Moral people cook meals at home, immoral people get takeout

[ttt]

Yes, I just changed the title to make it more clickbaity. 

Some really good points about using "eating healthy" as a code for "work harder (women)." 


op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/is-america-ready-for-healthy-convenience-food/


“If healthy food were more convenient,” asks Olga Khazan of The Atlantic, “would more people eat it?”

Ms. Khazan’s exploration of Farmer’s Fridge, a start-up that sells salads from vending machines, suggests that the answer is maybe — while one mall shopper she talks to praises Farmer’s Fridge’s offerings, another calls salads “rabbit food.” But her investigation, and indeed much conversation around food, cooking and eating today, suggests another question: If healthy food were convenient, would we still consider it healthy?

Put another way, while debates around the virtues of home cooking often center on health, are they about morality as well?

“I think the question of women’s labor sort of haunts these questions around convenience food,” Tracey A. Deutsch, a professor of history and the author of “Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century,” told Op-Talk. “Is it ever morally O.K., according to some people, for food to be put on the table that didn’t require a lot of work?”

“There’s a long history to being suspicious of food that doesn’t require work,” she explained. As immigrants from Europe arrived in American cities in the early 20th century, they were often “encouraged to become more frugal and healthier by adopting what was put forward as American ways of cooking.” This included baking bread at home rather than buying it, purchasing whole chickens rather than cut-up chicken pieces, and making stews rather than noodle or potato dishes.

Cooking schools and high school classes of the time aimed to teach families, especially those who were working-class or recent immigrants, “how to cook in ways that were deemed more nutritious,” Dr. Deutsch said. And while the lessons weren’t always wrong from a health perspective, she is struck by the fact that “in the face of dramatic changes in the food system and dramatic changes in people’s lives and in retailing, the advice has stayed the same.”

“What we see now,” she said, “is really the repetition of a very long history of criticizing eating habits that seem non-normative or not to have required the right kind of labor.”

The act of getting takeout — and the controversy surrounding it — may have a long history, too. Katherine Leonard Turner, the author of “How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century,” told Op-Talk that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, working-class people frequently bought prepared food from saloons, bakeries or delis, and “it definitely was seen as a bad idea by middle-class reformers.” These reformers saw prepared food as unhealthy and as a poor use of money. But they also saw women who bought food outside the home as “kind of giving up on their job.”

“A true woman devoted herself completely to housekeeping and management and all that home food production,” said Dr. Turner, “and so they thought if working-class women were buying food from the deli instead of cooking at home that they were not being womanly.”

These judgments reflected class divisions as well as gender roles. “At the time, the definition of a good middle-class woman was that you didn’t work for wages,” Dr. Turner explained. “Women imagined themselves as creating the home as kind of a refuge from commerce. So when working-class women were buying cooked food and bringing it home, the middle-class women saw that as not just lazy but actually defiling the purity of the home.”

Of course, she noted, middle-class women had an easier time maintaining that purity, since they often had household help, and their husbands made enough income that they didn’t have to work. Working-class married women, meanwhile, “were doing piecework or they were doing laundry or they were keeping boarders, they were doing something to bring in income, and that’s less time to spend cooking food.”

She sees several parallels between these attitudes and the messages we see around food today. “Despite so much progress, I think we still see cooking as women’s job.” And, she said, just as in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those who want to change Americans’ eating habits tend to focus on individuals rather than on systemic issues. “People say, ‘oh, well, those poor people are eating McDonald’s because they’re lazy, or they’re undisciplined or they can’t control themselves,’” she said. “When you focus on individual people, you lose track of the structural issues which make it in some ways a rational choice to buy pre-cooked food,” and “you miss the food system itself that has made industrially processed food incredibly cheap and very, very heavily advertised today. It’s kind of unfair to blame people for buying food that is advertised to them literally every minute of the day.”

