{"id":4185,"date":"2025-08-27T06:45:47","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4185"},"modified":"2025-08-27T06:45:47","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:45:47","slug":"how-feminism-killed-cooking-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/08\/27\/how-feminism-killed-cooking-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How Feminism Killed Cooking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Once again, this week got away from me. Here’s a piece from 2018.<\/em>

I read an article on Salon a few years ago: \u201cIs Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?\u201d 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\u2019 days of cookery from the writers\u2019 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\u2019s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I\u2019d just as soon know what I\u2019m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don\u2019t do them as a political statement. I\u2019m 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 \u201cfemivore\u201d 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 \u201cauthentic\u201d 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\u2019re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O\u2122 or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It\u2019s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens\u2019 magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn\u2019t a creative outlet. It was work.

There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking\u2013for the week. All those pies and cake and breads\u2013which explains a lot of recipes using \u201cstale bread,\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2013run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don\u2019t 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\u2019t want to do the same, is a mug\u2019s 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\u2019s all good. But don\u2019t blame Betty Friedan if you don\u2019t like what\u2019s for dinner.
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Once again, this week got away from me. Here’s a piece from 2018. I read an article on Salon a few years ago: \u201cIs Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4188,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4185\/revisions\/4188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}