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. 

Kids > Advertising

Photo by Haan-Fawn Chau

My latest piece on Zócalo Public Square: Your Edgy Billboard Is My Kid’s Nightmare. An abridged version of the article appeared in Time. I discuss the billboards advertising FX’s show, “The Strain,” that frightened young children all over Los Angeles, and respond to the CEO, John Landgraf, who said, “We had to terrify some children in order to launch this show, but I think it was worth it. Just saying.”

If you care about this issue, here are more resources:

1. Sign the MoveOn petition, “Ban Violence and Sex on Billboards” (California)

2. Join the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (national)

3. Support Ban Billboard Blight and follow their calls for action (Los Angeles)


To take action on an offensive outdoor advertising campaign in your city:

1. First, call the company responsible for the ad campaign (in this case, FX) to demand that the ad copy be replaced with less offensive content. Be sure to follow up. FX announced that the ads for “The Strain” would be pulled, but most remained up until after the show's premiere nearly a month later. 

2. Call your city council to complain about the ad campaign and urge the council to put additional pressure on the media company to pull the offensive copy. The council will be effective and responsive in direct proportion to the number of constituents who call in.

3. To target a specific billboard, call the outdoor advertising company that owns the billboard. 

4. Continue to advocate for stronger regulations on outdoor advertising.

Mothers' Day 2014

Photo by Kevin Miller

Love to the mothers. 

Love to the ones that wake in the night, night after night, then stumble through the days, keeping on. Love to the ones that care for sick children, offering juice and tea, placing cool cloths on feverish heads, fluffing pillows and tucking in blankets. Love to the ones that pack the lunches, that launder the linens and clothes, wash the dishes, scrub the toilets, that buy the food and the clothing and the toothbrushes and then, choose a small toy or treat or longed-for thing, just because. 

Love to the ones who answer questions, who give advice, who say “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out”, who say “you can do it”, who say “no”, who say “because I’m the mama, that’s why.” 

Love to the ones who soothe hurts. Who give hugs and kisses. Who refrain from giving hugs and kisses in public because it’s embarrassing. Who see you past each heartbreak. 

Love to the ones at home with their babies, going a little bit stir-crazy, lost in a whirl of milk-diapers-nap, dreaming of taking a shower or talking with a friend or doing something, anything that makes them feel knowing and capable rather than bewildered and inept. 

Love to the ones who labor all day to provide for their children. Love to the ones who rise in the early hours for work, who carry still-sleeping kids to the neighbors’ or the sitters’ houses until it’s time for school. Love to the ones who work all night so they can see their kids in the mornings and in the evenings. Love to the ones who work part-time, at low pay with no benefits, trying to find a third way that works. 

Love to the ones who discovered unknown depths of sadness and fear during their pregnancies or after, who are struggling to return to the surface. 

Love to the ones who parent alone. 

Love to the ones who did not birth their babies, but took them in and gave them the families their birth mothers could not. 

Love to the ones who cared for their babies by giving them up because they knew they were not ready or able to mother their children all day, every day, for the rest of their lives. 

Love to those for whom this day brings pain. 

To the mothers whose babies passed on before them, who live with an ache and a void every day. Love especially to those whose babies were torn from them by unexpected violence. 

To the mothers who had their babies stolen from them by coercion or by force. Love especially to Nigerian mothers in Chibok who wait every day in sorrow and despair. 

To the children whose mothers could not or would not give them all the love they deserved, whose mothers carried an inner wound that they, in turn, used to wound their children. 

To the children whose mothers have passed on, for whom this day reminds them of loss. A missing that just goes on and on. 

Love to the mothers who, in the true spirit of this day, write letters, make phone calls, march in the streets to make a healthier, more peaceful world for all of us. 

Love to the mother beneath our feet, who gives us all life and sustains it. Who feeds us, gives us water, provides our very breaths. 

Ashé.

Where Do We Go After #CancelColbert?

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

This post is available on Salon.com: “#CancelColbert accomplished nothing: why social change movements must be inclusive.”

Thanks to Mimi Khúc, who read an early draft of this post. Thanks also to the many friends on Facebook whose discussions helped develop my thoughts on these issues.  

#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! 

Feminist Quickies: My Own #365FeministSelfie Series

Tired Mama Working
Each word is its own feminist topic!
Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian

This winter has sucked. In spite—or perhaps because—of our record-breaking warm winter in L.A.,* my kids have been sick a lot, particularly with nasty coughs that linger and linger, sometimes disappearing briefly only to return with a vengeance.

During the month of December, it seemed that we all had one cold that we were simply passing back and forth between each other like some kind of high school basketball drill. Then in January, my grandmother (my last surviving grandparent) contracted a lung infection and spent about a month in the hospital, a forced confinement that made her lonely and depressed. Shortly after she was released, my son got sick again—this time with croup!—got better and attended school for a week, then caught another cold with nonstop coughing and was diagnosed with asthma.

I remember last week as one marathon viewing of the anodyne Canadian cartoon Caillou barely heard over the droning motor of the nebulizer. I didn’t see any of the episodes, mind you, because my eyes were fixed on my son’s upper lip, where I trained the hose spewing vaporized Albuterol.

So, I haven’t been writing.

I have been Facebooking, however. Ah, Facebook! The refuge of the exhausted, isolated mother, trapped with a sick child, yet able to participate in a quasi-social life stolen in five-minute snatches.

A few of my friends began the year pledging themselves to the #365FeministSelfie project, the brainstorm of Veronica Arreola. Arreola began the project as a rebuttal to a Jezebel piece describing selfies as a “cry for help.”  “Selfies aren’t empowering,” the writer scoffed, “they’re a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness.”

“But what about positive selfies?” Arreola countered. “Yesterday I saw a mom and her maybe-5yo-daughter taking a selfie.They were making silly faces and snapping pics. Those were memories being made, moments of love that both will likely remember forever.” She went on to describe other ways selfies could be feminist: “WOC [Women Of Color] rarely see themselves reflected in media, people over a size 4 are told to hide themselves, transgender persons want to be seen...”
 
I wanted to take part. Because periodically, someone has to write a clickbaiting column declaring feminism dead, again (too many links to embed, I’m afraid). The #365FeministSelfie project seemed like a way for women (and other-gendered people!) to simply and effectively preempt a 2014 Feminism Is Dead article while bringing up feminist issues in a new way. I wanted to be a visible mixed-race woman of color in the 365FeministSelfie roll call. But-

“A selfie every day?” I thought. “Ha ha ha ha.”

In February, my friend Jaclyn Friedman interviewed Arreola for her podcast. Together they were so convincing, I made for myself the more modest goal of a selfie a week.

Now it’s mid-March. I miss writing. I am having that kind of tired, sad, well-worn Cult of Domesticity feminist mom crisis that we all know. (Members of a parenting group I belong to—again, on Facebook—have titled our version Household Drudge, PhD... or MA, in my case.)

Since sustained writing, research, or even thought is quite beyond me these days, my goal now is to turn out a series of weekly quickie posts, based on my own #365FeministSelfie series. Tomorrow’s post will cover feminine performance, social capital, and body hair.

* Yes, I am sorry to rub it in your face, everyone suffering from the Polar Vortex. The downside, of course, is that we are going to run out of water this summer. Oh, and the earthquake this morning.

Are you participating in the #365FeministSelfie Project? What made you decide to join? Share in the comments below! And please subscribe to be sure to catch every post in the series.