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| Not Your Dad’s Dad Food | Not Your Dad’s Dad Food |
| (32 minutes later) | |
| Every year, as Father’s Day approaches and the gift guides suggesting $300 supercharged charcoal grill lighters and backyard pizza ovens roll in, I’m left wondering if I’m truly dad enough in the kitchen. | Every year, as Father’s Day approaches and the gift guides suggesting $300 supercharged charcoal grill lighters and backyard pizza ovens roll in, I’m left wondering if I’m truly dad enough in the kitchen. |
| I do most of the cooking for my family. My wife is a public-school teacher with a relentless schedule who rarely has the will to make dinner. I, on the other hand, love to cook and, as my two kids frequently remind me, don’t have a real job. Yet, dads, avert your eyes: I do not own a Big Green Egg. I have never even used a 16-pound baking steel to make my kids sourdough pizza. | I do most of the cooking for my family. My wife is a public-school teacher with a relentless schedule who rarely has the will to make dinner. I, on the other hand, love to cook and, as my two kids frequently remind me, don’t have a real job. Yet, dads, avert your eyes: I do not own a Big Green Egg. I have never even used a 16-pound baking steel to make my kids sourdough pizza. |
| Blame it on my TikTok algorithm, but so many of the dads I see seem to be reveling in this profligate age of Dad Food, making homemade burger buns and subjecting spice-rubbed animal carcasses to long periods of indirect heat. Meanwhile, I’m wary of grills (too flammable!) and overwhelmed by gadgetry (the Bluetooth-enabled meat thermometer I received as a present three years ago remains unopened). I’m just trying to sneak vegetables into the pasta sauce without the kids’ noticing. | Blame it on my TikTok algorithm, but so many of the dads I see seem to be reveling in this profligate age of Dad Food, making homemade burger buns and subjecting spice-rubbed animal carcasses to long periods of indirect heat. Meanwhile, I’m wary of grills (too flammable!) and overwhelmed by gadgetry (the Bluetooth-enabled meat thermometer I received as a present three years ago remains unopened). I’m just trying to sneak vegetables into the pasta sauce without the kids’ noticing. |
| I had the sense that dads were cooking more than they once did, and this was true — to a point. We have come a long way from the dawn of dad food, when man discovered fire and the “Big Boy Barbecue Book” suggested in 1956 that their occasionally grilling steaks indicated a revolutionary shifting of gender roles: “Wives take it easy. All they have to do is make the salad and dessert.” | I had the sense that dads were cooking more than they once did, and this was true — to a point. We have come a long way from the dawn of dad food, when man discovered fire and the “Big Boy Barbecue Book” suggested in 1956 that their occasionally grilling steaks indicated a revolutionary shifting of gender roles: “Wives take it easy. All they have to do is make the salad and dessert.” |
| But despite decades of sustained increase in the contributions by dads in the kitchen, moms — at least in households with moms — still did about three times the cooking and dishwashing from 2015 to 2019, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, and that was before the backsliding seen during the pandemic. | |
| To me, the food that dads cook sometimes seems to have a performative quality that mirrored so-called dude food, which the author Emily J. H. Contois memorably describes in her book “Diners, Dudes and Diets” as “comfort food with an edge of competitive destruction.” A dad, after all, is just a dude with more responsibilities. |