Last week, Matt Yglesias questioned celebrity cooks who push home cooking. Matt wrote that restaurant food doesn't necessarily have to be healthier than home cooking. The push for home cooked meals also puts the burden on women to make the meals, and women just don't have the time any more.
Russell writes that if men scale back their work obligations, they can do the cooking, too.
I'm glad that Russell wrote this post, because I've been turning it over in my brain, too, this week.
One of the goals that I had when my job ended was to spend more time cooking good food and less time at the drive through of Wendy's. When my work obligations were the busiest, I bought crappy take-out food two or three times a week. One day of the week, I scrounged a dinner from my mom. I cooked one day. I think the rest of time we ate leftovers or Trader Joe's or air. I can't remember.
That's not unusual. A friend of mine, a single mother who has a tough schedule as a doctor, feeds her kids fast food five days a week.
Now that I'm home, my goal has been to cut out the fast food. We go out to a restaurant (mid-priced, kid friendly places) once a week, but no take out.
I'm doing more cooking for a lot of reasons. The quality of my food is much superior. (A rant on the poor quality of suburban food is for another day.) I want to support local farms. My kids can eat a greater variety of foods and healthier food. I'm teaching them how to cook; Jonah learned how to make banana muffins yesterday.
Surprisingly, cost isn't a huge factor. We can eat at Wendy's for $15; the ingredients for dinner can cost that much, if I go to the good place for the fish.
There are a lot of excellent reasons to cook at home. However, it takes a lot of time. Food planning, shopping, preparing takes about two hours a day. I start preparing the meal at around 4:00 or earlier if we have to work around a soccer schedule. If I was coming home at 6:30 with Steve, it would be far too late to cook. Or I would just be too tired to stuff the chicken or make the chili.
People who work traditional hours just don't have time to shop at the farmers markets and home cook, especially if they have kids. They may have 20 minutes to open some cans, which helps explain the popularity of Rachel Ray.
Sure, it would be nice if everybody worked less and therefore had the time to do these things, but most people don't have the option to work less. Steve could never leave work early to make dinner. (He does cook on the weekend.) Many families can't afford to have one parent stay at home.
So, is the push for home-cooked, organic meals somehow anti-feminist?
Is this an unreachable goal for most working families? Is this just one
more unfair expectation being placed on women? Can you be both a feminist and a food Nazi at the same time?
Apt. 11d 
I don’t really think it’s strictly a feminist issue. It’s a matter of priorities–there are ways to move time and money around to make all home-cooked food if you’re willing to make the effort, like cooking on the weekend and then eating the same thing three or four days in a row. Most of us like to use our time off work on, well, leisure, though, and we’re very hooked on variety. So we prefer to put our money into takeout or other solutions.
Honestly my husband’s an OK cook but is not interested in giving brain space to the dinner problem. On the other hand, he wouldn’t care if we ate spaghetti or sandwiches four days a week, whereas I would feel all resentful and disadvantaged. So in some sense I am creating the need for that extra labor.
Finally and more frivolously Mark Bittman and Nigel Slater are both great for 30-minute meals from pantry staples.
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There area number of very good pasta dishes that don’t involve canned sauce (I’ve nothing special against that, these just don’t involve it) that take a half our or less to make, and are very good. One of the few very good things I can make is a Japanese curry that takes well less than an hour. Much of the time eating out will take close to that amount of time by the time you get people together, get in car, drive, and come back. I don’t really care how people eat, but there are lots of quite good and reasonably healthy things that can be made in a pretty short time.
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I perceive this as more of a classist thing than a feminist thing, although I can see where it could come down on either side. (Can you tell my husband cooks?) But I am very, very tired of everyone piling on moms and telling them about yet another thing they’re doing wrong.
I am a stickler about grocery budgets and I find that cooking at home saves TONS of money. Tons. And this is compared to eating out at the low-end taqueria. But I also don’t cook fish. YMMV.
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“Surprisingly, cost isn’t a huge factor. We can eat at Wendy’s for $15; the ingredients for dinner can cost that much, if I go to the good place for the fish.”
