When Food Politics and Sexism Collide

[Jimmie Higgins]

...or where petty-bourgoise moralisim always tends to lead: telling workers or the oppressed that they don't live right and that problems in society are all their fault for not living up to an unobtanable (or in this case, too expensive and time consuming and sexist) ideal.

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_michael_pollan_a_sexist_pig/



Right-wing The Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan describes feminist-run 1970s households thus: “There would be squalor beyond reckoning in the kitchen . . . Cooking nourishing dinners was an oppressive act.”

Okay, that’s an extreme thing to say, but Caitlin Flanagan is a notorious conservative rabble-rouser who adores baiting feminists and other liberals. Of course she’d say that.

Here’s another quote: “[The appreciation of cooking was] a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.”

Flanagan again?

Nope, that’s Michael Pollan. Yes, that Michael Pollan, the demigod food writer and activist at whose feet so much of progressive America worships. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Pollan’s pro-local, pro-organic manifesto, spent years on the New York Times bestseller list, and Pollan’s motto of “eat food/not too much/mostly plants” can be heard murmured like a mantra in the aisles of local grocery co-ops nationwide.
Yet there he is again, in the New York Times Magazine, dismissing “The Feminine Mystique” as “the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” In the same magazine story, Pollan scolds that “American women now allow corporations to cook for them” and rues the fact that women have lost the “moral obligation to cook” they felt during his 1960s childhood.

Pollan is not alone in his assessment. Mireille Guiliano, author of the megabestselling diet book “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” ratchets up the guilt by blaming feminism both for ruining cooking and for making women fat: “[Women] don’t know how to deal with stress, and they eat when they’re not hungry and get fat. They don’t know how to cook, because feminism taught us that cooking was pooh-pooh,” she says.
As sustainability advocate Marguerite Manteau-Rao writes:

[During the era of ] feminism, we, women made a bargain with the devil. Tired of being kept in the kitchen, we welcomed with open arms, promises from the food industry to make life more convenient for us . . . Of course there were compromises to be made, such as paying more for our food, and jeopardizing our health and that of our family.
“Yes, it’s feminism we have to thank for the spread of fast-food chains and an epidemic of childhood obesity,” sniffs British celebrity cookbook author Rose Prince, who later defends herself by telling me the feminists didn’t intend to ruin cooking.

[l'Enfermé]

I was able to keep a straight face until this bit, then I laughed my ass off:


“Yes, it’s feminism we have to thank for the spread of fast-food chains and an epidemic of childhood obesity,”http://static.quickmeme.com/media/social/qm.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/rAmjntU.png
http://static.quickmeme.com/media/social/qm.gif

[Vanilla]

I... I don't even know what to say. Women are supposed to have a "moral obligation to cook"? Well... maybe, just maybe, men can start to cook a little bit too.

[Quail]

I don't really know what to say to this. Of course domestic labour is drudgery. If it weren't drudgery, the man who said

“the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.”would be rushing to help his wife with the chores, which I am almost certain he isn't.

Obviously I am preaching to the choir here, but women are people too with hopes and dreams that can't be realised when you're chained to a cooker. Why can't men and women just share the housework? Why is that some kind of crazy, revolutionary idea? But why, as a husband, would someone want to limit their partner and stop her from fulfilling herself by forcing her to do dull, repetitive housework and cook fancy meals all day?

In my household, I cook and my partner cleans because I like food and he is a lot tidier than me. He works full time and I'm studying full time for a degree. I think we share the housework and childcare fairly evenly and it works. While I do cook fresh, healthy food every night, it does take anything from 30 minutes to over an hour depending on what I make, and I really like cooking so I actually find it relaxing. But I understand that not everybody is like me, so I can see why, after a day of work, some people don't want to cook. I also have my "bean burgers and oven chips" nights.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The other, more general aspect of all this is that even with couples sharing the housework (what does that mean for single people!) the kind of work required by these middle class food-fads to eat "morally" is nearly impossible for a working person - let alone a working person with kids.

A local free-weekly paper here had a story with a reporter who had her family eat "slow-food" style for two weeks or something. With everyone working and with taking some short-cuts they were able to do it, they enjoyed some of it and felt more satisfied by their meals (both in a sense of accomplishment and nourishment) -- but that's all they did! After working and picking up kids, even a presumedly middle-class urban family with two parents had to spend all their free-time preparing food!

There's nothing inherently wrong with "fast-food" -- it's more efficient overall to feed people in large groups than to have everyone cook their own food. There's no reason we couldn't have convinient food on demand that's healthy and tasty--no reason other than the profit-motive and inequality. And, of course, in this era fast-food is a capitalist-spawned necissity for working class people generally.

