Slate.com recently posted a curiously
useless, sour article with the hyperbolic title “The
Tyranny of the Home-Cooked Meal.” That’s right, tyranny. So cooking is the new Communism, and mothers, your family
are the new Stalins.*
Columnist Amanda Marcotte asserts
that the home-cooked meal has become “the hallmark of good mothering, stable
families, and the ideal of the healthy, productive citizen,” which is overstating
it, but yes, a good home-cooked meal is certainly, and rightfully, regarded very
positively – except by Ms. Marcotte and North
Carolina State University sociologists, who complain in a recent study
that too many mothers don’t have the time or money to live up to that ideal.
The researchers interviewed 150
mothers “from all walks of life” (although only the middle class and below are
discussed) and found that “even for middle-class working mothers who are able
to be home by 6 p.m., trying to cook a meal while children are demanding
attention and other chores need doing becomes overwhelming.”
Welcome to the real world, ivory
tower sociologists. Yes, simultaneously juggling chores, cooking, and wrangling
kids can be overwhelming, but that’s motherhood.
Mothers have been multi-tasking since time immemorial. What is a real-world
alternative, besides not becoming a mother in the first place? The article
doesn’t offer one.
The sociologists also discovered
that “low-income women often… can't afford to pay for even a basic kitchen
setup,” and “even when people have their own homes, lack of money means their
kitchens are small, pests are hard to keep at bay, and they can't afford basic
kitchen tools like sharp knives, cutting boards, pots and pans.”
Yes, poverty makes feeding your
family problematic – it makes everything
problematic – but the notion that cooking is too expensive for most mothers is
demonstrably false. You don’t need the Barefoot Contessa’s kitchen to cook for
your family. And again, what’s the alternative – an even more expensive
restaurant? Fast food? I paid over $8 recently just for McDonalds Happy Meals for
my two kids. By contrast, my entire family stuffed ourselves on my
wife’s hearty, healthy, delicious dinner tonight that cost literally under $4
total for all four of us.
But the study reports yet another
downside: “whiny, picky, and ungrateful” family members who didn’t appreciate
the mother’s cooking efforts, including husbands and boyfriends who were “just
as much, if not more, of a problem than fussy children.” I feel sorry for the
women in this study who apparently married ungrateful jerks and raised ungrateful
kids, but I don’t believe they’re in the majority. Speaking for myself, my kids
and I gush compliments and gratitude to my wife over every home-cooked meal.
In conclusion, “people see cooking
mostly as a burden… because it is a burden. It’s expensive and
time-consuming and often done for a bunch of ingrates who would rather just be
eating fast food anyway.” Wow. Besides the sheer whininess of that statement,
the article doesn’t even offer a solution: “If we want women—or gosh, men,
too—to see cooking as fun, then these obstacles need to be fixed first. And
whatever burden is left needs to be shared.” The “obstacles need to be fixed”?
How? It doesn’t say. The entire piece, and the North Carolina State study,
simply seem like an unhelpful attack on the family unit, especially the husband.
Time and money may be in short
supply but there is no instantaneous, free alternative for feeding your family
– certainly not going out to eat – and there has never been more information
available for mothers and/or fathers about how to make healthy meals quickly on
a budget.
A home-cooked meal is considered a
hallmark of good mothering for good reason: far from being tyrannical, it’s a powerful
labor of love that saves money, instills healthier eating habits, and most
importantly, helps unify and stabilize the family unit. Maybe that’s why Slate
feminists resent it so much.
* Marcotte apparently took such
heat for that title that it has since been changed to “Let’s Stop Idealizing
the Home-Cooked Family Dinner.”
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 9/18/14)
