Cooking dinner doesn't have to be this hard

House work, the nuclear family, and inequity

Last week, I talked with a friend about how hard it is to prepare a meal and have everything hot and ready simultaneously. This isn't the first time I've had this conversation, usually with other women, and I'm sure it won't be the last because the state of cooking dinner in the U.S. is a disaster amid disasters. It’s confounding in its mundanity and relentlessness: If I am lucky enough to have adequate food in my kitchen (unlike many), I must produce meals with it. This problem is frivolous in the face of the human toll in Gaza and Israel. This problem isn't a problem when people in Palestine and Israel and across the world are grieving. And once I've called my representatives, and done what I can do at this moment, my family and I must eat. 

The stress of producing a hot meal for the family that disproportionately falls on women's shoulders is newer than it feels. Entitlement to a daily hot meal of multiple parts (protein, starch, vegetable–don't forget dessert) is not how most people have eaten for most of history. This "modern" meal, which feels regressive to me, was normalized with the rise of the nuclear hetero family after WWII and the belief that the wife's job was the meal and the reality that she and the family were judged by it. But this created standard for mealtimes was always inaccessible to large swathes of people–it was never for everyone. It was a type of meal created to sell more products that would make the meal "easier" to produce. Today, it continues to be a nearly impossible task unless a person in the family (usually a woman, even if she is also working outside the home) is required and/or determined to make it their responsibility. When that person is too pressed for time to cook, they are sold quick fixes to make dinnertime "easier"– ranging from air fryers and jarred goods to fast food places selling family meal deals. 

What existed before industrialization? Families, often multiple generations, lived together. Cooking was more practical, and people ate the same starch over and over again. I'm learning by reading through all the books mentioned in Alicia Kennedy's 4-week food politics series and following the bibliographies to other books. I'm re-learning and unlearning some of what I've taken for granted in U.S. food culture as a writer and an eater. All these books show the systems behind the food that turn people against each other and ourselves to distract us from the source: inequitable systems and ridiculous expectations that serve capitalistic ends.

I read How to Disrupt Housework (Without Robots or Replicators) by Tara McMullin last week and appreciated her work showing the possibilities explored in science fiction. She writes, "When more people live in a home, more people can help out." and "Things started to change with the industrial revolution. Still, it took a couple of centuries to transform our social organization and turn work that was once done collectively into the purview of the housewife." Let's dream more. The labor system in households can change. More hands do help. If a woman is siloed off from everyone else to prepare a meal all day and then make it magically appear on her family's table, some people will think it's easy and devalue the labor that went into it. I want more people taking turns in the kitchen.

I cook in such a way that minimizes the human and resource energy needed. Usually, when I cook, there is one hot element, and everything else is room temperature or cold. Or everything is cooked in one pot. Last night, I made pasta with broccoli and jarred sauce in one pot. It may be humble and not cooked as well as I can, but I don't feel inferior for cooking in this way because it gives me more time and space to exist. I resist the virtue signaling of having a multicomponent hot meal ready daily for my husband and children. There are many ways of expressing the art of getting food on the table. 

Last week, I defrosted a quart bag of white tepary beans I'd made in August with plans to make a dip. I also had some caramelized onions in my fridge, and after I mashed the beans in a bowl, I mixed in the onions. I added a splash of vegetable broth, a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar, and seasoned with salt, ground pepper, and cumin. I drizzled olive oil over the top. 

If you have a blender or food processor, blend all the ingredients. The vegetable broth is there to make the dip more liquid, depending on your preference. (Turn the dip into a soup if you have a lot of broth you want to use.) If I had cilantro, I would have roughly chopped some and thrown it on top. We ate the dip with corn chips. It also would make a good sandwich with sliced tomato, a crunchy green, and pickles. 

It takes a lot of work to make a meal every day. Why is it hard? Breakdown of collective society, increased work hours, division of labor, gender issues, marital roles. The expectations of U.S. households are distorted and produce stress: Worry about cooking. Worry about not cooking. Worry about saving or spending money. The proliferation of recipes, meal solutions, the quest for newness–it's enough to make me want to scream sometimes. Who is this good for? In Sweetness and Power, Mintz mentioned that with the rise of industrialization, men ate the family's meat, and women and children often went hungry. If we trace the origins of this type of meal back to the source, we'll see it doesn't serve most people.

I looked at the Arizona census (2017-2021) and found that the number of people in a household is 2.58, and the mean travel time to work is 25.7 minutes. Also, 2 million Arizonans face food insecurity, and 30% live on wages that barely cover housing and basic needs. If a household comprises two adults driving 25 minutes each to work a job that barely covers their necessities, how does that impact cooking hot meals? For those of us who have food security – though it is always tenuous when one lives in a country where how much money you make and where you live determines if you can afford or find food – we have more agency to make time in the kitchen lifegiving, not crushing. I'd rather eat in delicious, simple ways and make more time for other people, activism, and rest. Finding individual solutions is a part of it, but not everything. I'm looking at the inequitable systems that keep people overworked and underfed.

The labor of home cooking has been devalued at least partly because of the invisibility of whoever is making the meal within the current U.S. ideological landscape. And so we remain in our individual kitchens, as various mechanisms ensure that we stay isolated in this way, including low-paying jobs, expensive childcare, and lack of family and community support. 

I saw an ad on Instagram showing a white woman vacuuming her spice drawer. A transparent plastic shelf system in the drawer keeps the bottles of spices displayed with their label face up. The drawer is about 50% full, 2-3 inches between each spice bottle. I reposted the screenshot, adding “If your spice organization looks like this I don't know if we can be friends.” It's a joke. But… I'm annoyed by what that spice drawer says about the expectations and goals of the average U.S. home cook. It says not only do you need to cook, you must keep a pristine spice drawer and regularly vacuum it. People (mostly women) replied to my story with incredulity, confusion, mock horror, and envy. We agreed: none of our spice drawers or shelves look like that! My spices are organized in an idiosyncratic and messy way. I know where they are, but they are perched in mismatched jars and tiny bags on a too-small shelf, sometimes precariously. I'm about to move into a new (to me) kitchen and re-do the whole system, and I'm looking forward to it. But I won't be basing my goals for that system on the ad from Instagram. It's not that the shelf system itself is wrong. If you have more drawers than shelves, it could work. But the austerity and exactitude of the drawer shocked me and made me react negatively. I'm focusing on not over-purchasing spices and buying from places like Diaspora Co. and Burlap & Barrel. And I do love a spice/herb pantry bursting at the seams. It makes me feel happy, excited, and hopeful. 

And that's how I want everyone to feel in the kitchen: That it’s a place of enough food and much promise. Whole foods (that often have the words "humble" or "simple" ascribed to them) such as onions and beans can be delicious in their own unadorned right. They can also be added to, embroidered on, rehashed, and brought to new life with a sprinkle of cumin and pepper or whichever spice the cook prefers. The same building block foods (legumes, starches, vegetables) can be made in a stress-relieving pattern of sameness and made new when variety is craved. Whichever is desired that day, sameness or variety, I hope that whoever is cooking is giving their labor freely and valued for it by those at their table.

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Reading - Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Olivia.

Writing - My mind is returning to a long essay I was working on in the spring, so I’ll be opening up those docs and taking a look around soon. Then writing/revising.

Cooking - Not a lot beyond the easy meals I go to when life is chaotic (wish us luck moving houses tomorrow!)