Today, moms across the class spectrum may feel a sense of judgment if they fail to provide home-cooked meals for their kids. In research published earlier this year, Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott and Joslyn Brenton found that poor and middle-class women alike worried (albeit sometimes for different reasons) about their ability to make healthy, home-cooked meals for their children. “The message that good parents — and in particular, good mothers — cook for their families dovetails with increasingly intensive and unrealistic standards of ‘good’ mothering,” they wrote.

As a working mom, the lawyer and blogger Chatón Turner is intimately familiar with today’s motherhood standards. “If you’re not spending the time making homemade lasagna,” she said, “then people look at you askew, as if somehow you’re not really invested in your kids and their development.” This attitude, she explained, comes from “people who judge you for working.” The expectation: “You have to work and do everything that you would do if you were a stay-at-home mom. You can’t just throw some stuff together.”

Around the holidays, she noted, such expectations can ramp up even further: “The traditions surround women spending exorbitant amounts of time in the kitchen creating these elaborate traditional meals for their families, and men get to play football.”

Outside judgment, she said, isn’t the reason she makes home-cooked meals for her family, “but I do understand the pressure that moms have who don’t want to say out loud that they let their kids eat at McDonald’s.”

Ms. Turner thinks grocery stores could help take some of the pressure off by selling more pre-chopped ingredients. “You seem to get caught in this bind as a working mom,” she said: “You either have takeout and convenience food on one extreme, or you’re shredding your own cheese and chopping your own vegetables on the other.” Supermarkets could help parents find a middle ground.

A greater acceptance of flexible work arrangements, including working from home, could help, too: “If corporate America adopted it as a value, then I think that it would give working moms the ability to make meals at a time that worked for them.”

Virginia B. Vincenti, a professor of family and consumer sciences and an editor of the book “Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession,” told Op-Talk that convenience can have some unexpected interpersonal costs. She notes that the introduction of the dishwasher caused some concern, because washing dishes together by hand “gave one-on-one time for parents and a kid to have conversations.” But, she said, that doesn’t mean dishwashers are bad. Rather, if we lose something to convenience, we need a way to replace it: “If some change in our lifestyle is eliminating this opportunity to interact with our kids or our spouses” in a healthy way, “then let’s find another way to do it.”

And some lessons from the past might help families who want to eat more home-cooked food but aren’t always able to prepare it. “The national conversation around obesity or around healthy foods” and around making healthy meals, especially for children, “takes on this moral tinge that makes the people that don’t have the resources to do that criminal and moral failures when really what we need is sort of systemic and collective solutions,” Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a professor of English and gender and women’s studies and the author of “Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century,” told Op-Talk.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in 1960s and ’70s, she said, feminists created their own collective solutions, forming communes to share the work of cooking. And today, “different forms of collectivization really seem to be the solution that we have at hand,” whether it’s multigenerational families sharing cooking duties, or community gardens providing fresh food to underserved communities. “We need to cook in groups,” she said, “and we need to cook for each other.”

[pamela]

Is there really a large % of women who are so super judgey of working moms or are the ones that are just super loud? I have run across 1 mom that fits that mold. But so many articles.

I don't think prechopped veggies are the answer. At least not when we're trying to talk healthy food. The more preprepared, the most preservatives that are going to have to get added for shelf life to keep manufacturer margins. Although I guess it would be awesome if I could order to be ready for me at the store "3 onions diced, 1 red onion sliced, 4 peppers chopped" and then they do it fresh and have them ready for the week. Hmm... I should pitch that to my local store that is dying thanks to Walmart (and that they generally suck).

[pt716]

I see some of this in the home-cooked vs prepared food discussion. It seems like everything about food is moralized in some way. Whether or not you cook, what you eat, where it's sourced, how much you eat, there are opinions on everything. And every time you turn around you are doing something wrong and eating poison.

I think there could be a middle ground. I mean an apple is just as convenient as a bag of chips, but healthier. I don't know why food conversations tend to be so all-or-nothing.

