at-home dads who actively enjoy and take pride in cooking. I heard from opposite-gender couples who split cooking 50/50. I heard from same-gender couples where one partner did most of the domestic tasks. I heard from single mothers who are struggling to do it all. From a small sample, I received a breadth of possible family configurations, each negotiating cooking and domestic tasks in their own way. 

In the diversity of responses, one consistency stood out for me. Many women in opposite-gender couples, who had generally egalitarian relationships, said they cook because their male partners simply lacked know-how. No one had taught their men to cook when they were young. As adults, the men had little time or motivation to learn, so if their female partners wanted to eat decently, then they cooked. 

If families abandon cooking entirely, then we lose one path to gender equity: men who cook. I am fortunate that my son loves to help me in the kitchen. I count teaching him to cook amongst my small, daily feminist acts. One day, after picking up my son from preschool, my daughter asked him, “Do you want to play ‘Frozen’?” “No,” my son replied. “I want to help Mama make dinner.” Heart cockles: warmed. 

If gender dynamics and motherhood ideals can’t fully explain the problem of working mothers and cooking, what else is at play? One clue is revealed in this quote from Elaine, a white, middle-class married mother interviewed for the study: “When we get home it’s such a rush. I just don’t know what happens to the time. I am so frustrated. That’s why I get so angry! I get frustrated ‘cause I’m like, I wanna make this good meal that’s really healthy and I like to cook ‘cause it’s kind of my way to show them that I love them, ‘This is my love for you guys!’ And then I wind up at the end just, you know, grrr! Mad at the food because it takes me so long. It’s like, how can it take an hour for me to do this when I’ve already cut up the carrots and the celery and all I’m doing is shoving it into a bowl?” (emphasis mine) 

Elaine says herself that she likes to cook, but she is frustrated that she doesn’t have the time to cook the way she wants to for her family. I hear her longing for a certain kind of connection that a home-cooked family meal can bring, but time pressures turn a leisure activity into a stressful obligation. 

The study authors themselves name many of the barriers to cooking: food costs, particularly for healthy foods; basic food insecurity; long work hours; unpredictable schedules; differing family schedules; inadequate transportation; and long commutes to work. Some mothers live in particularly dire situations: “During the month we spent with Flora, a poor black mother who was currently separated from her husband, she was living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a cockroach- and flea-infested hotel room with two double beds. They prepared all of their food in a small microwave, rinsing their utensils in the bathroom sink.” 

Is cooking really the problem here? 

Would Flora benefit more if she were released from a gendered obligation to cook? Or would she perhaps find more relief if her city had a program to house the homeless like Salt Lake City’s? 

Sign from the New York City strike
of McDonald's workers this summer.
(Photo by Annette Bernhardt,
from WikiMedia Commons)

At the same time I read this study, which features at least four parents who work in the fast food industry, I also read William Finnegan’s article in The New Yorker about the efforts of McDonald’s workers to unionize and raise the minimum wage. Most of the workers he interviews have jobs at two different locations, if not three, and yet their hours are held under forty hours a week to keep them part-time. One mother who has worked at McDonald’s for fourteen years makes $8.50/hour, a 50 cent increase over the base pay—which is minimum wage—in a city where a living wage for a single parent with a child is calculated to be $30.02/hour. Finnegan writes, “American fast-food workers receive almost seven billion dollars a year in public assistance,” which includes food stamps. 

Moreover, employees do not get regular shifts. Instead, every Saturday evening, hours are posted for the following week. Each worker receives a thin strip of paper with her or his schedule. Imagine what this unpredictability means for parents trying to arrange child care. 

As if this level of exploitation isn’t enough, some workers don’t even get paid for the hours they put in. Finnegan reports, “Two former McDonald’s managers recently went public with confessions of systematic wage theft, claiming that pressure from both franchisees and the corporation forces them to alter time sheets and compel employees to work off the clock.” 

