I've read a whole lot of food books. Not many diet books, but I'm a junkie for books on food culture, food politics, food ethics, food philosophy, and anything else food related. (Michael Pollan is my hero. I'm kind of obsessed.)
My obsession seems to stem from That Void that so many in my generation feel--the void of growing up in the non-food culture of modern America. My family was a quintessentially Suburban American family growing up. My mom pretty much found cooking a chore except the meals she was particularly proud of (hello best fried chicken ever!), and my dad's only knowledge of cooking involved fire, slabs of meat, and some pre-made seasoning. In high school, when my schedule got really crazy and I was rarely home for a meal, most of what I ate came out of a box or fast-food restaurant or vending machine. It wasn't weird...that was normal. It is normal for most people.
So, needless to say, it stuns boomers like my parents that I, and many of my fellow overly-educated Gen Y friends who grew up like me, are teaching themselves how to cook, and, well, kind of like it. We're shopping at farmers markets. We're growing vegetables and herb gardens. We're caring about the origin and production of our food.
Hold up. I thought you were a feminist, Caroline. Why do you love the fact that your husband bought you an apron for Christmas? (It's a SUPER cute apron, too.) Betty Freidan must be rolling in her grave. If you're getting back in the kitchen, isn't this a backward step for Feminism?
Maybe my apron disappoints old school feminist ideals. But should it? Are being a feminist and being a home-maker mutually exclusive?
Not to me.
For all the benefits to society, there was also a cost to taking the homemaker out of the home. Welcome to the struggling health of Americans. Now we know the results of not having the home-cooked meals, not knowing the origin of our food or simply growing it ourselves, and outsourcing all that is the art of home-making. It begs the question...why didn't anyone take the value of home-making seriously and given it the credit it deserved? Yes, I am a feminist, of course. I am a working mother. I am NOT advocating a regression of all that progress. But that doesn't mean I don't want to eat real food made at home.
Boomer feminists gave us so much to be thankful for, and I don't want to downplay their contribution at all. As a woman, I benefit amazingly from the efforts they made. But, they had one tragic flaw: "equal" became women fighting to be more like men. Equal opportunity didn't mean turning around and demanding that women (and men) get more respect for homemaking roles. They didn't challenge the perceived value of the female traditional roles. To put it simply, they didn't give their mothers enough credit. Unbeknownst to them, home life was a zero-sum game: if you are going to give the homemaker the opportunity to leave the home, you are going to have to find a way to make up for what they provided, with the same quality and meaning. Otherwise you are going to see some unwanted repercussions.
In my investigation of health, I keep thinking "When did we start needing professionals to tell us what is healthy? When did health become something that needed to be defined because we don't know what it is?" Maybe it was when we started discounting the power and value of home-makers.
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