[SmartyCat]

I think the minority of people who are super judgey about food are just loud about it. Some of my FB friends fall into this category, and I end up with bite marks in my tongue because it's not worth it to engage them. I don't even like fast food but there are days when I want to post a big selfie of me biting into a Big Mac just to see the frenzy of death threats (OMG cancer, heart attack, deathfats, cloaked in concerned tones of course) appear in the comments.

A marketing class I took cited a study where people evaluated shoppers based on grocery lists that were identical except for instant coffee vs. ground. The shopper with instant coffee was judged as lazy. This article seems to be saying pretty much the same thing.

[stealthmom]

I see the multi-generational thing here a lot. Even if people don't live in the same house with their parents they may go to their parent's house for dinner often or even every night.

[wackadoo]

Dec 6, 2014 15:36:50 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

I had an old boyfriend who felt like this. He thought that every time he came to my house there should be food cooking on the stove and he judged that I liked to go to restaurants. The funny part about this is I love to cook and bake for people, I just didn't want to do it for his misogynist ass. Can't say I miss him.

Sounds like that one figured out a way to make the woman pay for the meal while attempting to cast himself as the moral superior.  Deviously clever and definite ex-boyfriend material. 

I realize I am cynical.

[secretlyevil]

I'm just rolling my eyes at everything. And brava ttt...making me open the thread.

[josieposy]

Dec 6, 2014 15:36:50 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

I had an old boyfriend who felt like this. He thought that every time he came to my house there should be food cooking on the stove and he judged that I liked to go to restaurants. The funny part about this is I love to cook and bake for people, I just didn't want to do it for his misogynist ass. Can't say I miss him.

Please tell me you said to him just once something along the lines of "Great! What are you making?"

[Deleted]

I'm not good in the kitchen. Not. I could change that, and bit by bit I learn a new recipe here and there so I can easily think ahead for how to plan to make it so it works into my schedule. I mean, we just got a crockpot last year and I have made exactly one thing with it.

In a society where time really is money, I can't judge any mom too hard for just trying to get food in her family's bellies even if it's not totally healthy/organic/homemade/etc. Shit, I only work one job; I can't imagine a mom working 2+ and still being expected to make a main entree with two sides most nights.

At least I married a dude who does 95% of our cooking. It would take a lot for me to quit that.

[ttt]

Dec 6, 2014 13:54:42 GMT -5 pamela said:

Is there really a large % of women who are so super judgey of working moms or are the ones that are just super loud? I have run across 1 mom that fits that mold. But so many articles. 

I don't think it's judgment of working moms, but there is definitely a lot of judgment of people (moms) who fail to cook real meals at home. It's fine if you work, but you still need to have delicious, healthy home cooked meals ready for your family every night too. 

[Deleted]

Dec 6, 2014 15:55:45 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

Dec 6, 2014 15:43:18 GMT -5 wackadoo said:

Sounds like that one figured out a way to make the woman pay for the meal while attempting to cast himself as the moral superior.  Deviously clever and definite ex-boyfriend material. 

I realize I am cynical.

And I wouldn't do it. He also said he wanted to bend me to his will. Yep. Walked away and never looked back at that one.

Yeah, I doubt even HBC or I would green-light that dude. 

[ttt]

Dec 6, 2014 15:55:45 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

Dec 6, 2014 15:43:18 GMT -5 wackadoo said:

Sounds like that one figured out a way to make the woman pay for the meal while attempting to cast himself as the moral superior.  Deviously clever and definite ex-boyfriend material. 

I realize I am cynical.

And I wouldn't do it. He also said he wanted to bend me to his will. Yep. Walked away and never looked back at that one.

LOLOLOLOLOL he obviously didn't know who he was talking to!

