cooking is so passé.
How odd to read Michael Pollan in the NYT urging a return to cooking. Say wasn’t he the guy who wanted us to eat practically raw food? Anything to avoid eating the evil processed food. I seem to remember that he dissed his mom’s cooking as processed-plus but now she is revealed to have tried to emulate Julia Child. And cooking is praised as a form of psycho therapy undertaken by Julie Bosworth, the blogger who made a Julia dish a day for a year as relief from the monotony of her 9-5 job (Julie & Julia, the movie).
Jeez how upside down the world is. Once cooking was part of women’s imprisonment in a domestic life forced on them by economic circumstance. Julia escaped into cooking because she’d failed to get a 9-5 job, having been turned down as a spy. In those very recent times, even college educated women had a tough time being taken seriously in the workplace. I can remember a managing editor of the Toronto Star saying as recently as the eighties that women only worked for lipstick and a hair do.
Whenever I hear someone fussing about food and cooking these days, it’s usually a man. My impression is that women are well shot of cooking – oh they’ll exploit their historic connection to the kitchen stove by writing cookbooks etc- but I know no woman who wants to return to being the family cook – a full time drudge. Friends who spent years cooking for their families now demand to eat out – its the men who want to stay in for “home cooking.” I consider my thirty something niece to be emblematic of her gen, she’s a VP at Goldman Sachs who always eats out. It’s as Delia Smith said, people (notably women) today have so many OTHER interesting things to do rather than cook. When I see a party of women eating out together and having a great time, I say now that’s liberation.
Cooking? How medieval.
