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LET’S ASK MARION: DID WOMENS’ LIBERATION STRAIN OUR FOOD CHAIN?
Submitted by KAT on Tue, 11/06/2007 - 11:53am.
(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)
Kat: Peg Bracken, author of The I Hate to Cook Book, passed away last month, prompting a reexamination of the legendary 1960 bestseller that launched a rebellion in kitchens all over the country. Bracken’s book was directed at the legions of wives and mothers who felt oppressed by the obligatory nature of their daily cooking chores, and yearned to throw in the dish towel.
Bracken’s recipes relied on short cuts such as cake mixes and canned soups and vegetables, freeing millions of harried housewives from all that tedious peeling, sifting, and chopping. Julia Child’s equally legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published the following year, launching a culinary counter-revolution, but Bracken’s populist portrayal of cooking as drudgery outsold Child’s glorification of gastronomy three-to-one.
Our current crop of celebrity chefs runs the gamut from made-from-scratch maven Martha Stewart to canned cuties like Rachel Ray and half-baked Sandra Lee, but the percentage of families who sit down to an even “semi-homemade” meal is at an all-time low. Overworked, stressed-out moms are taking a lot of heat from some quarters for getting out of the kitchen, but who’s really to blame for our convenience food-dominated diet? Was the I Hate to Cook Book a progressive, pre-Friedan feminist manifesto, or a culinary cop-out?
Dr. Nestle: Or neither, but yes, there I was right in the middle of it at home with two small children in the suburbs and, alas, bored out of my mind (fortunately The Feminine Mystique came to the rescue, but that's another story). OK. I admit it. I did "Hate to Cook" and Julia Child, sometimes in the same meal. My social group of that era was devoted to serious, competitive home cooking, and we vied with each other to see who was best at mastering "Mastering." I can't say I won those competitions, but I tried my best and learned a lot about cooking in the process.
Years later, when I met Julia Child for the first time--at a dinner at her Cambridge house arranged by mutual friends--I presented my copy for signing. It looked used as it was, with pages yellowed, splattered and glued together with Hollandaise failures. So I was grateful for cake mixes; with just a few additions of eggs, vanilla, or other real things to disguise the metallic chemical taste, I could produce serviceable cupcakes or birthday cakes with minimal fuss.
"Hate to Cook" promised us that we could make food our family liked with what we could find in grocery stores. I realize all of this is ancient history, but grocery stores of that era did not have the fresh, organic ingredients you can get practically anywhere now. "Mastering" depended on having decent ingredients around and it forced home cooks to demand them. My cook friends started growing their own herbs and vegetables and driving miles to find little Italian stores where you could find--if you looked hard--the makings of excellent sauces and really good coffee. Once we all got used to cooking a la Julia, the "Hate to" canned fruit and onion dip mixes just didn't work anymore. But we still all looked for and used short cuts whenever we thought nobody would notice.
I mention all this because "let's blame mom for this too" is simplistic as well as annoying. If we want people cooking, and teaching kids about where food comes from and how to cook it, the doing of all that needs to be easy and fun and the results need to taste great at the end. People have to start somewhere. It's just fine with me if they start with Rachel Ray. If she gets people--men, women, and children--back into the kitchen once in awhile, she is performing a great public service. Tastes evolve. Good cooks experiment. When fun and delicious seem more rewarding than eating it fast, people will be cooking again. And that's happening too along with all the other contradictory trends going on in the food scene right now.
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Did Loneliness Strain our Food Chain?
Something else happened around this time. Women were separated from one another. It was no longer fashionable to involve mother-in-laws and other extended family members, sisters and friends in our intimate lives. The car and 1/4 acre block with three bedroom house and white goods galore became more important that working together to bring up the kids. The loneliness those mother's must have suffered... Much better to make dinner in 1/2 hour and make it to the PTA meeting where they could see some other women. Marion, your gang's friendly competition did wonders for your culinary skill as well as the availability of good fresh ingredients. This is the way to get good food back into our lives. Have good relationships. Eat together more often. My little village meets every Sunday to share good home cooked food, stories, games and laughter. This does so much to ease the loneliness of modern suburban living. For all it's good contributions to society, feminism forgot to do the most important thing for women. Get them living together again.
Don't blame Peg Bracken!
The I Hate to Cook Book is one of my favorite books of all time, but that's because she's such a witty writer, not because of her recipes. The book was really aimed at people who had never cooked before, and the tone was reassuring and encouraging—look, this isn't so bad, anyone can make scrambled eggs—and it included a number of basic recipes that didn't use convenience foods. It was also written for people who aren't fascinated by cooking and would rather be doing something else. Those people (like me!) would never cook from Julia Child because we get tired just reading the recipes.
Peg Bracken was a witty and subversive writer. There were plenty of other reasons why people turned to convenience foods—clever marketing, lifestyle changes, and the weirdly authoritarian attitude of the 1950s that seemed to place more trust in the government and big business than in individual efforts. Bracken's books critiqued societal mores in ways that left this reader in tears of laughter,
Great Q & A
I've also puzzled over the question over why more people don't cook, because I think people are missing out on so much of what's good in life by not cooking, not to mention what's good for their bodies. Good cooking doesn't have to be difficult or particularly time-consuming, and, as a recent study at UC-Davis (if I'm remember correctly) found, doesn't take any longer in the prep than "food kits." But people think it's hard, and it does take a little more planning than pulling a box off the shelf. The changing of the economy and culture that has more women in the work force isn't the reason, though, and neither is feminism. My mother, who didn't work outside the home, probably used more packaged food than I do. That was the "new thing" in the 50s and 60s and it's become ingrained in our culture.
You have to learn to cook
I hope I'm not to late to comment - I just found a link to this on Ms. Nestle's blog.
I have an obese, lactose intolerant, vegetarian friend who now thinks he may have celiac disease. Before he started avoiding gluten, he subsisted on bread products and processed fake meats, but now this is not an option, since most of those faux meats are made of gluten. After a long conversation in which he lamented that the gluten-free breads are uniformly terrible, and in which he rejected most of my advice on where he could get good quality, gluten-free, vegetarian protein, I cried in exasperation, "Well, then, you're going to have to learn to cook!"
I think one of the problems with the era you're describing is that cooking really was a chore. It was the unending responsibility of the wife, 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But when cooking becomes creative expression, it's much different. I myself insisted that my husband learn to cook, and not just chili mac from a packaged mix, either. Five years later, I think he's learning to like it.