Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (27 page)

This time became a kind of luxury, and that
is precisely when I began truly to enjoy the work of cooking.

You could argue that this sort of cooking
was a special case, and it was. Our cooking was luxuriously optional, not obligatory. It
didn’t happen every day, either. It was also not time spent alone, which
I’ve come to think is a big part of the “drudgery problem” with
cooking, and one of the reasons so many of us happily abandoned the kitchen as soon as
that became a real option. Cooking can be isolating in households where one person is
expected to do it all—typically the
woman in a nuclear family. Yet
it’s worth remembering that it is cooking alone that is the historical exception.
Historically, cooking has been a much more sociable activity than it became after World
War II, when so many people moved to the suburbs and the nuclear family with a wife who
didn’t go off to work became the norm.

Before that, multiple generations of women
in a family would often cook together. And before the industrial revolution, when men
first left the home to earn wages, men and women commonly worked together (at different
tasks, it’s true) to put food on the table. The household was a more
self-sufficient unit before the rise of the market and the division of labor. Going back
still further, the women in small, traditional communities would perform food work as a
group, grinding grain or making bread in what anthropologists call “the
conversational circle.” Even today, in many Mediterranean villages, you find
communal ovens, where people bring their proofed loaves, roasts, and braises, and pass
the time in conversation while waiting for their dishes to come out of the oven. Sundays
with Samin had some of that flavor. Sooner or later, Judith and Isaac, our son, would
drift into the kitchen and pick up a knife to help, and conversation became a more or
less constant companion to the soothing, rhythmic sounds of kitchen business.

It is true that this cooking was purely
elective. But nowadays, what cooking isn’t? With fast- and convenience food so
cheap and ubiquitous, cooking is hardly ever obligatory anymore, even among the poor. We
all get to decide whether to cook, and increasingly, we decide not to. Why? Some people
will tell you they find it boring or daunting. But the most common reason people offer
is, they don’t have the time.

And for many of us, that is true. For years
now Americans have been putting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home.
Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours—the equivalent of a month’s full-
time labor—to the total amount of time we spend at work each year,
and in households where both parents work, now the great majority, the figure is more
like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other
industrialized nation—an extra two weeks or more a year. This probably owes to the fact
that, historically, the priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for
money, whereas the European labor movement has fought harder for time—a shorter
workweek, longer vacations. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take
home cooking seriously, as they do in much of Europe, they also have more time to devote
to it.

It’s generally thought that the
entrance of women into the workforce is responsible for the collapse of home cooking,
but the story turns out to be a little more complicated, and fraught. Yes, women with
jobs outside the home spend less time cooking—but so do women
without
jobs. The
amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous
rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has among women who do: In
both cases, it has fallen about 40 percent since 1965.
^*
In general,
spending on restaurant and take-out food rises with income. Families where both partners
work simply have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American
families now allow corporations to cook for them when they can. There is an irony in the
fact that many of the women who have traded time in the kitchen for time in the
workplace are working in the food-service industry, helping to produce meals for other
families who no longer have time to cook for themselves. These women are being paid for
this cooking, true, yet a substantial part of
their
pay is going to other
corporations to cook
their
families’ meals.

Now, whenever anyone—but especially a
man—expresses dismay at the decline of home cooking, a couple of unspoken assumptions
begin to condense over the conversation like offending clouds. The first assumption is
that you must be “blaming” women for the decline in cooking, since (and here
is assumption number two) the meals no longer being cooked are women’s
responsibility. It’s not hard to identify the basis for these assumptions: Women
have traditionally done most of the household food work, so to defend cooking is
automatically to defend those roles. But by now it should be possible to make a case for
the importance of cooking without defending the traditional division of domestic labor.
Indeed, that argument will probably get nowhere unless it
challenges
the
traditional arrangements of domesticity—and assumes a prominent role for men in the
kitchen, as well as children.

Even so, the decline of cooking remains a
fraught subject, and there are many people who don’t think a man has a leg to
stand on talking about it. But the very touchiness of the subject turns out to be an
essential element of the story. When women left the house to go to work, there was a
problem: Who would now do the housework? The women’s movement plopped that
difficult question onto kitchen tables all over the world. How fair was it to expect
women who now worked to continue taking care of the children, cleaning the house, and
putting meals on the table? (In the 1980s, one sociologist calculated that, when you
added up work at work and work at home, working women were putting in fifteen hours more
work a week than men.
^*
) The time had come, clearly,
for a renegotiation of the division of labor in the family.

This promised to be a very difficult and
uncomfortable conversation. No one was looking forward to it. And then we found a way to
avoid having it. Several ways, actually. Couples who could afford
to defused the conflict by paying other women to clean the house and take care of the
children. And instead of arguing about who should get dinner on the table, or how that
work might be equitably shared, the food industry stepped into the breach with an offer
that proved irresistible to everyone, male or female, rich or poor:
Why don’t
you just let us cook for you?

