RSS
Home
Cooking: chore or choice?
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
The cover story of this weekend’s New York Times Magazine is an article by Michael Pollan, in which the author of In Defense of Food laments the disappearance of cooking from American homes. He also observes, with dismay, the ever-increasing number of cooking shows on American television.
With the release of Julie and Julia, in which Meryl Streep and Amy Adams play women whose respective not-quite-fulfilled lives are spiced up by the addition of French cuisine, there’s been an awful lot of talk about cooking and about food. Pollan makes the distinction between the two when he observes that the target audience of the Food Network’s “cooking” shows is not people who love to cook, but rather people who love to eat. He observes that, given the time constraints of most of these shows, and the need to create drama in programs like “Top Chef,” these shows are less about the process - cooking - and more about the end result - food - and that viewers who watch these shows learn a lot about food, but very little about cooking.
Pollan’s major problem with modern cooking shows, however, is their reliance on pre-made products. like canned soups and powdered sauces. Pollan, as anyone who has read his books will know, abhors these kinds of processed food imitations. He does, however, acknowledge the convenience of these products and recognizes their role as both a catalyst and a result of women’s migration into the workforce. Canned soups made it easier for women to work outside the home while still cooking for their families, and these days, women (and men) who have careers are most likely too busy to make soup from scratch.
But Child, Pollan writes, saw cooking not as a form of oppression, but as an outlet for self- expression and creativity, and encouraged American women – even those who read The Feminine Mystique, which was published the same year that Child’s show began – to view it in the same way. Of course, it’s not uncommon for potentially oppressive practices to be pitched as self-expression and creativity; how many times have we heard makeup, fashion and cleaning products described in precisely those terms?
That said, there are some people who genuinely take pleasure out of cooking, who see it not as a chore but as a joy. These people are usually the ones who aren’t obligated to cook every night. They usually have someone else around who can cook for them when they don’t feel like it, be it a spouse or the chef at the place around the corner. For everyone else and for feminists in particular, cooking retains its “chore” status not because it’s unpleasant, but because when it comes to cooking, women often don’t have a choice. Julia Child chose to cook complicated gourmet meals, and so did Julie Powell. For most women, despite the advances of the women’s movement and despite the modern conveniences of processed foods, cooking is still a chore, not a choice.
As Pollan writes, Child believed that “the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (Or a man's)” Given how delicious Child’s chicken fricassee looks, it's certainly got my attention. But, given that her fricassee recipe has about a thousand steps, I might just let my boyfriend - an intelligent man who cooks by choice - make it for me.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
.jpg)