If the four of us go to McDonald’s, it’s generally around $19 (including a salad or two). Our home cooked dinners (generally stir-fry with chicken made by both my husband and me) run $10-12, although on a beans-and-rice night, it’s probably no more than $4 for the four of us, plus leftovers for lunches. Meanwhile, we can all four eat at the cafeterias for $12 total, so that’s what we generally do when the cafeterias are open. The faculty club has an excellent lunch buffet for $5 a head, so my husband and I like to go there for lunch dates while the kids are in school. (As I’ve said before, this was how communism was supposed to look.) We have fast food when traveling or squished between appointments, but I prefer to save that money in order to go to a real restaurant. I’d like to patronize our local Thai restaurant more, but it’s just not there, and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. Oh well, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
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My wife got ambitious and made chicken marsala last night. Very good, but usually it is simpler meal for (i.e. broiled chicken breasts, frozen veg, starch). When I get ambitious and it is cold out, I roast a chicken with potatoes, carrots and onions. That does take time, but not that much effort.
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Organization makes home cooking happen. Plan ahead. More time cooking, less time food shopping.
I cooked nightly from scratch for years after marriage and before having kids. I usually got home between 6 and 6:30, and cooked until my husband got home an hour or more later. I went to the Farmer’s Market during my lunch hour or on Saturday mornings. My mom does complicated, from-scratch meals every night of the week after getting home at 5:30, and did so throughout the years of raising 4 kids. Lots of people get home from work well before the dinner hour.
When you have tiny kids it’s hard, because they go to bed so early. Who wants to give up prime playtime with babies, especially if you’ve been away from them all day?
But there are other ways to cook — the crock-pot, once-a-month cooking, big batches made on weekends that you eat throughout the week, 20 minute meals a la the Desperation Dinners ladies, and Let’s Dish (which I’ve used and love.) Laura recently bashed grocery delivery services and weekly grocery shopping, but most of the frugal home cooks I know limit food shopping to once a week or less.
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I didn’t mean to bash weekly food shopping, Mrs. Ewer. I just said that I wasn’t organized enough to do that. I’ve never been organized enough for a weekly food menu. I’m a last minute cooker, which certain adds a lot more time to the operation.
I’ve only recently been able to push dinner time to 6:30, when Steve walks in the door. For years, the kids had to eat at 5:30, because they went to sleep for the night at 7:30.
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Laura, this is a great post. You took one little sliver of my ramblings, and gave it the attention it deserves. You really know how to blog.
I agree that it’s more of a class issue that a feminist issue; the only reason why it becomes a feminist issue is because very few people–or, at least, very few people who are both modern in their views of the responsibilities of men and women, but which also have more-or-less ordinary heterosexual relationships–are either capable of or willing to take their families out of the consumer economy, with its demands for specialization and the long work-week and everything else. The time to cook for yourself–and thus, more often than not, both save money and eat healthier–is going to be a lot more available when either spouse can be at home with the kids and plan the meals, or when both spouses have jobs that are flexible, or when you live nearby friends or family that you can trust, and are equally flexible with their time. If you lack that–as the great majority of middle- and upper-class suburbanites do–than yes, the call to “cook at home!” is going to be, rightly, received as another source of pressure on women.
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One other comment: the idea that home-cooked food is healthier has not panned out in our house. Since I don’t have time to grocery shop more than once a week, by Wednesday night we’re living on leftovers and the shelf-stable stuff. No salads late in the week, no fresh vegetables (beyond the ubiquitous baby carrots), very little fresh fruit. Tons of pasta, potatoes, frozen veg, bean soup out of the crock pot with rolls out of the freezer. It’s economical, yes, but my youngest daughter continues to have weight problems that have not been ameliorated by this. And the fact that my husband and I spend our late afternoons cooking means we don’t have time to put the kids in soccer, where they could get more exercise. So it cuts both ways.
