And with this, (hat tip), my boundless enthusiasm for Michael Pollan’s body of work starts to subside. Where’s the Pollan of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, who openly worried that there weren’t more sustainable food farms that also had feminist values? I guess he got eaten by a Pollan who knows that taking swipes at feminism gets you fat checks from the NY Times. For even as he praises Julia Childs as a feminist icon---a title she deserves, since she actively resist the sexism that makes women kitchen cooks, but turns men into chefs---he’s doing the “best feminists are the ones who get thee to the kitchen and pretend that it’s liberation” schtick. Because in his eyes, Childs isn’t a feminist hero because she made cooking a career for herself and didn’t apologize for that, it’s because she really liked cooking. And feminists who suggested that having your own income might be more useful to a woman’s quiver of survival skills than knowing how to fricassee were just meany-heads with no sense of beauty.
I say this as someone who likes to cook, and who actually tends to agree with Pollan that it’s an interesting enough way to spend your time, especially if you feel like you’ve got a lot of freedom to experiment and fuck up. More men should pick up the past time, which I know is something Pollan would eagerly endorse, if he wasn’t so busy blaming feminism to notice that it would be more interesting to beat up on men for a continued lack of interest and a steady rate of doing less housework than women than make already overworked women feel guilty. Even though he loves to cook, Pollan abdicates all male responsibility for the situation he finds so dire, which is that few Americans eat much home-cooked food, and instead frets about how jobs and gullibility to advertising claims have ruined women that should be in the kitchen right now doing something delightful, even if they’ll never get paid, called a “chef”, or probably even thanked by their families. Towards the very end, he tacks on a call for men to care, but it’s hard to swallow, after comments like this:
Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression. You may think of these two figures as antagonists, but that wouldn’t be quite right. They actually had a great deal in common, as Child’s biographer, Laura Shapiro, points out, and addressed the aspirations of many of the same women. Julia never referred to her viewers as “housewives” — a word she detested — and never condescended to them. She tried to show the sort of women who read “The Feminine Mystique” that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s too.) Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex” that though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of “revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the gift.” This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c’est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.
It’s got that quality that I’ve come to know and love in those who want to be feminists and make excuses for unfeminist nonsense. He’s not leaning on “choice"---as in, if a woman isn’t being marched at gunpoint to a behavior, then it’s automatically “feminist” and shouldn’t be analyzed in any way---but this is very close. Simone de Beauvoir was certainly interested in how domestic tedium destroys women’s minds and souls, and so of course she was going to have interesting thoughts on cooking as respite from that. But the less exotic American second wave feminists like Betty Friedan that he’s picking on here were rejecting a culture where women’s creativity at home was being squashed in new and exciting canned food/perfect house ways. To boot, there is the more pragmatic arguments about the need for independence and your own income that Pollan’s ignoring completely. Many women who might enjoy cooking have never gotten around to it, because paying for the food on the table---and not allowing a man to dominate the finances and therefore deprive you of your freedom---are more pressing concerns.
And, as Kate Harding points out, some women just are never going to like cooking. Though I do agree with Pollan that a lot of people who don’t like cooking---and more men don’t like it than women, don’t forget!---think that it’s harder than it is, and have also been brought up in the unimaginative American kitchen. For instance, our “cooking” in home ec in high school centered around Jello molds and cans of spaghetti sauce, and becoming an adult who makes her own spaghetti sauce was a revelation for me that caused me to spend more time in the kitchen.