gender / gender stereotypes

Back to the kitchen, ladies

magicalersatz22 Comments

Feminist Announcement! We’ve got another thing to add to august list of Things Feminism Has Ruined. In addition to marriage, family, children, being pretty, the fabric of society, and aviator sunglasses we can now add something altogether more important: food.

And that’s because according to Michael Pollan – of The Omnivore’s Dilemma fame – women, and more specifically feminism, are to blame for the food ills of the contemporary western diet. In a recent interview with the NY Times magazine, Pollan opines that our love of carefully prepared food is:

a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.

Pollan further bemoans the fact that:

American women now allow corporations to cook for them.

American woman, Pollan fears, have lost the “moral obligation” to cook that they once felt. And this is a Bad Thing. Thanks, feminism!

I’m not even going to bother going into how ridiculous Pollan’s rose-tinted view of food in 1950s America is – Emily Matchar does that far better than I could over at Salon in her article Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig? 

Historical nonsense aside, the really striking thing about Pollan’s comments is how he seems to have internalized the idea that if home-cooking is anyone’s work, then it’s women’s work. So if the home-cooking isn’t getting done, it’s the women who aren’t doing it.

Though I suppose it’s not particularly mysterious that someone so fond of nostalgic call-backs to 1950s Americana might not have particularly enlightened ideas about gender norms. Let’s just hope his nostalgia for the food traditions of the American past doesn’t extend back too far, given the now conclusive evidence that the settlers at Jamestown were cannibals.

22 thoughts on “Back to the kitchen, ladies”

  1. I am so bummed by this. I really like his earlier books–not scientistic, reasonable view of evolution, cool notions of the importance of lay knowledge accumulated via long term cultural development. I am disappointed that someone whose work I thoroughly enjoyed came up with such a problematic position. blerg.

  2. The Pollan quote, while it’s still somewhat problematic, looks a little different in context:

    Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex” that though cooking 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.” This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c’est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.

  3. T.V. dinners. Packaged puddings. Instant cakes. Processed meats. Canned meats. White bread. It should be pretty obvious that the food industry was hard-selling these factory foods to middle-class housewives who were suddenly expected to entertain, keep a bar stocked in their home, and keep up with the Jones’s.

    Does he think that his approach to food is any less a middle-class fad and fashion?

  5. elizardbreath: I wonder why you think the quote looks different in context? That full quote still expresses the ridiculousness about American feminists “thoughlessly trampling” appreciation of food and cooking, and also manages to have a totally needless dig (“special frenchie exemption”? really?) at Simone de Beauvoir.

    It’s also not the whole of Pollan’s comments on women and food (it misses out the stuff about “moral obligation” and the remark that women – just women! – now “allow corporations to cook for them”).

  7. I once read an article lamenting their association with Gloria Steinem. No kidding.

  8. “Does he think that his approach to food is any less a middle-class fad and fashion?”

    His complaint isn’t that the feminist approach to food is faddish! It’s that the food is bad.

    I would have thought Julia Child deserved a mention in Pollan’s screed, no? Diane Seed. Margaret Visser. It seems to me there was some pretty feminist writing and working about food in the ’50s. Not self-consciously feminist, of course. And a little later, Frances Moore Lappé.

  10. elizardbreath, thanks! Now that really does provide helpful context — I understand Pollan differently now.

  11. Back to magicalersatz in 5: It looks different to me because he’s talking about the different values placed on food culture as part of a conversation between different feminists or strains of feminism, rather than, as the truncated quote implies, a uniform undervaluing of food and cooking by feminists generally.

  12. Moreover, Pollan never offers that as his opinion, just as one possible reading of de Beauvoir’s comment.

    Likewise, the “moral obligation” comment is Pollan quoting Laura Shapiro, not Pollan positing that women have a moral obligation to cook (nor, so far as I know, was Shapiro).

    Pollan’s article is nothing like what the OP would lead you to believe.

  13. I don’t think that Pollan is quoting Laura Shapiro. He puts “moral obligation to cook” in quotes, in a sentence that comes after a sentence in which he mentions Laura Shapiro. Here is the full quote:

    Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake.