I suppose it’s better than Wendy’s every night, but that’s not what we were eating when we used to eat out. We were eating Thai, or Mexican, or Japanese.
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It’s pretty easy to see why people resent being pressured to do thing like cook at home, whether it’s a feminist issue or a class issue. Our society is built around an over-prioritization of work which is difficult to break away from. Unfortunately, it really is good advice. It is vastly cheaper for the same quality of meal and, relatedly, it is usually better for you. I think people underestimate the costs in money and time of eating out because it is less stressful to get take-out instead of planning a meal with kids running around. Starting from when I was 14, I started getting meals ready before my parents got home per my mother’s instructions. Even hamburger helper with thawed frozen vegetables is better for you than a typical destination like Chili’s, much less Wendy’s.
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Laura, I thought of your last post about online/delivered grocery shopping as I drove home from the store in the rain after wrestling my 2 1/2 year old through the grocery stores (carts too wet/cold for my darling’s cotton leggings). “Squeeze the produce, she says!” I thought to myself. “Sniff the melons!”
As Amelia began to drag her feet and actually lay down in the aisles (cause it’s fun!), I had to pick up her 30 pounds and carry her under my arm, hefting the shopping basket along side, and there were no hands left to squeeze the peppers. And definitely no trip to Whole Foods the for special organic food. Or to Trader Joe’s for their wonderful fortified sugar free applesauce.
But is was a cheap, healthy meal. And then I did the dishes after. And then went to bed to get ready for my long morning commute. As my generally wonderful and chore sharing husband watched Parks and Recreation.
I’m with you, sisters.
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That doesn’t sound so bad to me, jen, especially if you consider that nutrition averages out over the week. Lettuce salads are overrated for nutrition anyway.
Even “healthy” restaurant food tends to have more oil and salt than home cooking does. Thai for example is packed with coconut milk which is super-fatty.
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What we really need to do at my house is break up with carbs. And I’m not holding my breath.
BTW welcome back Mrs. Ewer!! It’s been ages since I’ve seen you comment.
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Since I don’t have time to grocery shop more than once a week, by Wednesday night we’re living on leftovers and the shelf-stable stuff. No salads late in the week, no fresh vegetables (beyond the ubiquitous baby carrots), very little fresh fruit.
Jen, I’m a little confused how this could be the case, unless you have little or no refrigeration in your house. Green onions, mushrooms, apples, cantaloupes, broccoli, bean sprouts–all of it will keep for at least several days, if not longer, in the crisper, or in a sealed bag. Do we just have low standards for food quality at our house? I know I do compared to my wife, but even she is okay with peppers a week old. (Though that’s a bad example, since we grow a ton of peppers every year and then freeze them.)
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I happen to love cooking and am getting pretty good at the planning. I’m spending way too much on food though, all the way around. Thanks to Mint.com, I now know that I spend about 1/3 of our money on groceries and eating out. That’s a lot of money. But I’m pretty frugal, really when I see what other people spend.
I’ve taken to writing down what meals I can make out of what I have on the fridge and then crossing them off when we eat them. Lasagna stayed on forever since the leftovers stayed on there forever. My staple meal now involves a meat, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, often thrown into a crock pot. I have started saving chicken stock.
Tonight is kind of an epic fail as I forgot to take the sausage out of the freezer to make sausage pizza, so we’ll have pasta. We almost never do salads because no one here really likes them.
Mr. Geeky will cook if you ask him to, but planning, not so much. I’m trying to get the kids involved more and they helped me make fried chicken the other night (which yes, is pretty unhealthy, but we had sweet potatoes on the side). Instead of thinking of it as cooking, I try to imagine I’m Julia Child or that I’m on Top Chef. Seriously, chopping an onion or cutting up a chicken feels very different when you think of yourself as a professional. Which may mean that I’m making professional a role that is a conservative stereotype. Sigh. There’s no escaping it.
I wholeheartedly agree with Russel’s point in his post that this whole issue might be ameliorated if men (and women,too) focused less on their careers. And, of course, some are able to slow down and place their focus elsewhere, but that’s not the norm and it certainly goes against what most workplaces want out of both men and women.
