Alison Hope Alkon

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 ...