    So unless you think he’s also attributing “baker” as a quote to Shapiro, I’m not getting your reading. Indeed, the overall article seems to suggest Pollan is rather too fond of scare quotes.

    I very much stand by my reading of the piece (nor am I at all persuaded that the full paragraph of the “thoughtlessly trampled” bit makes it at all better). To my mind, article is sexist, and it is historically ill-informed. But readers can judge for themselves about that. I know based on induction that you won’t agree, but let me suggest that we simply agree to disagree on this one.

  14. Not sure why my name didn’t show up. Anyhow, the phrase “moral obligation to cook”, often though not always in quotes, appears in several older reviews of Shapiro’s book, so it seems very likely to be hers. I wouldn’t generalize any basis for disagreement.

  15. magicalersatz wrote:

    “I don’t think that Pollan is quoting Laura Shapiro. He puts “moral obligation to cook” in quotes, in a sentence that comes after a sentence in which he mentions Laura Shapiro.”

    In fact, Pollan *is* quoting Shapiro, as a quick search in the Amazon preview of her book reveals. Here’s the full paragraph:

    What they were talking about was a slew of anxieties that many women felt as guilt—a vast and murky guilt that seeped across issues of work, love, identity, and responsibility. Aside from raising children, cooking was the job that led all others on the list of chores that defined homemaking and ruled women’s daily lives. And cooking wasn’t just a chore; in many ways it was a responsibility similar to taking care of children. The emotional component was huge, the day-to-day necessity was relentless, the social pressure to perform well could be imposing, and there was no mistaking failure. No matter how appealing the prospect of doing something as utterly labor-free as opening a can of macaroni and cheese, spooning the contents into a pan, heating it up, and serving it, very few women were able to convince themselves that they had produced a meal. ***The moral obligation to cook*** simply was not satisfied. Where was the personal dimension, the sense of a gift from heart and hands that had characterized the notion of home cooking for millennia? Clumsy cooks, harried cooks, bored cooks, and adequate cooks weren’t so different from good cooks in at least one regard: They felt duty-bound to cook. That meant producing the meal, doing the work, putting their hands in the food, moving about the kitchen, and making it happen. It didn’t mean opening boxes and jars, then summoning the family. (Shapiro, 2004, pp. 52-53)

  16. Ah, okay – thanks, Nico. That’s interesting. (From the context it certainly wasn’t clear that the quote marks were meant to actually indicate quotation, rather than scare quotes – at least to me.)

    Fwiw, whether Pollan is quoting someone else seems to be something of a red herring here. He uses this idea of a “moral obligation to cook” – of *women’s* moral obligation to cook – as something we’ve lost out on, by somehow distancing ourselves from food and the kitchen and, as women, allowing corporations to cook for us. Whether or not the phrase is his own or someone else’s, it’s what he does with the idea behind the phrase that’s so problematic.

  17. magicalersatz also wrote that Pollan asserted that “women, and more specifically feminism, are to blame for the food ills of the contemporary western diet.”

    But the point of the passage in which Pollan quotes Shapiro is that marketers and advertisers, working for big corporations following WWII, are to blame. Not feminists. Yes, Pollan also says that *some* American feminists “thoughtlessly trampled” the wisdom of Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that cooking *can* be a source of satisfaction. That’s not the same as blaming all (or even any) feminists for *causing* the food ills of the western diet, however. It just means that some American feminists contributed to devaluing cooking, at a time when doing so happened to serve the interests of advertisers and big food corporations. And the record on this is not controversial, when the point is accurately stated, as Pollen and Shapiro both do.

    Also contrary to what magicalersatz claims, Pollan does not anywhere state or imply that women should bear the burden of the cooking. He is inviting people of *both* genders to give it cooking a try. He thinks many people of both genders will find something satisfying in it. This is something he states in the NYT article itself as well as throughout his writings. His new book, in fact, documents his own process of learning how to cook and ferment certain foods, and how much fun he has in doing so.

