This is something I posted on my own website four years ago. Just re-read it and thought I’d post it here.
I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.
Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)
Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?
Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.
There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.
Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.
Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.
Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.
A bunch of writers started hanging out in a virtual treehouse when the pandemic hit and now don't want to leave.
I don’t love cooking like you do, but I don’t mind it. I do a lot of of it because (a) I like to eat and (b) I like the food I eat to be both tasty and healthy. It is quite possible these days to make tasty, healthy food from scratch without doing a lot of work, especially if, like me, you actually like beans and veggie stir fries. And, for that matter, when we went camping over the summer, we picked up some good canned foods and dried noodles and made pretty healthy quick meals over our camp stove. (No, not canned spinach — low sodium veggie soups and such.) I grant I have more time to do this, but I did a simpler version of it back when I had a day job and was writing lots of fiction and spent the rest of my time at the Aikido dojo.
I did see something slide by on social media this week where someone — someone male — suggested going back to doing laundry by hand in large groups, which is appalling. I live in an apartment building where we have one washer and one dryer for 13 units, which is a much more reasonable way to be efficient about laundry. I mean, I avoid buying any clothes that need hand washing because I hate doing it with a passion. Pretty sure the argument for going back to handwashing everything is truly anti-feminist.
There is an argument to be made for shifting the priorities of our lives to put greater value on what we eat and the making of it. The feminist argument is that women shouldn’t have to be in charge of cooking (or laundry or other housework), not that those things don’t need doing in ways that are beneficial to everyone. There are lots of ways to shift that, starting with such things as remote work for many so that folks can do a little cooking around their day jobs (something I used to do when I worked remotely) and efficient cooking equipment that allow you to cook without paying close attention (I love my instant pot). Group meals are another choice.
I like the idea of communal laundry. When we lived in NYC, our building had laundry facilities in the basement, and the co-op had put in a small play area for the kids in the building, so you could drag the young down while you were folding the laundry, and sometimes catch up on what was going on in the building. This made an unlovely task much cheerier. And my recent week in Maine in a house full of visitors reminded me how pleasant many hands, well organized, can be in preparing a meal (as opposed to, say, organizing a house full of teenagers who do not want to do it because you asked them to do it…)
On the other hand, hand washing all one’s clothes and linens? AVERT. Aside from the difficulty of really getting things clean without devoting a day to it, no one has the facilities for that kind of work. I know someone who brought down the wrath of her community’s HOA because she dared hang her laundry to sun dry; it brought down the property values or some such.