Food and Feminism, Part I

Two of my favorite topics.  Food – I love to cook, buy, bake, talk about, read about all things food.  And yes, that includes eating out at all sorts of local dining establishments.  It isn’t always fun to cook for one (since I’m single), and I can use the time eating out to eat with friends and broaden my food perspective.  Like just the other day – tried a new sushi place with a friend and during dinner we discussed Paul David Tripp’s book War on Words.

 Feminism – no, I’m not a feminist - but I love to study it and the effect that culture has on women and the home and the way God has created women to be.   If you want two books to read about what I’m referring to: Mary Kassian’s Feminist Mistake and Carolyn McCulley’s Radical Womanhood.

 How are the two brought together?  Read the following quotes from different articles I’ve been reading:

 “How do we both scale the career heights and bake our own bread?” – Jennifer Jeffrey

 “We watch cooking shows on TV but we cook very little.  We’re seduced by convenience.  Who knew liberation would be found in a kitchen cupboard full of produce, not purses.  Sure, women have been unfairly stuck with the brunt of domestic labor for a long time in a culture that has deemed it lower status than say, working in an office.  Stepping away from the hearth is a form of rebellion and liberation and a way to gain more cultural status.  This idea…that liberated women don’t prepare food…is part of the Sex and the City cultural hangover.  Carrie Bradshaw, of course, famously used her oven as a shoe cupboard far before Grace, as a kind of feminist triumph.  She likes sex and (therefore)doesn’t have to cook.  Men come across as evolved, sexy, and creative when they mix things up in the kitchen.  But women seem stuck in Leave it to Beaver land when they step in front of the stove: domestic suckers who aren’t paying enough attention to their ambition or their libidos.” – Vanessa Richmond

 “Why do women cook in the domestic sphere but male chefs reign in restaurant land?” – Cooking with Ideas

 “Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensable, option for pinched and harried families.” – Michael Pollan

 “In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating foodwork, everything involved in putting meals on the family table – we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal.  Pollan doesn’t question the notion that feminists are to blame for urging women to leave the kitchen, when one might imagine that those who left the aprons behind were thinking beings who made their own choice to leave, regardless of the persuasions of feminists and family alike.” – Anna Clark

Tomorrow: Why does all this matter?