This kind of treatment is inhumane, for parents and non-parents alike. And it isn’t just the fast food industry. American workers put in longer hours for less pay than their counterparts in other developed countries, and they also take fewer vacations. No legal limits exist to prevent American workers from answering e-mails and analyzing spreadsheets when ostensibly having family time at home. 

Rather than an accusation against cooking for causing misery amongst working women, I would like to see an indictment of a brutal work culture engendered by skyrocketing inequality. I would like to see an examination of farm subsidies that make processed foods artificially cheap while making raw foods unattainably expensive. I would like to see a report on the economic conditions that create food deserts in certain neighborhoods when food is so abundant in others. I would like to see a denunciation of a political climate that makes raising the national minimum wage to a paltry $15/hour an impossibility. I would like to see rage against weak and ineffective initiatives to end poverty while the top 0.1 percent continue to attain new heights of wealth. 

The study authors suggest in their conclusion a variety of “creative solutions” to feed families healthy meals without continuing to overburden mothers. They suggest town suppers and healthy food trucks, to-go meals that parents pick up at their children’s schools to heat up at home. 

While I am interested in collectivist solutions, the logistics bring up more questions. Where would the food come from? Who would grow it? What food traditions would be represented? How would it all get funded? If families buy the meals, how could the meals be affordable yet made with good quality, fresh ingredients? 

The main question I have is, who would prepare these foods? How much would they get paid? What hours would they work? Because I can imagine, all too easily, that these programs would rely on part-time workers juggling two jobs, some of them parents. Parents who would work long hours to prepare food for parents, who are working too much to prepare food. Alternatively, I can imagine stay-at-home moms being asked to volunteer their labor, just as they are tasked with filling in labor gaps in their children’s schools. 

This isn’t a solution. It’s a displacement of the problem. 

The answer to the question, “Why do working mothers find it so hard to cook?” is not an easy one, but cooking itself is not the problem. The way most Americans, not just working mothers, find it difficult-to-impossible to engage in one of the most fundamental human activities is but one symptom of a cancer in American culture. 

So what can we do? We can insist on connection. We are all linked: the farmers who grow our food, the migrant workers who harvest it, the drivers who transport it, the grocers who stock it, the corner-store owners who sell it, the food workers who prep and cook it, the parents who bring it home, the children who either eat it or complain about it. 

Cooking can be feminist or anti-feminist. But insisting on a more just and equal world is feminist to the core.

#365Feminist Selfie 1: Hair (specifically, body hair)

The brows are lightly waxed.
Because I'm half Armenian.

First in my #365FeministSelfie series.

I haven’t shaved for 23 years. I know, I know. Shaggy underarms are at the top of the list of Feminist Stereotypes, probably right next to “burning your bra.” You’d think I attended college in the 1970s rather than been born during that decade. 

I tried shaving, but after six years of gashing my legs and getting red, itchy rashes under my arms, I threw in the towel. 

Actually, the reason I thought that not shaving could even be possible was due to Pia, the Swedish exchange student who attended my high school during my sophomore year. Pia wore miniskirts, showing her long, white-blonde leg hair to God and everybody. Of course, within two months she had begun to shave as part of her acculturation process. But she had already made her impression on me. 

I’m going to say right here, because I know the first riposte this post will provoke, that I have had my fair share of sexy times with men even though I don’t shave. (I say only “men” because I doubt anyone is going to chime in on the comments with “No self-respecting hot lesbian would want you with that disgusting pit hair.”) Yes, Virginia, there are hetero cis-men who hit skins with women with body hair and either don’t mind or actively enjoy it. After all, ahem, I do have two children with my handsome, hetero cis-man husband. 

I am not alone in my alarm at American culture’s intolerance for body hair. Not because I think that all women should let their body hair GROOOOW FREEEEEE! I am not opposed to women (and men) who trim, shave, wax, electrolyze, or thread off some or all of their body hair. Bodily autonomy is a feminist principle. 

