Wisdom from Bourdain
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 2:16AM From Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
[T]he idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.
Back in the dark ages, young women and girls were automatically segregated off to home-economics classes, where they were indoctrinated with the belief that cooking was one of the essential skill sets for responsible citizenry—or, more to the point, useful housewifery. When they began asking the obvious question—“Why me and not him?”—it signaled the beginning of the end of any institutionalized teaching of cooking skills. Women rejected the idea that they should be designated, simply by virtue of their gender, to perform what would be called, in a professional situation, service jobs, and rightly refused to submit. “Home ec” became the most glaring illustration of everything wrong with the gender politics of the time. Quickly identified as an instrument of subjugation, it became an instant anachronism. Knowing how to cook, or visibly enjoying it, became an embarrassment for an enlightened young woman, a reminder of prior servitude.
Males were hardly leaping to pick up the slack, as cooking had been so wrong-headedly portrayed as “for girls”—or, equally as bad, “for queers.”
What this meant, though, is that by the end of the ’60s, nobody was cooking. And soon, as Gordon Ramsay has pointed out rather less delicately a while back, no one even remembered how.
Maybe we missed an important moment in history there. When we finally closed down home ec, maybe we missed an opportunity. Instead of shutting down compulsory cooking classes for young women, maybe we would have been far better off simply demanding that the men learn how to cook, too.
Reader Comments (1)
Yeah there's been sort of an ongoing food movement vs. feminist movement discussion going on for a little while now. The more extreme will say they are both at complete odds with each other, but that relies on the attitude that cooking is something to be relegated to servants, or that it shouldn't be considered white collar thing to be engaging in.
I think, unfortunately, that there is some truth in the fact that the fast food/prepackaged food industry capitalized on the feminist movement "freeing" women from the "shackles" of kitchen work, but Bourdain (and many others who have said similar - Michael Pollan speaks about this regularly) is exactly right. It would never have been a problem if we weren't so entirely reliant on only having women provide the cooking in the first place. That's what the real shame is.
Fortunately, I think (or like to hope) that that is shifting as food and cooking is becoming glamorous - and not only in a celebrity way. For once, people are proud of their kids for going to culinary school, and more and more men and learning how to cook on more than just a grill.