Cooking Deserves Respect

Saturday’s Washington Post featured an article by Candy Sagon about how cookbook publishers and food companies have simplified recipes to accommodate Americans’ diminishing culinary skills. Instructions have been broken into smaller steps and terms such as “add,” “simmer” and “fold in” have been replaced by instructions on how to do so. In Sagon’s piece, cookbook editor, Bonnie Slotnick, explained that the instruction from 30 years ago to “add two eggs” has become, “In a small bowl, using a fork, beat two eggs.”

Cooking magazines and television shows are popular, yet most people know less about cooking than those of previous generations. Our cooking skills have declined for several reasons. As women entered the work force, they had less time and energy to devote to cooking. After a full day at work, one is more inclined to heat a frozen pizza than to make chicken stew from scratch. Working parents’ lack of time for cooking results in fewer opportunities to teach their children to cook. In past generations, mothers taught their daughters to cook, but that changed as working mothers did less cooking. Additionally, many parents of people under 30 did not or do not expect their children to help with household chores, something that denied their children opportunities to learn.

As more women entered the workforce, demand for partially and fully prepared meals grew. Supermarkets sell ready-to-eat rotisserie chickens, pre-made salad in a bag and frozen, microwavable meals. Restaurants and fast food establishments have meals available to eat there or carryout at prices comparable to those of home-cooked meals. These options are convenient and, often, delicious. However, they diminish the need to know how to cook.

The drawback to that is that there is less incentive to co-ordinate parents’ and children’s activities so the family can eat together when each person can simply microwave his/her own prepared meal. Studies have found family dinners help children in many ways. In 1996, Harvard researchers found that eating dinner as a family did more to promote children’s language development than story times or play. A 2004 study published in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine associated frequent family meals with better grades and lower incidences of depressive symptoms, smoking, alcohol use and drug use. Joseph A. Califano, Jr. of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse noted that teens who frequently have dinner with their parents were less likely to have sexually active friends and spent less time with boyfriends or girlfriends. Harvard Medical School research has also shown that family dinners at home encourage healthier eating habits than eating separately or eating out.

Home-cooked meals tend to be healthier than prepared ones and the family dining experience benefits children. Hectic schedules, prepared foods and adults who can’t cook make it difficult to have home-cooked family meals. However, there may an additional reason for our declining cooking skills. As recipe instructions changed over the past 30 years, so has the esteem in which domestic skills are held. Women once considered the ability to cook, clean and care for children to be a source of pride. In the 1950s, our image of a housewife was June Cleaver of Leave It To Beaver. Now, the images of housewives are more likely to be Peg Bundy of Married With Children or Gabrielle Solis of Desperate Housewives. A less extreme version was Deborah Romano of Everybody Loves Raymond, a character known for her terrible cooking. The traditional wife and mother role is parodied on Desperate Housewives in the character of Bree Van de Kamp, an obsessive-compulsive Stepford Wife type. Such portrayals of stay-at-home moms contribute to the idea that housewives are lazy, incompetent or have something wrong with them.

Starting around the 1970’s many career women came to see the inability to cook as a badge of honor. Feminists often saw domestic tasks as things for less intelligent people to do. Being a bad cook became proof of one’s intellectual superiority and professional value. Hilary Clinton once said, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had tea, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession,” (as though the legal profession would not have survived without her). Linda Hirshman, author of The Mommy Wars, sees women choosing to be stay-at-home moms as dereliction of their duty to other women. She believes educated, professional women who choose to stay home with their kids are “leading lesser lives.”

Despite feminists’ opinions and negative media portrayals of housewives, many young professional women, as well as some male professionals, are choosing to stay home to bring up their children. For some, caring for their families is equally or more fulfilling than careers outside of the home. Maybe society is once again ready to recognize and appreciate the value of domestic skills.

Copyright Eva Ellsworth, 03/19/06, all rights reserved