Michael Pollan on Class, Glamour, Food TV & Lots of Other Stuff

DC Jason just sent me a link to Michael Pollan's NYT manifesto that hits just about every big point that relates to Americans current relationship with food and cooking. It's a brilliant article, really, starting with Pollan's childhood memories (from Julia to Swanson and back, without missing a beat) and closing with the most simple, yet unlikely to materialize, solution to America's obesity problem.

It's long, but well worth a full read. But in the meantime, a few quotes:

Cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child did. In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television.

So-called fancy food has always served as a form of cultural capital, and cooking programs help you acquire it, now without so much as lifting a spatula.

Even the most ordinary dish follows a similar arc of transformation, magically becoming something greater than the sum of its parts. Every dish contains not just culinary ingredients but also the ingredients of narrative: a beginning, a middle and an end. Bring in the element of fire — cooking’s deus ex machina — and you’ve got a tasty little drama right there...

Trendy Monday: Supermom Glamour

Deep Glamour has a post this morning mentioning the trendiness of "supermom glamour." The post starts out about J.Lo, in all her post-triathalon glory, but it's not hard to make the leap to super-hockey-mom-with-lipstick glamour.

I wouldn't ever describe myself as either a supermom or glamorous, but I can't deny that the idea (myth?) of supermom glamour is attractive to me.

So I wonder if that's part of what drives me in the kitchen. Cooking can be, but isn't always, a glamorous endeavor - millions of parents hurriedly microwaving chicken fingers and french fries probably see very little fabulosity in what they're doing. But fit into a larger story about supermom glamour, even frozen chicken fingers taken on a bit of mystique.

Food & Gender

Ann Althouse wrote a post this morning about cold soup, starting by mentioning Bourdain and his childhood experience with vichyssoise (he loved it). Reading a couple of other blogs, she notices a comment made by a female blogger, saying that "chilled soups seem to be a tough sell for men."

Althouse references Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, and asks how her readers feel about gendered foods. I think about the fact that I'm making quiche Lorraine for dinner tonight, and Cooper will be perfectly happy with that. He is also very masculine.

I think I do have some preconceived notions about gender and food, but they're not borne out of widespread stereotypes. Instead, they come from my immediate experiences with the guys around me. For instance, I think of rice served without Asian food as somehow feminine, but only because my dad and brother and Cooper don't like it. But quiche, especially the kind that's full of bacon? Totally gender neutral.

I was also wondering if I'd written anything about this subject before. I hadn't exactly, but last summer I did write about an article exploring the differences between the way men and women cook.

One last thought - English is a gender-neutral language, but I wonder how gendered speech connects to connotations about food in other countries. I'm most familiar with French, and somehow I doubt that French men have many hangups about the gender of their food. But I wonder about other cultures...

Women and Winemaking

At the Epicurious blog, Natalie MacLean poses an interesting question: are women winemakers inherently different than their male counterparts?

As I said in the comments:

one of the more interesting papers I wrote in college (long ago) was a review of a history book about women in foreign policy. The main thing I remember about the book was that, in most cases, women in foreign policy seemed to have more in common with "foreign policy people" than they did with "women in general".

I'd guess the same is true for women who go into winemaking (or maybe every profession that's a calling). The calling trumps the gender, or ethnicity, or any of those other demographics.

I'm looking forward to the follow-up...

Tasting the Difference

My friend Joyce just sent me a link to such an interesting article. It appears in the Times Online - the London paper - and it explores stylistic and philosophical differences between male and female cooks. The basic idea is that women are more nurturing, and therefore more into simple food that will make people happy, while men are more ego-driven and artistic, so they take an "If I cook it, they should come" approach.

The concept behind the article is not a new one. In college, I remember writing a paper for my American Foreign Policy class (shoutout to Professor Crapol - best history teacher at William & Mary) regarding differences between the sexes in terms of foreign policy beliefs and actions. There's a school of thought that believes that women in government, as nurturers, are more likely to be pacifists and diplomats than their warmongery, conquistador male counterparts. The Times article is basically about the same thing, only looking at the butter, not the guns.

