Women’s ‘utopian’ joy of cooking slammed in survey

As millions of American households prepare to enjoy the delectable smells of Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie, some social scientists say it’s time to loosen belts and lower expectations. Women, who prepare the overwhelming majority of Thanksgiving repasts, need a break from expectations about “utopian” family meals.

Home-cooked meals have become the hallmark of “good mothering, stable families and the ideal of the healthy, productive citizen,” according to sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott and Joslyn Brenton.

Yet in reality, home-cooked meals are often a burden due to the pressures to plan, prepare and present a meal, the worries about the cost of ingredients — including today’s must-have “organics” — and the difficulties pleasing the palates of finicky eaters, the three researchers wrote in a recent, hotly-debated study.

The academics’ goal — especially during this mother-of-all-home-cooking seasons — is to put a fork in the “romanticized” image of feminine prowess in the kitchen, and encourage “collective” solutions to feeding families such as monthly “town suppers,” food trucks offering healthy foods, and schools offering dinners “to go.”

Not surprisingly, their article sparked some heated feedback on the “tyranny” of the home-cooked dinner — as well as a call to bring back home-economics classes.

“At the end of the day, we want [people] to be able to take care of themselves and their families,” said Penny Nance, chief executive and president of Concerned Women for America (CWA).

The food fight started with publication of the article, “Joy of Cooking?” in the summer issue of Contexts by the American Sociological Association.

Ms. Bowen and Ms. Elliott, both associate sociology professors at North Carolina State University, and Ms. Brenton, an assistant sociology professor at Ithaca College, conducted research with 120 low-income mothers and 30 middle-class mothers on the issues of family, food and health. They found that many mothers chafed at the burden of creating “utopian family meals.”

The 1950s “Leave It To Beaver” ideal showed smiling mothers rustling around the kitchen every day to feed their family and their breadwinner husband. But for the vast majority of families, that kind of family “never really existed,” Ms. Elliott said in a recent interview. Today, modern mothers juggle work obligations with shopping and cooking, while facing financial constraints and complaints from fussy eaters, both adults and children.

The academics concluded that “the widely promoted standard” of home-cooking that all mothers are held to is “moralistic” and “rather elitist.”

“We think that it’s important to look at the invisible work that goes into [home cooking] — and the fact that it disproportionately affects women — and also think about the broader changes that we would need to push for to make this easier for all families,” Ms. Bowen said.

Holiday times can magnify this, since many women struggle to “re-create the big family meal that they may have grown up with,” added Ms. Elliott. A lot of mothers “talked about the holidays as something they looked forward to, but also something they had to recover from.”

Sharp reactions

Their article prompted some sharply divergent reactions, pro and con.

The professors rightly say that “people see cooking mostly as a burden because it is a burden” — especially when it’s done for “ingrates who would rather just be eating fast-food anyway,” Amanda Marcotte wrote at Slate.com. “If we want women — or gosh, men, too — to see cooking as fun, then these obstacles need to be fixed first. And whatever burden is left needs to be shared.”

But theFederalist.com senior editor Mollie Hemingway countered that while home-cooking is time-consuming and can even be “a grind,” it is also “one of the world’s oldest and most widespread practices.”

The idea that feeding one’s family is a sign of privilege “is laughable,” Ms. Hemingway wrote.

What’s missing in the discussion, she observed, is how family breakdown and some feminist critics have made some women feel terrible if they don’t work long hours, rush to get the kids from day care “and then figure out meals.” Cooking is a labor — “of love,” she said, and cultivating attitudes of gratitude and selfless service to others goes hand in hand with seeing family life as “a holy blessing.”

Nobody is forcing women to live up to certain standards in the kitchen; in fact, modern women “have more liberty and more opportunity than at any time in history — we are very, very blessed,” said CWA’s Ms. Nance.

Some see a solution in the revival of home-economics classes in high school, so women (and men) can learn how to bargain shop, plan, prepare nutritious meals and generally run a household in an efficient and frugal manner.

“We need people to be self-reliant,” and instead of cultivating government dependency, society should help people “learn to be self-reliant,” said Ms. Nance. In the end, she added, it’s not making entire meals from scratch, but that, “as a family, you’re sitting down together and looking at each other in the eye and sharing details about your day and sharing your heart.”

Meanwhile, “family dining” remains a fact of life for most American families with minor children, according to a 2013 Gallup Poll.

Some 53 percent of these families ate dinner together at home six or seven nights a week — with an average of 5.1 shared dinners a week — virtually unchanged since 2001.

Married parents ate 5.3 family dinners a week, while unmarried parents dined at home with the kids 4.8 times a week, Gallup said.