    I wrote these posts because I was genuinely dismayed by Matchar’s article and the many reposts and uninformed supportive comments on so many feminist websites. Good feminism should, in part, be about accurately rendering and speaking to quotes, as well as keeping the right targets in mind. Advertisers and corporations have successfully played the key role in causing what is now a very serious health problem in this country. If writers like Pollan help counter that by, in part, helping to inform people and even get some people excited about enjoying preparing and eating healthier things, then that’s a damn good thing, isn’t it? For feminists as much anyone else.

    It’s simply astonishing to me how many self-professed feminists (here, on Salon, on jezebel, on feministe, etc.) are jumping on the Pollan-is-a-sexist-pig-bashing bandwagon. Even several self-professed (now former) fans of Pollan’s work. Wtf!?? One of the main benefits of the Internet is the amazing ability to easily locate nearly any kind of information, including the full context and original sources of quotes. It took less time for me to do that in this case than it takes to heat a microwave dinner.

  18. Thanks the thoughtful response, ME, I appreciate it.

    I still disagree with your critique of the “moral obligation” idea, though (but I can understand where it’s coming from).

    Pollan is not saying that women should be morally obligated to cook *because they are women*. He’s arguing that many people of *both* genders would likely find something satisfying and nourishing about cooking and eating healthy meals. If he’s encouraging a kind of moral obligation, it’s one of treating ourselves in a healthy, non-toxic way. That we (both men and women) have a moral obligation not to let ourselves or our children get hooked on sugar-filled junk food that serves only the interests of people and companies making money off of promoting profoundly unhealthy behaviors. Nowhere does Pollan say that should be a moral obligation of only one gender. He says over and over throughout his work that it’s something people of both genders would benefit from.

  19. Hi Nico, just to clariy: “are to blame” doesn’t mean “are fully to blame”. Yes, Pollan casts most of the blame at corporations. But he also casts blame at the “thoughtless trampling” of some feminists.

    Perhaps I have jumped on a bandwagon. Perhaps I have, as you suggest, simply thoughtlessly asserted that Pollan’s comments are sexist, and problematically so. Personally, I really don’t think so. I think I read the article after it was linked by Matchar and was genuinely shocked by what was being said by someone I’d assumed would have more enlightened views on gender. Look, I don’t doubt that Pollan is very well-intentioned. And I also don’t doubt that he thinks men should cook as well (he says as much). But the overall tone of much of what he says – despite these good intensions – nevertheless comes off a sexist. That’s not to say that he set out to be sexist, or that he had any malicious intentions, or that he thinks a woman’s place is in the kitchen (I was trying to be sarcastic with the title of the post). It’s just to say that I think his words belie some pretty startling gendered attitudes.

    I’ll simply post some quotes below, which I think speak for themselves:

    [Meryl Streep manages to capture] Child’s big-girl ungainliness — the woman was 6 foot 2 and had arms like a longshoreman. Streep also captures the deep sensual delight that Julia Child took in food — not just the eating of it (her virgin bite of sole meunière at La Couronne in Rouen recalls Meg Ryan’s deli orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally”) but the fondling and affectionate slapping of ingredients in their raw state.

    [Julia Child] tried to show the sort of women who read “The Feminine Mystique” that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s too.) Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex” that though cooking 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.” This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c’est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.

    It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. 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, a decline of about 40 percent since 1965. (Though for married women who don’t have jobs, the amount of time spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.

  20. Nico, just quickly in response to you at 18 (we cross posted):

    I realize that Pollan doesn’t explicitly want to say that women are obligated to cook because they are women. Indeed, at the very end of the article he makes a brief comment about men and women sharing the job of cooking equally. The trouble is that he spends the bulk of the article talking *about women* – how women used to cook, how women don’t cook any more, how women used to feel a moral obligation to cook but don’t any longer, etc. And that gives the impression that the issue is a women’s issue, that cooking isn’t being done because women aren’t doing it. Yes, he does then bring up men in a sentence at the end. But you can’t cancel implicatures that easily.

Comments are closed.