Ms. Overlooked
When food is left out of the revolution
I opened HBO Max to see Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print and cancelled all my plans. All my many important plans. Consider it part of my ongoing media wonk training. I pulled out my Leuchtturm1917 and took excessive notes over the 110 minutes split into three mini-docs by directors Cecilia Aldarondo, Alice Gu, and Salima Koroma. Ms. and I aren’t well acquainted. I’ve probably read some of their essays online but never flipped through an issue, so getting introduced to the founding editors and learning about the early years was illuminating.
The founding editors wanted to report seriously on the injustices women faced. They saw a women’s rights revolution about to crest. The mission of the magazine was to write about marriage, sexuality, friendship, reproductive rights, and more in a new way. But then there’s a clip of Carbine, previously the vice president and editor-in-chief at McCall’s, explaining how Ms. was different from other women’s magazines: “Women’s interests are much more than how to make meatloaf 12 new ways.” Oh, I recognize this old tune.
Food is a common target to distinguish the serious from the trivial, the prestigious from the lowly, the revolutionary from the mundane. How does overlooking eating and cooking fuel revolution? How does revolution happen if no attention is given to food? Who’s feeding the revolutionaries and why can't cooking and eating be revolutionary, too?
Suppressing and undermining respect for cooking has been part of so-called “progress” since the 1880s. Laura Shapiro writes in Perfection Salad about the turn of the century home economic reformers: white women trying to revolutionize cooking by adopting science and technology. “As the old-fashioned kitchen was reduced in size and function until it became the kitchenette, more than one reformer was happy to predict that it was about to disappear entirely.” They cared less about the taste of a loaf bread and more about each loaf tasting the same, even if it was lower quality, as I’ve written about before. But what about the people who didn’t want to outsource their bread-making to the factory? Well, they were backward, old fashioned, definitely not revolutionary.
“Women’s interests are much more than...” It slipped so easily off Carbine’s tongue. A statement as obvious as it is patronizing. She wanted people to know Ms. was for the women who have better things to think about than food. In offering Ms. readers an escape from perceived and real drudgery, the editors also fall into a tired misogynist line of thinking. Food is women’s work, thus it’s repellant to a modern woman. “...how to make meatloaf 12 new ways.” I don’t eat or make meatloaf, but I am interested in 12 ways to make tomato sauce or tofu or … citrus olive oil cake. What about the woman who is a feminist and likes to cook? Not allowed. What about feeding my women, trans, and anomalous straight male friends? It’s worthy work in my opinion, but Ms. didn’t think so in the 70s.
I know the game the founding editors were playing and it was a particular one: To launch a commercially successful feminist magazine that could compete on newsstands with McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal in a time rife with blatant sexual harassment and misogyny. Writing about food would have been a liability, and to be fair they seem to follow their writer’s interests. But when I look back I like to think that they could have tried to extend their hand to the feminist home cook. It’s not that no one was writing about food as revolution.
Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971, the same year Ms. launched as a special issue tucked into New York Magazine. It’s a book written by a politically active white woman that could have fit into the editorial scope of Ms. As far as I can find online, Ms. didn’t cover Lappe until her 2011 book was published. What is a blind spot, what is prejudice, and what is attributable to a small team taking on the huge task of launching a feminist magazine in a male-dominated landscape?
Lappe’s son, Anthony, interviewing her for New York Magazine, asked how the book impacted her: “Realizing I wasn’t alone—that there were millions of people like me, wanting to find meaning in their daily acts.” This realization of a community through reading was a common theme of the early days of Ms. Women wrote into the magazine that they couldn’t believe they weren’t the only one who felt trapped, who was abused, who was lonely, and they found the magazine to be, as Steinem said, “A portable friend.” I wish the magazine that wanted to be a companion could have brought food into its pages.
The final of the three mini-docs focused on the feminist fights about porn and sex work, and what points of view were espoused by Ms. The editors, even years later, seemed pained by how difficult it was to hold conversations with women who held opposing views. Marcia Ann Gillespie, the first black woman to be editor-in-chief of Ms., said, “Here’s the thing Ms. is important for – we women need to challenge each other. We need to do the work.” I would broaden that to people in general need to question each other. Especially peers who share a focus. Food writers need to question each other. But so often questioning is met with hurt feelings that block dialogue. It’s tough out there as a writer and being questioned can be unpleasant. People “adopt this attitude of do no harm,” as Brandon Taylor put it. If I dare say my goal is change, though, not just personal success, then avoiding conflict protects the status quo – and it’s dull. There’s work to be done but it doesn’t need to be boring.
Back to the whole “omg women aren’t only interested in cooking” of it all, I know I’m being nitpicky. That’s the point. I understand that Carbine wasn’t trying to be insulting, but that’s part of the issue: The unquestioned dismissal of food as a serious subject of inquiry is a problem that perpetuates the cycles of injustice Ms. seeks to uproot. I can read and critique at the same time. Seeing food so easily overlooked is motivating me, and many others, to do things differently. Food writing is expanding, still imperfect, and rich grounds for change.
Paid Subscriber Chat Today at 1pm PST / 4pm EST
Join my paid subscriber chat on TOMATO TOMATO, the Discord server that Alicia Kennedy started and is the place to be for conversations on food, culture, ecology, and more. Find the link in my latest Substack chat or email me for the link once you upgrade to paid — we begin in The Good Enough Weekly channel at 1pm PST.
The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays, interviews, and blog posts on food, climate, and labor. Rooted in the Sonoran Desert.