In all honesty, I just don't know where I stand on this topic. On one hand, I'm a big believer in acknowledging the differences between the sexes - men and women don't think or act the same way and I do believe that biology plays a role. And both in terms of cooking and foreign policy, there are certainly examples that back up the woman-as-nurturer position.

But on the other hand, something about the whole discussion sticks in my craw. For one thing, I can't shake the feeling that there's a tinge of reverse-misogyny at work here: women are presented as good, caring nurturers who do for others, while the men involved are ego-driven and self-centered. I don't think that's fair.

My other hesitation about the arguments is that they just don't apply to my own kitchen - or my mind. Not that I don't care about my guests having a good time or enjoying their dinners, but as I'm sure I've mentioned before, when I'm preparing a meal for friends, a healthy part of my enjoyment comes from the feeling of creation - and from the praise that goes along with creation. Similarly, I would imagine that if I was, say, a member of Congress (a job I would never, ever want), I'd be a little more "send in the Marines and git-r-done" than a lot of the men.

There are exceptions, of course, to every rule, and maybe I just fall into that category. It's difficult, though, to honestly evaluate an argument when you're possibly outside the norm. And of all of the food and cooking research that I've been privy to (and it is a lot), the vast majority of the research has been female-focused (food marketers just care more about women's attitudes and behaviors because they make the majority of the food shopping decisions in any given household.) As a result, I've seen profiles of a fair number of ego-driven, artistic foodie women and at the same time, I have very little understanding of what makes the male culinary mind tick.

Joyce mentioned that in her own life, she tends to cook more recipes written by female chefs, but when she eats out, she's drawn to the men - possibly seeking out something more exciting and complex than what she personally wants to deliver at home. That's something interesting, too, but again, something hard for me to evaluate in my own life...partly because there are just so many more male chefs than female.

But conclusion or no, the article gave me something interesting to think about, and to watch for as I cook and eat out. Because everyone knows that I need more ways to analyze my food.

Women at the Table

Somehow I missed that Field Maloney followed up on his wine vs. beer article in Slate with an online question-and-answer session on washingtonpost.com. It adds a little to the article itself, though it's not really long enough to add significant depth.

One point raised by a reader caught my eye, though. She mentioned that her family only drinks wine at group events because it's the women who make the decisions about what to serve, and the women just prefer wine to beer (better taste, less bloaty, etc. etc.).

Maloney comments that the influence of women on overall food and drink trends is an interesting one that hasn't yet been fully explored. In all of the food-related research studies I've designed and/or analyzed, the role of women has been both undeniable and explicit. This isn't something new to marketers. They target the female head of household for a reason. But I'd love to read a really thorough and careful exploration of how this role of women's is influenced by and, in turn, influences the overall public perceptions of food. Something that goes past just the marketing into the subtle shifts in perception that occur over time. Would be a totally cool project for somebody...

And I Thought I Slaved over the Stove

I found a lot interesting about this Ad Age Online article (I wrote about some marketing-related thoughts here). But one point stood out above all the others: apparently in the 1920s and 30s, women spent an average of 30 to 42 hours a week preparing food for their families.

Now, I cook a lot. A lot more than most people (especially most people my age). I'm home during the day. I have the luxury of time. But 30 to 42 hours a week? Does that include selecting and butchering livestock or something?

I'm probably just not grateful enough for all of the luxuries the modern kitchen has to offer, like microwaves and KitchenAid mixers. But I don't even use tons of pre-prepared foods, or fancy tools (much of my prep and cooking is done with one big knife and a saute pan.) Yet even if I cooked a pretty involved meal every night, and cooked breakfast, and made a real lunch, the longest I can imagine spending in the kitchen is about 4 hours a day (and that's a stretch). And if I cooked that much, Cooper and I would both be the size of a house.

Whew. 30 to 42 hours. I can't imagine I'd like cooking nearly as much if it was that much of a job.