I Thought Cooking Would Make Me a Bad Feminist

My grandmother was a housewife. My mother was a career woman. Who would I be?
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Photo by Paul Walters Worldwide Photography Ltd./Heritage Images/Getty ImagesPhoto by Paul Walters Worldwide Photography Ltd./Heritage Images/Getty Images

When I think of my grandmother, I see her in her linoleum-tiled Oklahoma kitchen. She might be hoisting sourdough into the breadmaker, walking me through her famous chicken and dumplings recipe, or lifting a spoon to taste it (it's perfect, I assure you). More often than not, she’s alone in the kitchen, even as the rest of us start to dig into the meal she's likely been planning for weeks. Memories with my mother are more likely to take place around the table. We lament the state of politics, she counsels me on my latest career crisis, or recounts literal war stories from her time as a conflict journalist. We eat, but as an afterthought. And the food, more often than not, was either made by my father or by one of our favorite takeout spots on the Upper West Side.

Today, as a millennial woman two generations from the ultimate homemaker and one behind the ultimate career woman, I feel caught somewhere in between these two women. Married by 20, my grandmother dropped out of college and became a homemaker. My mother, on the other hand, plunged headfirst into a successful career. While I think my grandmother always saw cooking as her intrinsic duty, I think my mother saw cooking as a trap designed to keep her from more intellectual pursuits.

As for me, I can easily dismiss the old-fashioned idea that, based on a pair of matching chromosomes, I have the responsibility to know how to make a soufflé. But, at the same time, I've often felt ashamed for lacking the kind of basic domestic knowledge many women are taught by more housework-oriented moms than mine. The first time I cooked for a man—that is, sat him down at my dinner table and presented him with a meal prepared as a romantic gesture—I felt like a fraud. I paced, racked with performance anxiety, as I wondered aloud why the water was taking so long to boil. "You might," he suggested gently, "try putting a lid on the pot?" That night at dinner, embarrassed by my lack of confidence in what society tells us is a core requirement for being a desirable female partner, I lost my appetite.

For women, food is an inherently political subject. Just ask Hillary Clinton, whose 1992 comment, "I suppose I could have stayed home [and] baked cookies" continued to haunt her even throughout the 2016 election. Films like Bad Moms skewer the all-too-familiar reality of working moms who are shamed for bringing store-bought donut holes to the school bake sale. Men become “chefs,” who are paid for their work; women become “cooks," whose labor has no market value. And despite women's advances in education and in the workplace, even working women are still expected to take on the bulk of household chores like cooking and cleaning. (Don't even get me started on the fact that we're expected to prepare all this delicious food but never eat too much.)

But, meanwhile, millennial women have started to reclaim cooking as a creative endeavor. I have brilliant and driven female friends who still can't think of a better way to end their day than roasting a chicken. They care about food politics, health, and wellness, and know the power of taking control of what ends up on their table. More than anything, they find cooking fun.

For years after college, I took pride in being too busy to cook. But, as my social schedule started to slow down and I spent more nights at home, I asked myself what I was really saving all that time for—binging another season of Netflix? I slowly eased into buying groceries more often and challenging myself to cook the foods I craved instead of blowing another $20 on Seamless. I rediscovered cooking as a mode of expression, a challenge, a way of understanding the world around me, my body, and myself.

Alone in my kitchen, I understand how wrong I had it. Cooking, like feminism, can take many forms. It can be an act of nurturing, a statement of love, a playground for experimentation, or a method of self-care. No woman should be shamed into cooking, and no woman should be shamed out of it. My mother can cook, but has never really found joy in it. My grandmother could not cook—or at the very least could spend less time on it—but would never give up her passion for creating food that brings her family together. When it comes down to it, maybe the feminist label isn't so much about whether you choose to be more of an individualist or more of a caretaker. It's about having the ability to make that choice at all.

I'm still not big on the idea of winning over a guy with my engagement chicken, but I don't mind the idea of a partner I can cook with. And, one day, if I have kids, I'll cook for them too—they'll just have to accept the fact that, from time to time, mommy's gonna set off the fire alarm. Women may always be burdened with a complex, often fraught relationship with food. I’m still navigating mine, but, for now, cooking for myself—finding the joy in it, sustaining myself in a healthy way, and making great food for the sake of making great food—feels like feminism to me.