Food for Thought

Cooking is incredibly hard. As a university student living away from home, it’s the first time I’ve actually realized how much time and effort is needed to make good food. Most days, I end up either spending hours in the kitchen to make a decent meal or giving up to eat some very questionable dishes. I struggle, and I rarely cook by myself. I have no idea how so many women, like my mother and grandmother and aunts, have the patience to make hearty, balanced breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for their families. It’s astonishing to think about how my mom spends most of her day in the kitchen, with barely any time to relax between cooking and other household chores. When I was younger, I used to ask her why she doesn’t just ask my dad for his help, and her response was always the same: “because I’m the wife and mother in this house”. Looking at it now, I’ve learnt that cooking and the culinary arts are just another tool used by society to strengthen the enforcement of gender roles.

Just looking at my own family, I can already see how cooking was an obstacle that stopped women from reaching their own dreams. I recently found out that my grandmother had wanted to pursue a post-secondary education when she was younger. Unfortunately, her father refused to allow her to study beyond her high school years and considered her lucky for even being allowed to study at all. Instead, after her last year in high school, she was pushed to focus her time and energy on learning household skills. Back then, a girl’s worth was determined by her ability to cook and serve her future husband and education was useless, even frowned upon. At first, I was really surprised because my grandmother has always seemed like her interests lay in cooking and making food, rather than topics like mathematics or sciences. Then, I realized the harsh truth is that my grandmother used to have passions of her own, but she was forced to leave them behind to fit into society’s role for her in the kitchen. It’s sad to think that her grandkids are always going to see her, and others just like her, as good wives and mothers whose love is cooking, and nothing more.

This idea of women belonging in the kitchen has continued to appear even nowadays too. One of my cousins isn’t allowed to participate in many extracurriculars because her immediate family doesn’t approve of her learning much outside the kitchen. Meanwhile, her brother isn’t allowed to help out with cooking or other household chores. My uncle seems to think that being in the kitchen will somehow decrease my cousin’s masculinity. So, not only are girls stopped from exploring other interests and forced to like cooking, boys are also stopped from exploring their interests in the culinary arts. This goes on to translate into later life, where the men don’t know how to cook due to a lack of experience and the women are forced to cook due to it being their only experience. For example, my mom has had no choice but to cook for my dad because my dad does not know much about cooking. Despite the fact that he is dependent on my mom for his meals, my dad never seems to appreciate my mom’s food and always complains about why it wasn’t made exactly as he liked. Never once does he consider that cooking wasn’t one of her interests, or even offer her help, despite the fact that my mom works a full-time job outside while my dad works from home. Consequently, by restricting who learns to cook and who doesn’t, society’s view of the kitchen helps enforce gender roles, and on top of that, creates a dependency in which women are forced to help their male relatives in a specific way.

Astonishingly, the professional field of culinary arts continues to be male-dominated. According to the U.S. Labor Department, more than half of culinary graduates are women; however, in 2019, only 23.9% of head chefs in the States were women1,2. This disparity is only more apparent in higher-level positions of the food industry. This is really crazy to me, as the kitchen has always been traditionally seen as the women’s place in many households. It seems as though cooking for their family isn’t considered to be a “real” job, and the moment leadership, power, and authority come into play, men are still given the advantage over women. Additionally, many food service industries place an emphasis on female dress code and impose societal standards of “pretty” and “beautiful”. A very prominent example of this is Hooters, a relatively famous corporate restaurant, which is known to sexualize workers who are women. This, along with the difference in power due to men being in higher positions of power, builds an environment in which women in the food industry suffer from harassment, not only from coworkers and employers, but from customers as well3.

Overall, there are still many changes that need to be made both in perspectives and workplaces in order to create a society in which all genders can thrive, and this is also true for the world of food and cooking. Slowly, but surely, we are starting to break out of the gendered stereotypes about the kitchen, with more and more men helping out in their home’s kitchens. We need to realize that cooking isn’t just a societal “role” that must be fulfilled by someone. Cooking is a basic life skill, one that we would all benefit from learning, no matter what gender we identify as.

by Rijuta Gohil '23 (Blog Subcommittee Member)

References

1. Chefs & Head cooks [Internet]. Data USA. 2019 [cited 2022Jan22]. Available from: https://datausa.io/profile/soc/chefs-head-cooks

2. Creative V. The Future of Food Is Female [Internet]. Eater. Vox Creative Next; 2019 [cited 2022Jan19]. Available from: https://www.eater.com/ad/20908826/gender-inequality-in-the-food-industry

3. Johnson SK, Madera JM. Sexual Harassment Is Pervasive in the Restaurant Industry. Here’s What Needs to Change [Internet]. Harvard Business Review. 2018 [cited 2022Jan24]. Available from: https://hbr.org/2018/01/sexual-harassment-is-pervasive-in-the-restaurant-industry-heres-what-needs-to-change