The foodie and the feminist

For the next eight weeks I will be playing housewife. If you know me well, that’s not exactly a statement you would expect from me. Don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for stay-at-home moms and believe they work just as hard as career women and without paid vacations.  But it’s no secret that I’m not exactly the domestic type. I’m not completely hopeless in that arena — I can make a bathroom sparkle — but I HATE cooking. 


Despite my lack of skill or even interest in the culinary arts, I recognize the importance of families sharing a good home-cooked meal around the kitchen table. So I’ll pull out some recipes and try to make this happen when I can. As a feminist, however, nothing gets my blood boiling like people blaming career women for the demise of the American family. 


Last week while I was busy grading research papers and final exams, famous foodie and journalist Michael Pollan was busy pissing off feminists with a statement he made in his latest piece in The New York Review of Books. I read a few blog posts on Pollan’s comments before I actually read the article. I was heartbroken. Pollan was one of my instructors during my graduate studies at UC Berkeley. When I mention this to foodies, especially those who are also writers, they drool. Pollan is one of the people who helped me find my voice as a writer. Is my favorite foodie really anti-feminist?


In his article, Pollan discusses Janet A. Flammang’s new book, The Taste of Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society and writes:

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. It is at “the temporary democracy of the table” that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility—sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending—and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run. “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”

After reading the article I’m still on the fence about whether or not I believe Pollan is criticizing feminism. Quoting Flammang, he does say the answer is not simply for women to return to the kitchen alone but “for everyone—men, women, and children—to go back to the kitchen, as in preindustrial days, and for the workplace to lessen its time demands on people.” However, he also half quotes Flammang and says “‘American women are having second thoughts’ about having left the kitchen.” Statements like this make me cringe as they can imply that we broads were silly to ever think we’d be happy without our aprons. 


Feminist foodies like Anna Clark absolutely agree that families need to get back to sharing healthy meals, but think it’s unacceptable to place this solely on the shoulders of women.  


Clarks writes for Salon’s Broadsheet:

Blaming feminism for luring women out of the kitchen, stealing the ritual of the family meal, and thereby diminishing “one of the nurseries of democracy” is both simplistic and ridiculous. It’s true that shared meals are powerful spaces for building relationships and “the habits of civility.” But if we’re going to talk about who’s to blame for our current culture of processed food, why not blame untold generations of men for not getting into the kitchen, especially given Pollan’s characterization of the family meal as having a meaningful role in cultivating democracy? If it’s so important, why is their absence excusable?