This little piece of pie I’m serving today is inspired by a FB friend who had posted this meme as a joke. It has its basis, a notion that women are cooks, and men are eaters. That only women belong in the kitchen.
His joke reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend many years ago. We did business together, and shared meals, because we both like to cook. The cartoon is based on a real conversation we had. We both agreed: if one is not a good cook, stay out of the kitchen. Because cooking is a complex, and serious act.
In this essay, it is the conservative men who need an understanding. If you are a conservative, and a Christian, you know what I am talking about; “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost you all you have, get understanding.” Proverbs 4:7.
I will also bring to your attention that Solomon equates wisdom as feminine. His next verse, 8, puts it this way: “Cherish her, and she will exalt you; embrace her, and she will honor you.”
With that in mind, let us look at a couple of facts.
Number 1 fact: It is true, that the kitchen is the heart of the home. We all have experienced this fact that when we have a social gathering, people gather in the kitchen. Because it is a social center in the modern home, among the working classes. In times before the Industrial Revolution, it was a working center as well as a social center. The kitchen staff is family. They could be a family of blood, and a chosen family. Usually, it would be a bit of both.
Number 2 fact: I write this as a woman who loves to cook. From an intimate dinner for two, or a boisterous party of 20, I enjoy it. This love of cooking comes from two sources. The first is of the utmost importance. The second is innate in me.
1. Source 1, a love of food - I like to eat good food. Taste is important to me. Bland food? Yuck.
2. An innate need to care for others - Cooks think people need good food. So they will give it to you. Same here. However, when I feed you, I reserve the right to chastise you if I think you are messing up your life. Well, who do you think will scold you? Someone who doesn’t care about you?
Let’s deep dive into number 1: A love of food is a requirement for anyone who would cook well. That means your mother or your wife, if they don’t have that basic love of food, they will not cook well. Roy loved to eat, so he learned to cook.
The majority of people know what they like to eat, but they do not know how to make it. Nor are they interested in the process. To think that every wife and mother, aka, “the women” should be interested in creating interesting meals, the analogy is this: a prospective ballet dancer without that magical arch in her feet, will not make it past the elementary classes of dance. And cooks without good smelling and tasting abilities, won’t cut it in the kitchen. Them’s the facts.
Just as dancers are few and far, so too are good cooks. Women are not born with a cooking gene. What women are born with is a proclivity to nurture. Duh, right? That is why I think they make better doctors. For a woman to be a doctor, she gets to be the mother with knowledge and authority.
If women “belong” in the kitchen, why is it that most head chefs are men? The first cookbooks were written by men. I will say something here that will make a few people quite upset. But here it goes. Men are the bulk of the creators. This has nothing to do with women being “held back.” This has to do with the way they think. What I find interesting is that eunuchs were not creators. So this has to do with that hormone, testosterone. How many eunuchs were engineers, we cannot know. But the bulk of eunuchs were protectors, not initiators of anything. Back in the protohistory days of the Hunter-gatherers, the guys not only did the heavy lifting, they made tools, and kept refining the tools. From the tools, they made machines, like stoves.
Among the wandering peoples, women played a larger role than is understood. Yes, they cooked. But they also hunted the small game and did the fishing. Up until the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, women would hunt and trap the small game. Until there were guns, women went fowling too, with falcons and hawks. Women learned about plants, and how to heal sicknesses and injuries. They learned about poisons as well. They became the pharmacists, and midwife; essentially, women were the doctors. This is, in my theory of life, woman’s proper roles.
As a rule, head chefs do not cook for children. Because children are not usually brought in to high end restaurants. Gourmet food, unless you are French or Italian, is not something we put together with our kids. In America, thanks to the immigration habits of the last century, we were introduced to Italian cooking. Of all the cuisines, this is probably the most popular among the younger set. A plate of spaghetti is an easy dish to prepare. Moms like it as much as the kids do, albeit, for different reasons. Parents can take their kids to an Italian restaurant. The chefs in these restaurants come close to the cook at home in their approach, because they know families come to their place to eat. Hey, there are Italian. So they create dishes to please kids and parents.
The second source, the need to care for others, is a tendency we find in both sexes. What is different is their approach in caring for others. That difference is the male will go to work, day after day, to bring in the bucks to feed, clothe and house his family. Other than that, he may not do much more. Modern males are not as handy as they used to be. I call it the suburban lifestyle. And then, beginning with the Boomers, there was a return to the full working life for women. I say return, because when you look at it, life in the suburbs was a new idea in living. The nuclear family was an aberration, not a tradition. Extended families were, and are in most places, the tradition.
There are no latch key kids in extended families.
I am a traditionalist. The extended family makes for an easier lifestyle. The pressure is off for every adult individual to have a great job that pays well. The pressure is off the one woman to care for, and feed, everyone in the household.
In the extended households, there is a boss of the house, usually an elder female, who is the COO. This tradition recognizes that for a young woman to come into her own household, and to take on that responsibility successfully, without experience, this is a silly notion.
Moderns have many silly notions. But we are here to talk about this one that says all women belong in the kitchen, and men don’t. We know that to be a fallacy. If it were true, all head chefs would be women.
Historically, here’s what happened. This is the nutshell version of a complex subject. The WW 2 generation lost something important when the divided life up into neat little packages: Women in the kitchen, men in the office. And then the feminists, who began on a good footing, went radical, because too many men went along with their balderdash. Was this so because they thought it would take the pressure off of them? This became a “be careful for what you wish for” moment. No-fault divorce and abortions did give the men more options, as well as make them victims of their own pleasures. Today, most divorces are initiated by the wife.
To sum it up, who wants to eat the cooking of a woman who doesn’t really love to cook? Yes, there is drudgery in the kitchen. In the process of cooking-I hate chopping veggies-and in the process of cleaning up.
Look at this image. Now that is a kitchen full of life! And each person has their role to play. On a smaller scale, I suggest that needs to be today’s kitchen, with the entire household participating. A small child can carry things to the table. And the dude can clean it up.
Oh yes, I fixed the meme.