But I do object to a culture that excludes, shames, or punishes women (or men) who do not wish to participate in depilation. 

I never thought about how early this enculturation starts, until one day when my daughter’s friend, five years old, came up to me and whispered, “Most women shave off the hair under their arms.” She said it in the exact tone of an old lady admonishing another that her slip was showing. “I know,” I whispered back, and smiled. She shot me a look of mingled incredulity and distain and walked away. 

I am fortunate that the kind of places I have worked—queer-oriented public health, publishing, teaching abroad, graduate school—did not require a conventional [American] cis-woman presentation. I didn’t have to shave, wear high heels, or wear make-up. This is not to say I don’t groom myself (although my grooming has slipped a bit since my small children have transformed the simple ritual of showering into a major undertaking). 

I just don’t think women should be held to a higher standard of appearance—that is, one that demands more attention, time, and expensive products—than men. 

I hate that stock sitcom gag where a man rolls his eyes over how long it takes a woman to get ready to go out. On the one hand, the joke theatrically bemoans the vanity of women; on the other, it writes over the ways men have historically required women, as their property, to represent and display beauty and—by extension—wealth and class. Although most of us are no longer categorized as property, we can still be props—as adornment, as visual pleasure for the male gaze, as symbols of affluence, often in service to increasing men’s social capital. (And the methods of beautifying—the couture, the accessories, the jewelry, the shoes—simultaneously showcase yet hide the labor of those of far lesser economic and social status—mostly women, some even children.) 

My refusal to shave is one way that I opt-out of the expected time-consuming ritual of costuming for feminine performance. It’s my small, daily rebellion against this facet of sexism. By being “out” about not shaving, perhaps I can be Pia to another woman or girl. 

It is also an assertion of the importance of my pleasure, my time, and the integrity of my body. I have decided that men’s aesthetic pleasure does not rank above my bodily discomfort—pain from cuts, itching from rashes. I prefer to use my time doing something that gives me pleasure rather than removing my body hair. 

For some women, the removal gives them pleasure, and that can be a feminist act, too. 

But in a gender-equal world, every woman deserves the right to her own calculus. 

In Britain, women are going razor-free in August (i.e., Sleeveless Season) to raise money for women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). So if you do shave but are poils-curious, you can experiment for a good cause.

And now, to cheer us all up, please see this Robot Hugs comic on the Body Policing Police. Enjoy! 

Between Superman and Princess Boy

So far this holiday season, the controversial gendered toy seems to be GoldieBlox, the toy that began as a scrappy feminist upstart to generate engineer girls, but lately has labored under criticisms that it reinforces stereotypes about girls (“all girls are oriented verbally”; “girls won’t touch anything that isn’t princessy”), that the toy is an inferior build compared with “boy” toys, and that it doesn’t inspire creative play as well as plain blocks do. And of course, their latest ad ignited a firestorm. 

I am reassured that if I don’t buy GoldieBlox for my daughter, at least I can still find plenty of toys, books, and materials to encourage her to play outside the Princess Box. (A Mighty Girl is always a good place to start.) But I’d say our most successful STEM program in our house is my husband’s brilliant “experiments in the tub,” which began as a one-night-only presentation, but was so highly lauded that now we have shows nightly. What is buoyancy and what are the characteristics of buoyant objects? How does air create propulsion in the water? What is displacement? What is water resistance? My husband has illustrated all these concepts using items around the house like rubber bands, air cushion packs, balloons, corks, and plastic toys. No extraneous purchases necessary.

So far so good with my daughter. Yes, Silver dressed up as Cinderella for Halloween and asked for dolls for Christmas, but she constructs forts, can identify all the planets of the solar system, and can now tell everyone at kindergarten that snowflakes have six-point radial symmetry. 

The Topknot
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

So what about my son? 