It’s funny, because of all the serious relationships I’ve been in, Mr. Geeky was the only man who didn’t cook. Had I married either of the men I spent more than a year with, I would probably not be the one cooking and they were both obsessive about natural, local food. Or it would have been a joint effort, and I think that’s the more feminist position, to divide the labor up equitably, meal by meal, if possible.
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Yes, welcome back Mrs. Ewer!
Julie G, I hear you. I shopped with two young kids for many year. One of those kids has a tendency to wander off without telling anyone. One time, Steve lost Ian in King’s. They had to shut down the store. A full lock down. Ian was just checking out the small print on the back of the DVDs by the checkout lane.
As much as it’s a pain, it’s actually really good for the small one to go shopping w/you. It’s an outing with stimulation and new experiences. The more she does it, the better she’ll get at it.
The Golden Rule is “She Who Does The Cooking, Never Cleans Up”. Feel free to share with the hubby.
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Lots of good comments here.
Melissa grew up in a family where the meals were planned out weekly in advance, and the shopping list built accordingly. My mom just threw stuff into the bags, and we worked from that. Melissa’s system is better, and that’s the one we’ve used for our marriage.
I’m the grocery shopper in the family. Originally we went together, and then, once the kids starting coming, I went alone, and then with one or more of the kids. It’s a regularly Saturday thing; I won’t say they look forward to it (I’m kind of a boring shopper), but they know that we expect it of them, and we think it’s been good for them. Melissa hasn’t ever been solely responsible for the weekly shopping, and aside from short little runs for this or that, she hasn’t spent much time in a grocery store for over a decade.
“She Who Does The Cooking, Never Cleans Up.” That’s a good rule. Especially now that we have a couple of kids old enough to start on the regular dishwashing cycle.
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I do think that marketing, both of the gourmet/whole foods type and the fast food type, has massively conditioned the American palate to constant variety, and that makes home cooking a much greater chore. My pediatrician pointed out that kids can survive very healthily on a very small range of fruits and vegetables and it’s not like we’re all going to come down with scurvy if we don’t have a different green AND yellow vegetable at every dinnertime.
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“Jen, I’m a little confused how this could be the case, unless you have little or no refrigeration in your house. Green onions, mushrooms, apples, cantaloupes, broccoli, bean sprouts–all of it will keep for at least several days, if not longer, in the crisper, or in a sealed bag.”
I’m with Jen on this one. We go through the good stuff pretty fast, even with all those dinners at the cafeteria. Twice a week shopping fits better with our consumption patterns. I’ve been experimenting with sprouting, though, so I can make my own fresh veggies within about 48 hours. I worked through a 10 seed variety sampler, finding that lentil sprouts taste exactly like you’d expect but that alfalfa, clover, and radish sprouts are pretty good (the latter in moderation). So I just bought a pound each of alfalfa and radish seeds. You can buy this stuff in oxygen-free 35 lb. buckets, for all your post-apocalyptic needs.
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I’m with Jen on this one. We go through the good stuff pretty fast, even with all those dinners at the cafeteria. Twice a week shopping fits better with our consumption patterns.
I’d still argue that Jen is overstating the difficulty of being able to purchase on one trip enough food to have the means for home-cooking available for a week, but I don’t dispute that twice-a-week patterns, or more, are probably superior. That’s what we did in Germany, as did most of the folks we knew. Of course, you start looking at how they do things in another country, and you’ve got a whole bunch of issues that may be causes, or may be effects. Plentiful local markets? Walkable cities? Tiny refrigerators? More limited palates? (I tell you, the Italian, Chinese, and Mexican food stank in Germany.) It’s hard to say what’s the chicken and what’s the egg.
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On Russell’s comment re: fresh fruit and veg, this is a result of the nexus of once-weekly shopping, a smallish fridge, and picky eaters. The stuff the kids will reliably eat is invariably the stuff that doesn’t hold up over time. And then my pattern of massive shopping followed by massive cooking on the weekends results in a packed, packed fridge. And yet by Thursday evening, when we traditionally eat leftovers, it’s all gone. Note that both kids and hubby pack lunch every day. It adds up to a lot of food. Thank god for the basement freezer.
