The power of cooking and writing about it

Internalized patriarchy kept me away from food writing

When I got married and moved to WA for my husband’s grad school, I missed cooking for my three younger brothers. I struggled to make the appropriate amount of food for two people. Because of college and work, I didn’t cook for “the boys” as often as when I was younger and we lived together, but when I did they invariably ate with the gratitude and gusto of starving animals. It’s a powerful feeling, feeding hungry people. 

I make my quiet brother roll his eyes and exclaim with delight when he bites into the tres leches cake for his birthday. I make my loud brother go silent with pleasure when he eats the roasted carrots with his fingers before the meal starts. My youngest brother trusts me to make pickles very strong, just as he likes.

Chopping, stirring, tasting, tasting, tasting again, until the dish is done – the ‘doneness’ being my understanding of my loved one. I taste first so that they will enjoy what I serve them. It is intimate. And it is powerful.

Editing someone else’s story is similar to cooking for another person. I hand over my tastes and ideas to their vision. I work in submission to their goals and tastes. What I’d do if I was the author of the piece doesn’t matter. Deciphering their directive “Fix this, please” – as with responding to “I’m hungry” – shows me the way. It’s a dance: I edit and return it. They agree with my changes or they don’t. We talk about what is and isn’t working. I take leave of them with a better understanding of their hard to pin down idea that’s flitting about in their head as real and ephemeral as a moth. I work again, to their taste – trying to satisfy them and perhaps surprise them with options they hadn’t thought of yet. There are great hopes, false starts, and misunderstandings, just as in cooking.

Cooking (and eating) and writing (and reading) have been twin threads through my life. Things that I’ve taken seriously, so seriously sometimes I laugh at myself. I’ve been writing about food privately for a long time. I’ve tried to write about it publicly in the past, but it’s taken a long time to declare it as a primary focus.

I read An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler last week and only a few pages in, the page blurred as I tried to see through tears. The sun was low in the sky and I was nursing my two-month old and reading to escape from a jarring encounter with misogyny. The details don’t matter. All I need to say is that I was reminded of how some people and my culture view me: a stay at home mom with a writing hobby who would be better at her role if she set the notebook aside and cleaned more.

Anger is not a deep enough word for the experience of becoming a mother in a society that views the work done at home as unimportant.

When I was in journalism school, I pursued stories about food and idolized food magazine writers. My identity as a journalist lent seriousness to whatever subject I chose. When my identity was overshadowed by the role of mother, it became too much. My insecurities led me to focus on writing for tech and business outlets. Cooking and being interested in food felt like an admittance of the powerlessness of my roles, my gender. I so wanted to be taken seriously, and I shied away from writing about food for this reason.

It was easier to tell people I was a freelance tech writer than a food writer, all while deeply valuing food. Fear made a hypocrite of me, but I’m not the first. It was also that my identity felt so fractured that I didn’t want to write close to where I was – I wanted the distance. Sometimes I tried to merge my identities: The first story I pitched to the tech site where I was a freelance daily reporter was about a new wearable fitness tracker that tracked menstrual cycles. It was quickly shot down by my editor because it wasn’t within their focus. I learned quickly and didn’t pitch another woman-adjacent article for a long time. 

I read Amanda Svachula’s article in the NYT about women writers who worked there in the 50s and 60s. “Historically, women who came to The Times were immediately placed in the women’s pages, informally known as the “four Fs.”” The Four Fs were: “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings” The women’s pages were a way of keeping an imaginary line drawn. Important man stuff on one side, silly lady stuff on the other. But, when stopping to think for even a moment, the farce is made clear: Everyone, regardless of gender, relies on the Four Fs to live. But this ridiculous designating of some subjects as innately feminine, and therefore less worthy of attention, persists. Amanda Montei writes, interviewed in The Mother Lode Substack, “... culturally, we continue to venerate forms of work performed outside the home, for the market, and devalue everyday maintenance work.”

When I became a mother and felt the full devaluation of the work I was doing caring for my child, caring for our home because I was the adult who was home most, I was furious every time I felt myself being treated differently. Once a neighbor (middle aged, white male, fire chief of our small town), ran into my son and I at the mailbox. We chatted a bit, and as we parted, he said, “You must lounge around all the time.” I was dumbfounded and stunned by his offhanded dismissal. He didn’t see the work I was doing. How could he? He probably was never raised to value it, and never chose to open his eyes to it as an adult. He probably only valued work done out in the world in shiny trucks. 

Rage is a right that was long denied to anyone but men, and a weapon that can turn on whoever uses it. On Wednesday, Cameron Steele published an essay, Figures of Force: Mothers, Daughters, and Angry Affect in 20th and 21st-Century Memoir, the first part in a four-week series. Cameron writes, “The self-same women who were calling forth their comrades-in-gender to their rightful inheritance of rage, were also, in the life writing adjacent to their polemical entreaties, critiquing and worrying over the surfacing of this wrath—how the feminists’ very appropriation of anger elides its participation in and reliance on what, as we’ve seen, Weil calls a dehumanizing force, once solely wielded by the patriarchy.” 

I am so grateful Cameron published this newsletter this week, when I was sorting through my thoughts and going in circles in my notebook. The trick of power, or force, is thinking that if I had it, I’d do something better with it than the person oppressing me. I still believe it in some ways, but more and more I’m trying to reject the idea that force as I’ve seen used by patriarchal leaders ever has any good outcome. I want to think of power as the power to make someone feel loved when I feed or edit them – and I want that power respected.

I followed Cameron’s reference to Simone Weil and read The Iliad, or The Poem of Force. Written in 1945, Weil argues that the “true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.” She defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” Force turns a body into a corpse. But she also writes that force can “turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive,” which does great damage to the soul. For the soul “was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.” When I am seen as my role of ‘mother,’ I am a thing – denied my full humanity.

This quote from M.F.K. Fisher in A Gastronomical Me, sits at the beginning of one of the chapters in An Everlasting Meal: “The stove, the bins, the cupboards, I had learned forever, make an inviolable throne room. From them I ruled; temporarily I controlled. I felt powerful, and I loved that feeling.” I like feeling powerful, and cooking is one place where I can harness power, even though it is temporary. Weil writes, “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.”

Attempting to prove my work worthy of respect by contorting myself into a form this patriarchal and capitalist society can recognize is a losing game. I knew that nine years ago, when I became a mother. But it’s one thing to know something intellectually and another to embody a new role and experience how that shifts reality. In the NYT, Maya Salam writes about the book Why Does Patriarchy Persist? by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, “Women and men, they say, internalize patriarchy without realizing it, pushing aside their best judgment and sacrificing their needs in order to fall in line with how they think they're supposed to behave.” 

For so many reasons, I thought that writing about “serious” topics such as business and technology would win me more respect as a freelancer who was also a mother. But they’ve all proven false and I’m back to what I’ve always valued: cooking, with more knowledge and respect for all the women before me who cooked and never got their due respect. Writing about domestic matters may be less venerated than writing about adventure on the sea by some, but I know that there is plenty of adventure at home. There is a world in a home, and the food cooked in it. I can’t make someone value domesticity. But I can bring as much attention as I can gather back, again and again, to the deep well of value in cooking and writing about what happens in my home kitchen.

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Reading - Everyone mentioned above, plus Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde (found on eBay) and Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Mertonby Sister Therese Lentfoehr.

Writing - This, and just barely! It is late on Friday and it’s been a wild week.

Cooking - Oatmeal and lots of it.