Teaching my daughter to cook does not make me a bad feminist

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/26/teaching-daughter-to-cook-not-bad-feminist

Version 0 of 1.

Out of everything that I’ll teach my four-year-old daughter - to be kind, to share, how to tie her shoes - I’m starting to believe that the most important lesson I’ll impart is a love of cooking. Because despite all of the “make me a sammich” jokes and taunts to “get back in the kitchen” that feminists face, knowing how to cook, and cook well, is an incredible feminist gift that parents can pass on to their children.

Thanks in part to horrid 50s housewife caricatures and home economics classes populated only by women, cooking is still seen as domestic drudgery. When cooking for your family is a requirement for proper womanhood, with the “correct” meal being one with a just-right amount of food group diversity, it makes sense that some women would shy away from cooking. I did, for years.

But one of my earliest memories is of my feminist mother cooking tomato sauce (gravy, we called it) on a Sunday afternoon; she would let me take a piece of bread and dip it into the sauce as a treat before dinner. And while my mother is a feminist, traditional gender roles were still largely intact at the time and in our household: she did all of the cooking, cleaning, and various other “women’s work”. I came to see making meals – as delicious as they were – as part of an oppressive housework paradigm that I had zero interest in.

So for a while, in my 20s, my room went uncleaned, my food of choice was takeout and the only thing I cooked was ramen. (So angsty, I know.) Still, thanks to the lessons of my mother, I was always able to throw together a great meal from whatever was laying around in the pantry when I wanted to. Watching her with the grocer or butcher meant that I could go to a market and haggle over prices on my own or figure out the best cut of meat. Being around good food as a young person, and learning how to cook, made me much more self-sufficient than my friends who hadn’t.

It wasn’t until I had my daughter, and thought about how much I treasured those sensory-laden memories of my childhood around food, that I started cooking in earnest. Now, I do it for joy’s sake rather than out of necessity.

We should teach our daughters to cook because despite the baggage attached to domesticity, being able to make a great meal makes you independent in unexpected ways. We should teach our sons to cook for the same reason – but also because we are doing a massive favor for the potential future partners in their life (if those partners are female), who may not want to feel like they need to take care of someone who is helpless around a stove.

Now I’m the one making Sunday sauce with my daughter, and some homemade pasta to boot. (After we play with legos and a toy microscope, of course.) And while I watch her dip some bread in the cooking gravy, I’m glad that I’m teaching her that sometimes joy trumps the perception of politics, and that there is a pleasure in preparing good food, when its a choice and not a chore.