(I now look back in awe at my Aunt Helen, who had four sons and her farmer husband, each of whom who had to have been consuming 4000 calories a day. She bought milk four gallons at a time, three times a week, and stashed it in a special fridge in the mud room. Wow.)
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How lucky all of you First World shoppers are!
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Doug — at least you can get excellent fresh herbs and some of the world’s best tomatoes where you are! Remind me to teach you in Russian and Georgian: “one kilo of your very best and freshest meat.”
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I don’t know what shopping is like in Georgia but when I lived in Russia I liked many things about it quite a bit. (When I was down on the black sea, too, I loved the fresh vegitables and the local cheeses from the markets.)
Two things make home cooking easier for us. One is that the main place we do our shopping, a sort of little hippy co-op grocery store, is just two blocks away. The hours are not late (it closes at 8pm), it’s small, and I really don’t enjoy “cooperating” that much, but it’s nice to have it close by. It’s one of the advantages of the city and my neighborhood in general. Secondly, my wife has a great ability (that I lack) to be able to look at what we have in the fridge and figure out how to make something good and easy from it. I lack that skill, myself, but because I know the sorts of things she’s likely to enjoy using in cooking I’m able to do the shopping fairly effectively.
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Like a few other folks have said, if you “don’t have time” to cook, it’s not usually because the time isn’t there. I can cook a decent meal in half an hour, and if I can do it, just about anyone can. Maybe you’re disorganized, maybe you don’t consider it a real meal if the radishes aren’t cut into flower shapes, maybe you just don’t like to cook. Most often, people choose to prioritize things other than cooking, and that’s a totally respectable choices. But it’s annoying to those of us who have always cooked from scratch for economic and health reasons, despite having kids and full-time jobs, to hear people say it’s just not possible.
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I’m a half-scratch cook, as was my mother. Tuna-noodle casserole with Campbells cream of mushroom soup substituting for the nice white sauce I ought to make is perfectly okay, as is using various other flavored goos (look at the little bottles in your local Indian/Pakistani grocery or canned enchilada sauce) to take you from ingredients to dishes.
There was a long period when my boys were in day care when I shopped at the grocery on the way home, picked them up, brought them home, and cooked dinner until my wife came home. They had decided that what they wanted to do after day care was to watch Shrek. Every evening. For months. I think they may have watched Shrek a hundred times. That got a lot of dinners cooked.
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What’s wrong with frozen vegetables? I’m not saying they’re as good as fresh, but rejecting them out of hand is part of the problem here, I think– if we can’t be cooking fresh vegetables, we might as well count Tater Tots as as the veg of the day. We eat plenty of frozen vegetables around here, partly because I often find them on sale or with coupon or both, partly because I shop once a week, and partly because we have two full-time working parents for the first time this year. But I don’t think of frozen vegetables as that big a compromise. I’m much more fretful over the number of times we’ve had mac & cheese from a box or delivered pizza since school started.
I’m looking into batch cooking and stuff like that and trying to be better about meal planning before I shop too, but farmer’s market? I gave that up a while ago.
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“What’s wrong with frozen vegetables?”
I’ve read more than once that frozen vegetables are often better and fresher than the “fresh” vegetables in the produce aisle.
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Nearly all of the broccoli we eat is frozen as well as all of the peas. These two vegetables probably constitute 75% of the green vegetables eaten in our house.
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I think I agree that most of it is not so much time as planning and habit, but I think those habits and, frankly, tastes can be really hard to develop.
FTR we both work FT mostly out of the home.
For us, by which I mean me ’cause I do the food planning, shopping, and vast majority of the everyday cooking, it’s really not a huge time commitment on a nightly basis.
