The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [6]
Many point to the advancement of women in the workplace as the reason for fewer family meals cooked by Mom. Indeed, the rise of women at work from the 1960s on neatly parallels the national trend in eating out. Even as early as the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century, cooking was looked down upon by feminists as a stifling relic of female subservience. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it, “Why should half the world be acting as amateur cooks for the other half?”
The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its relative achievements may have succeeded in bringing more women into the workforce, but the issue of equality when it comes to traditional roles is still up for debate. Regardless of equally busy schedules, it seems that, if not the actual cooking, at least the responsibility of feeding a household has largely remained in female hands. Enter the days of family buckets from KFC. Turn on primetime TV today and you’re bound to see at least one commercial depicting a triumphant mom winking toward the camera as her family dives into a “just like homemade” takeout meal—or in other instances, calling for delivery pizza as she rushes out to make a meeting. Instead of acting as amateur cooks, today women and men alike turn to professionals to feed their families. Add to them the “food scientists,” responsible for canned, instant, just-add-milk, or just-microwave foods.
Another reason for the wane in home cooking is that the profit margin for prepared foods is generally much higher than that for groceries. It’s not because fewer people patronize grocery stores. Rather, grocery stores are just not a terribly profitable business. There is tremendous loss involved in keeping fresh products stocked on the shelves. Much is thrown out at the end of the day due to expiration dates or just to make room for new products. For stores without vertically integrated brand-name products or a prepared-foods section for which the extra labor can command higher prices, the lack of these items and the fierce competition among grocery stores for the lowest prices possible means paltry profits compared to those of restaurants. Throughout Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, the number of supermarkets has continued to dwindle over the last few years. A 2008 study by the Department of City Planning estimated that as many as seventy-five thousand people in what were considered high-need neighborhoods lived more than five blocks from a grocery store or supermarket. These are areas typically rife with fast-food establishments. Even more frustrating is the proliferation of restaurants in close proximity to schools, opened with the intention of luring youngsters away from the cafeteria.
For young women today, it might seem almost perversely backward to embrace an activity that our feminist forebears fought so hard to distance themselves from. But so what if the success of the women’s movements contributed to the demise of home cooking? Let’s not kid ourselves; men are not all helpless individuals searching, sad-eyed, for a woman to feed them, any more than a woman is looking for a man to look after her. Cooking is an especially gender-bridging activity in this day and age, if my young peers are any indication. I have many male friends who cook. I have just as many female friends and acquaintances who’ve admitted to never cooking, or to not knowing how. In 2007, The New York Times published a delightful article about couples in which one member was the “alpha cook” and the other the feckless “beta.” Most of the alpha cooks in the article were the husbands or boyfriends. In the media, there are just as many if not more male cookbook authors or celebrity chefs. There is a wealth of male-driven food writing today, and a somewhat macho infatuation with adventurous eating, meat eating, fatty cuts and offal eating, and regional food pride, seen in the many