Actually food manufacturers had been working
to convince us they should do the cooking since long before large numbers of women
entered the workforce. Beginning after World War II, the food industry labored mightily
to sell Americans—and American women in particular—on the processed-food wonders it had
invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes,
powdered orange juice and coffee, instant and superconvenient everything. As Laura
Shapiro recounts in her social history,
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner
in 1950s America
, the food industry strove to “persuade millions of
Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field
rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our
farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides
developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Shapiro shows that the shift toward
industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the workforce,
or even from feminists eager to escape the drudgery of the kitchen, but was mainly a
supply-driven phenomenon. Processing food is extremely profitable—much more so than
growing it or selling it whole. So it became the strategy of food corporations to move
into our kitchens long before many women had begun to move out.

Yet for years, American women, whether they
worked or not, strenuously resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of
their “moral obligation to cook,” something they viewed as a parental
responsibility on par with, and part of, child care. And though second-wave feminist
writers like Betty Friedan depicted all housework as a form of oppression, many women
drew a distinction between cooking, which they regularly told food-industry researchers
they enjoyed, and other domestic tasks. As author and nutritionist Joan Gussow has said,
“There is absolutely no evidence that cooking is, or was, a hated chore from which
the food processors—as they claim—liberated women.” But though it may not have
been a hated chore, it was one of the easier chores to hand over to the market when time
became short and the household workload too burdensome.

In fact, many second-wave feminists were
ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in
The Second
Sex
that, though time spent in the kitchen could be oppressive, it could also
be a form of “revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction
in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the
gift.” We can read this as either a special (very French) exemption for the
culinary arts, or as a bit of genuine wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly
trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen. But this ambivalence about the
value of cooking raises an interesting question. Has our culture devalued food work
because it is unfulfilling by its very nature or because it has traditionally been
women’s work?

Either way, it appears that the food
industry—along with the falling wages of American families, which is what drew most
women into the workforce beginning in the 1970s—probably had more to do with the decline
of cooking than feminist rhetoric. Not that feminist rhetoric didn’t help. It did,
especially when food marketers began deploying it themselves, as a clever way to align
their products, and
interests, with the rising feminist tide. Kentucky
Fried Chicken was not the only convenience food that promised “women’s
liberation” from cooking. The industry was only too happy to clothe itself in
feminist ideology if that would help it insinuate itself into the kitchen and onto the
dinner table.

Yet running just beneath the surface of
food-industry feminism was an implicit antifeminist message. Then as now, ads for
packaged foods were aimed almost exclusively at women, and so reinforced the retrograde
idea that the responsibility for feeding the family fell to Mom. The slick new products
would help her to do a job that was hers and hers alone. The ads have also helped
manufacture a sense of panic about time, depicting families so rushed and harried in the
morning that there is no time to make breakfast, not even to pour some milk over a bowl
of cereal. No, the only hope is to munch on a cereal bar (iced with synthetic
“milk” frosting) in the bus or car. (Tell me: Why can’t these hassled
families set their alarm clocks, like,
ten minutes
earlier?!) Like so much of
modern advertising, the commercials for convenience food simultaneously stoke an anxiety
and promise to relieve it. The food industry’s marketing message has the added
benefit of letting men completely off the hook. For the necessary and challenging
questions about
who
should be in the kitchen, posed so sharply by Betty Friedan
in
The Feminine Mystique
, ultimately got answered for us by the food industry:
No one! Let us do it all!
With that, we welcomed the food industry into our
kitchens as a way to head off the conflict brewing between Mom and Dad.

Yet it took years of such clever, dedicated
marketing to wear down the resistance of many women to the farming-out of food
preparation to corporations. They first had to be persuaded that opening a can or
cooking from a mix really
was
cooking. Honest. This took some doing. In the
1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers
figured out that if they left
some
thing for the
“baker” to do—specifically, crack open an actual egg—she could take
ownership of the cake, feel as though she had discharged her moral obligation to cook.
But in the years since, our resistance has crumbled as the food scientists have gotten
better and better at simulating real food while making it look attractive and seemingly
fresh. At the same time, the rapid penetration of microwave ovens—which went from being
a fixture in 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today—opened up a
vast new field of home-meal replacements by slashing the time it takes to, um,
“cook” them.

The idea of cooking as a solemn parental
obligation has not been completely vanquished, but, as Harry Balzer’s research
suggests, the corporate project of redefining what it means to cook and serve a meal to
your family has succeeded beyond the industry’s wildest expectations. People think
nothing of buying frozen peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their children’s
lunch boxes. The march of packaged foods into our pantries and freezers has also
undermined our willingness to buy fresh ingredients, Balzer has found, since they oblige
us to do something with them before they go bad—yet another pressure of time. A wilting
head of broccoli in the fridge is “a guilt trip,” Balzer says, whereas a
frozen entrée loyally stands by us indefinitely. “Fresh is a hassle.”