We got a CSA farm share this spring/summer/fall and will be getting a meat/egg/root veggie share throughout the winter. I make my own bread a lot of the time, in the breadmaker. We don’t eat much processed stuff or eat out a lot, although we’re flexible if it’s going to really ease a difficult time.
So how do I do it? Well over time I’ve developed a way of planning, prepping, and eating that works for me and my family. We’re all pretty flexible. While I have some recipes I love, I often adapt them or make some up or make new ones so that I don’t have to only have broccoli; cauliflower will do, etc.
Most weeks we have at least one stew, hearty soup, or meal component that comes out of the crockpot. Alongside fresh breadmaker bread it’s very yummy.
About once a week we have something that either resembles breakfast (omlettes, french toast) or is something like fish with couscous& peas or black bean and corn salad – pantry/freezer meals that are super quick and easy.
I usually make Monday’s meal on Sunday and then reheat it Monday; to do that efficiently it’s usually related to Sunday, like I might make two casseroles that cook together and even share some ingredients.
I wash and chop ahead of time when it makes sense to do so. We kind of have family time in the kitchen on weekends where a lot of that takes place.
I also have developed over time a few what I think of as “food cycles,” like roast the chicken one night (make rice on the stove while it’s roasting), take it apart that night and have chicken fried rice the next night; put bones in the crockpot that night, and the next morning take the bones out, put potatoes and leeks in the stock right there and turn it back on for soup that night. Throw in butternut squash too if the CSA has delivered one.
When not drowning in CSA produce I love frozen veggies, both my own and bought. I don’t buy into the “all or nothing” thing; there are not really any additives in the ones I buy so who cares.
And we’re still working on this but we’re trying to develop a “grilled cheese and decent quality canned or homemade frozen soup” habit over an “order pizza habit.” Both are probably pretty close nutritionally and in time and effort, esp if you factor in expense.
Anyways all that is probably overlong and specific but I think my point is that I don’t come up with 365 new Top Chef dishes every year; I adapt and fall back on old favourites — by which I mean ones that fit into our lifestyle — a fair amount and experiment when it suits me best.
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We are limited most by what we can carry. Cooking spaghetti takes a lot of water and carrying water up five flights of stairs means we don’t make a lot of pasta!
(in Dhaka for a year)
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For now, with two of my kids quite picky (the five and seven year olds), I’ve settled uncomfortably with a small range of meals that I cook, possibly not even as many as seven. However, it makes it very easy to shop. I found out this week that my oldest values us all sitting down together, and I don’t think it matters what we eat.
As for the philosophical aspect of this post, I do struggle with it. I feel that I can provide meals that are healthier and cheaper, but the cost is less time to pursue my own interests, and on top of that I don’t get much appreciation for the food. My husband is not home in time to cook and has very little interest in it. He can throw together a meal if it is required (for instance, Sunday night yoga class). Our church provides a $15 family meal every Monday, and I think I need to take advantage of it again.
Naively, I didn’t realize I was signing up to be cook/housekeeper when I had children.
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JennG– Oooh, breakfast for dinner! That is definitely one of my best ways to make the week’s dinners work. We had homemade pumpkin waffles with bacon for dinner last night, and the recipe makes enough that we’ll have the waffles again Tuesday night. I make a good cream-cheese stuffed french toast that makes an excellent breakfast for dinner too, with bacon and fresh fruit. We make a good pot roast in the crockpot, and a good crockpot pulled pork also for sandwiches.
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I like to cook, so using up Sunday afternoon on cooking counts as hobby time to me. Yesterday I made a crock pot stew, a mess of collard greens and kale (with a smoked ham hock which I fished out after half an hour and will use on black-eyed peas tonight), baked assorted summer squash (scraped all the flesh into a bowl in the fridge for dinners all week), and a hashbrown casserole (just frozen hashbrowns, sour cream, cheddar cheese, and sliced green onions). With the black-eyed peas tonight that’s a weeks’ worth of assorted meals and sides.
Add some pre-marinated kebobs from the market one night and some baked chicken breasts another night and we’ll eat good this week without a lot of nightly work.
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