[Tenka]

A local free-weekly paper here had a story with a reporter who had her family eat "slow-food" style for two weeks or something. With everyone working and with taking some short-cuts they were able to do it, they enjoyed some of it and felt more satisfied by their meals (both in a sense of accomplishment and nourishment) -- but that's all they did! After working and picking up kids, even a presumedly middle-class urban family with two parents had to spend all their free-time preparing food!


What were they cooking?! I've cooked a decent number of things in my time and none of them couldn't be left unattended for long enough at a time to do some other little things. Granted, none of them is ever more complicated than spaghetti with meatsauce.

P.S. Feminism did WTC, Boston Marathon Bombings, Virginia Tech, Texas Fertiliser Plant Explosion, and HITLER!! :rolleyes:

P.P.S. Organic is a sham.

[Jimmie Higgins]

What were they cooking?! I've cooked a decent number of things in my time and none of them couldn't be left unattended for long enough at a time to do some other little things. Granted, none of them is ever more complicated than spaghetti with meatsauce.


I can't find the article because when I do a search on "East Bay Express, Slow Food" or "East Bay Express, Eating Orgnaic at home" I get a zillion hits. But anyway, they were eating totally "ethically" with organic food from scratch, so Spaghetti and meatsause meant making your own dough and finding a butcher. I think they did make pasta actually and made enough from scratch to have it in different meals for several of the nights.

[Tenka]

I can't find the article because when I do a search on "East Bay Express, Slow Food" or "East Bay Express, Eating Orgnaic at home" I get a zillion hits. But anyway, they were eating totally "ethically" with organic food from scratch, so Spaghetti and meatsause meant making your own dough and finding a butcher. I think they did make pasta actually and made enough from scratch to have it in different meals for several of the nights.

Ah, no wonder if took all their time! I don't see how that's any more ethical than buying pre-made dough/noodles and pre-butchered meat though. I hope it was much cheaper for them, at least, to make up for all that extra time and effort spent.

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Just...there's no more thoughtful and intelligent response one could offer to these ideas and arguments but pffffftt HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA *deep intake of breath* HAHAHAHAHAHA YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!!! HA! :laugh:
And to those that buy their books and shit *slllllllap*

[mew]

Twice I wrote two long good responses to this thread and twice my posts were eaten :(((

Basically feminists have talked about this for a long time... Not directly related but perhaps you can see a connection. Radical feminists in the 70s wrote about how with the advent of things like washing machines which reduce domestic labor time there came about ideas like that you have to wash clothes after every wear which was previously unheard of.
Today there are feminist ladies especially french ones (I think in France they're generally disdainful of "coddling" child reading practices and normally engage in stuff seen as kinda barbaric in us like "cry it out") are talking a lot about how the green/Eco movements of which the slow food movement is part of I guess (reslky dislike the terms slow food and locavore just ugh) guilts women into breast feeding which obviously necessitates staying at home much more. Plus things like proposed tax increase on disposable diapers to get wonen to use cloth ones which would obviously lead to a lot more time changing babies and doing laundry...

http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/a-713890.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=

If u google this lady for the most part the media refused to even acknowledge she may have any sort of point or even a coherent posistion which should tell you something maybe....

Personally I'm not very interested in domestic work including cooking or baking and I would rather eat kfc than a fifteen dollar farm to table hotdog or whatever and it doesn't emotionally resonate with me (don't see what's romantic about baking bread) like it seems to a lot of other people I'm unsure why. I do wonder why it seems to be such a thing I think it goes deeper than just wanting to save money/worries about food safety or environment or even anxiety about the economy etc leading to yearning for the good old days /wanting to show off in that liberal middle class way. But I don't know... Especially for young girls what is the appeal?

Despite that I'm quite interested in food politics and nutrition.... I like http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-food.shtml
Really made the rise in obesity rates more understandable to me... I believe ideas she said included things like capital needing new ways to get rid of all the "excess" food it was growing so turning corn into sugar and placing it Into food for no "real" reason plus getting more profit through creating food addictions through novelty (dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets...) and the discovery and implementation of things like the bliss point..

[Jesus Saves Gretzky Scores]

feminists and other liberals
:rolleyes:

But talk about jumping to conclusions. These people sound like conspiracy theorists, "RONALD MCDONALD CREATED FEMINISM TO KILL US ALL FOR THE NWO!!!!11"