[bina]

I'm a stay at home mom and I couldn't care less what working moms are feeding their kids. I mean, we're all doing our vest and what's right for our families. Also we eat take out pretty regularly, because Thai food = Yum. Mexican food= YUMMM

[gpw]

Dec 6, 2014 15:36:50 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

I had an old boyfriend who felt like this. He thought that every time he came to my house there should be food cooking on the stove and he judged that I liked to go to restaurants. The funny part about this is I love to cook and bake for people, I just didn't want to do it for his misogynist ass. Can't say I miss him.

This is me.  I like to cook....until the minute you EXPECT me to do it.  Then you can fuck right off. 

[secretlyevil]

Dec 6, 2014 16:13:22 GMT -5 mockingbird said:

Pffft. Major makes pays about her mouth watering endeavors. And we all know she's a sex positive hussy

::chokes on water::

[wackadoo]

Dec 6, 2014 15:55:45 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

Dec 6, 2014 15:43:18 GMT -5 wackadoo said:

Sounds like that one figured out a way to make the woman pay for the meal while attempting to cast himself as the moral superior.  Deviously clever and definite ex-boyfriend material. 

I realize I am cynical.

And I wouldn't do it. He also said he wanted to bend me to his will. Yep. Walked away and never looked back at that one.

Wow.

I hope he's eating lunch at Hardee's today with the rest of the immoral hoi polloi.

[Deleted]

Dec 6, 2014 15:57:46 GMT -5 @ladydisdain said:

Dec 6, 2014 15:55:45 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

And I wouldn't do it. He also said he wanted to bend me to his will. Yep. Walked away and never looked back at that one.

Yeah, I doubt even HBC or I would green-light that dude. 

[josieposy]

Dec 6, 2014 15:56:58 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

Dec 6, 2014 15:53:47 GMT -5 josieposy said:

Please tell me you said to him just once something along the lines of "Great! What are you making?"

Actually, I quoted something my daddy said along the lines of my money doesn't feed me and big able-bodied negroes too. If you want food on my stove, you need to put food in my refrigerator.

Ha! That works too.

[redwino]

I'm not a mom but still get judgement about not cooking for DH. It seems that I'm not a proper wife because we eat out a lot or DH (who enjoys cooking) makes our meals. I've actually had people say I'm wasting DH's money by buying takeout. It doesn't matter that I work too and it OUR money. Nope, I'm a shitty wife who is going to lose my man unless I start having a hot meal on the stove when he gets home.

[emilyj]

A couple years ago, my undergrads who knew I stayed at work late told me they felt sorry for my H, because I was at work so late and not cooking dinner for him. I told them he was perfectly capable of cooking for himself.

[Velar Fricative]

Because it's that much harder to cook meals from scratch with only organic unicorn tear ingredients for all the (perfectly legit) reasons we know, smug assholes want to give themselves public pats on the back for being able to do so.

I've grown to like cooking but that's only because we now have a decent-sized kitchen and we have cut our takeout budget. Otherwise, takeout is awesome and I will proudly call myself immoral for loving it. Nothing I make will ever be as delicious as someone else's cooking.

[saz]

I am a sahm and DH still does a fair amount of our cooking. He enjoys it, sometimes I don't feel like it, and it works for us to share that duty. I feel super judged by his mom and grandma who both made large efforts to present a hot meal on the table at husbands arrival home from work. I don't really care though because this works for us!

I'm very much into healthy food and spend a lot of time meal planning, but we still have those nights where we order pizza, or get fast food, or make breakfast for dinner or something. I kind of question people who are 100% all in, all the time. It's a red flag that we probably aren't compatible as friends.

[ttt]

Dec 7, 2014 13:05:59 GMT -5 315 said:

Clearly the authors have never taken advantage in New York City where there are a million delicious and healthy places from which to get takeout that make it silly to cook it at home. Burgers, Thai, etc.

The gender role issues in the article are so outdated and wonky, it's laughable. Is this from the NYT Op/Ed or the Onion?

The vast majority of people do not live in NYC though and do not have those options available. And while it's nice to think these gender role issues are athing of the past, they're really not.