My fellow feminist and queer parents have identified a funny double standard: when our daughters play princess, we roll our eyes and wonder where we went wrong. But when our sons play princess, we cheer them on. 

I am heartened to see several breakthroughs recently for boys whose gender expression is, for lack of a less loaded term, more feminine. Are these boys queer? Are they trans? Are they straight and enjoy being “girly”? We’ll have to wait until they are old enough to say for themselves. But they are boys who embrace pink, who prefer dresses, who love nail polish. Most boys still get teased or gender policed in other ways when they want to wear “girl” dress-up or clothes, but more parents are defending their sons’ choices. As a result, attitudes towards Princess Boys are slowly changing in some parts of the U.S. 

Ocho has what I would consider typically three-year-old gender expression—that is, all over the place. His favorite color right now is hot pink. He did want to be a princess for Halloween, because, he said, “I want to be like Samantha”—Samantha* being the five-year-old girl he worships. At school, he will dress up in a tutu, then he’ll go outside and push bulldozers around. He plays with tool kits and dolls. He is growing his hair out and refusing offers of haircuts. Last time he grew it out, to keep the hair out of his face, I pulled his bangs up into a topknot. Strangers assumed he was a girl, even if he was wearing “boy” clothing. 

So my son is a Princess Boy, sometimes. And he is a Boy-Boy, sometimes. 

And I find myself wondering if he will continue this gender flexibility as he gets older. At some point, will he have to choose? Will Princess Boy become another rigid category rather than a fluid, permeable one? 

Right now, nearly all of my son’s friends at school are girls. He used to play with other boys at day care, but since he graduated to preschool, these friendships have fallen away. I assume one factor is that he has an older sister. But it also has to do with how our culture continues to define gender for kids. 

Which of these things is not like the others?
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

For example, my son doesn’t know about superheroes, unlike almost every other boy at his school. Our kids haven’t watched a feature-length movie yet, mostly because my daughter finds any kind of conflict in a movie scary. We’ve tried Lady and the Tramp, The Muppets, and even Winnie the Pooh. Each screening has ended the same way: Silver, who will happily hold all kinds of bugs that we find in the garden and stare unabashedly at blood, burst blisters, and x-rayed broken bones, will start to wail, “It’s scaaaaaaaaary!” So we stop. 

We don’t have any TV in our house (no cable or no digital antenna) so our children watch only the most benign shows on my laptop: Sesame Street, Wonder Pets, Olivia, Bob the Builder, the bland Canadian cartoon Caillou, and the charming British one, Kipper. Licensed characters are not allowed at our preschool, so this has helped to delay the pressure of keeping up with popular culture until kindergarten. 

I suspect that my son’s limited media consumption explains something about the way he enjoys play. Because he hasn’t yet seen conflicts modeled by superhero cartoons and movies, he doesn’t play good guys fighting bad guys. His imagination extends more towards playing a pet, or domestic family scenes, or pretending to be an excavator. Perhaps it’s just his age—the boys who play superheroes are older than him. But it means that the kind of play he likes will often group him with girls. 

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t do rough-and-tumble play. Both Silver and Ocho are very strong, and they get into wrestling matches where I can’t tell if they are laughing or screaming. (It’s usually both.) 

I find myself wondering, where is the middle path for Ocho, especially as he gets older? We try to construct it as much as we can in our own house. We’re happy to let him follow his own interests and imagination. When he puts on a sparkly crown for Thanksgiving dinner because, he says, he wants to “look more beautiful,” we smile at him with no reservations. We do the same when he puts on a firefighter’s hat. 

But he doesn’t live in a bubble, and I wish there were an equivalent of “A Mighty Girl” for boys, a central resource to encourage boys to grow up outside of stereotypes of manly men that isn’t exclusively Princess Boy, either. We know that feminism isn’t a women’s issue—it’s an issue for humanity. We can’t expand the spectrum of “masculine” and “feminine” solely for women and girls; we must expand it for men and boys as well.

* Name changed.