Man Can Cook: Michael Pollan, The Food Movement and Feminism 101

The interwebs have been abuzz with the news of Michael Pollan’s latest book release. Cooked is Pollan’s homage to home cooking, an attempt to urge us all back into the kitchen, to reclaim from corporations “one of the greatest satisfactions in life.”

Pollan argues that home cooking is both a personal pleasure and a moral imperative with environmental and agricultural consequences. Home cooked food is likely to be healthier for our bodies (after all, who uses preservatives like butylated hydroxytoluene or coloring agents like tartrazine in a home kitchen?). It also puts us, and not corporate food manufacturers, in charge of which kind of foods we buy, and which kinds of farmers we want to support. In Pollan’s own words, “Big companies only know how to buy from big farms.” If we want to support small, local and or organic ones, we’ll have to start cooking from scratch.

So who is the villain who has lured us away from participating in this satisfying and ethical activity? It is here that Pollan’s usual thoughtfulness and thoroughness falls short, because alongside corporate food processers and purveyors, he blames feminism for urging women to leave the kitchen in search of more satisfying careers. He writes that “The Feminine Mystique taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression” and that “[The appreciation of cooking was] a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.” According to Pollan, women who went out to work, and left their husbands and children with poor, purchased substitutes for their homecooked meals, damaged our culture in ways that can be repaired only by a return to the pleasures of the hearth. 

Not surprisingly Pollan’s remarks have provoked a fair amount of ire from feminist writers in the blogsphere. Reacting to articles Pollan published in the lead up to Cooked, Salon’s Kate Harding wrote that the popularity of Friedan’s book might indicate that millions of women already regarded housework as drudgery and sought to pursue more fulfilling goals. Both Harding, and more recently, Emily Matchar describe popular books celebrating processed food that preceded The Feminine Mystique including the 1951 Can-Opener Cookbook and the 1960 I Hate to Cook Book. Matchar offers a wide range of arguments against linking of feminism to our so-called decline in food culture, including pointing out that processed foods pre-date feminism. Most provocatively, she questions whether food and cooking are truly universal pleasures, as Pollan proclaims, or if the moral imperative to cook from scratch isn’t merely the missionary zeal of privileged professional foodies.

In addition to these critiques, there are a number of basic points about women’s history that Pollan seems to miss. First, many women—though perhaps not Betty Friedan’s intended audience—worked prior to the rise of feminism.  Indeed, more than one third of women over age 16 were employed in 1960, three years prior to the publication of Friedan’s tome. Going back even further, nearly a quarter of American women were in the paid labor market in 1930. Many of these women were working class and/or women of color and the greatest number worked in domestic service and clerical work. It is well known that women’s factory work increased dramatically during World War II. The majority of these women, however, were not coming to the workforce from home or school, but from other areas of paid employment. Moreover, a ten-city study by the US Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau in 1946 concluded that about 75% of women desired continuing employment, most often citing essential income rather than self-satisfaction. Feminism did not draw most women out of the home and into the workforce. Many women were already working! Indeed, the 1960s, the decade in which feminism began to take hold, women’s employment rose by only 4.4%.

But perhaps more relevant to Pollan’s argument is the notion that, for heterosexual, married working women, things around the house didn’t change much. Married women’s participation in the formal, paid workforce did little to encourage their husbands to contribute in the domestic sphere. This is the phenomenon that feminist sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild described in her groundbreaking book The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. Hochschild interviewed and observed upper-middle class couples and determined that, on average, women’s time spent on housework exceeded men’s by 15 hours per week. This was true even when both partners professed an egalitarian relationship. More recent research has shown that men’s participation in housework and childcare is growing, but women still do about twice as much as men. And further, men tend to do chores that are sporadic in nature and can be done at one’s convenience, like yard work, while women do those that cannot be delayed, like childcare. American women cook 78% of dinners, make 93% of food purchases and spend three times as many hours in the kitchen as men. This division of labor is particularly worth noting as cooking in the way Pollan recommends and models is an incredibly time and labor consuming endeavor. The statistics suggest that this extra work will likely be undertaken by women.

In contrast, while Pollan publicly blames feminism for our embrace of processed food, he holds no equal condemnation for men for not stepping it up on the homefront. Why are fathers not taking charge of the family meal when women enter the paid workforce, or else equally to blame when the family meal ceases to exist? Aren’t men also capable of creating conviviality, nurturing democracy, ensuring family health, receiving personal satisfaction and supporting progressive environmental and agricultural goals? If so, why are men not equally to blame when neither parent prioritizes cooking over other concerns and commitments? Pollan’s denunciation of feminism elides the fact that man can cook too. He condemns women for not continuing to do this work in the manner he thinks best without mentioning men’s failure to pick up the slack.

To his credit, Pollan does suggest that men’s learning to cook can be part of the solution he’s advocating. He describes the way that corporate food allowed heterosexual couples to sidestep arguments about the gendered division of labor in the home by decreasing the amount of labor necessary, and acknowledges that increased home cooking will force a return to these conversations. However, not only do men receive encouragement to cook rather than condemnation for not doing so, but his remarks regarding men’s participation are much less front-and-center. Pollan’s comments blaming feminism have made the rounds, as he’s repeated them in much of the widely-read pre-publicity for Cooked, including separate pieces in the New York Times and New York Times Magazine. His remarks about men’s need to enter the kitchen are much more obscure.

At his best, Pollan’s writing is compelling because it teaches us to think in new ways about the relationship between individual behavior and social systems. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, eating becomes an agricultural, cultural and political act, inspiring us not only to change our diets, but to shift food and agricultural policy toward incentivizing the kind of production we wish to see. But his condemnation of feminism is yet another rehashing of conservative arguments deriding women for abandoning our position as homemakers to engage in the public realm. In contrast to the fresh food he advocates, it’s an argument that’s become altogether stale.