The feminist who believes women must go back to the kitchen (and drag their men with them!)
She famously fought for women’s rights — and to free mothers from the stove. Now, as fast food wrecks our children’s health, ROSIE BOYCOTT has become ...
DON’T cook, don’t type, girls... and then you’ll get ahead.’ It was a saying I was fond of repeating when Marsha Rowe and I founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1972.
The magazine’s first giveaway offer was a purple tea towel with the legend ‘first you sink into his arms . . . then your arms end up in his sink’ printed on it.
Cooking — like typing — fell firmly into the category of household drudgery; only marginally more acceptable than vacuuming.
Growing up, I saw cooking as a chore, something that women did and men expected. My university-educated mum didn’t like cooking. I have almost no nice memories of being in the kitchen, sharing the preparation of food with her. She cooked quickly — like she did everything — but she did it without pleasure.
For a period, my father worked about two miles away from home and he’d come back for lunch: meat and two veg, then the same a few hours later.
He never cooked a thing, except for trout just caught from the river. He had his own method — soak a copy of the Times in water (the old style broadsheet printed on slightly shiny newsprint); wrap the fish in the wet newspaper, tucking in the edges to make a parcel; chuck it on the open fire which you’ve laid and lit on the river bank and wait for the paper to start to burn. Fish ready. And it worked.
But it wasn’t really cooking. It was a boy’s exercise in outdoor living, macho men around the barbecue, carving chunks of meat off the Sunday roast.
SO AS a young woman I felt very passionate about not cooking. I can’t remember cooking anything until I was in my 30s and had a child. I wasn’t much good, but I didn’t really care. I could roast a chicken, I picked up the odd dish here and there, and I was happy to buy ready meals from Marks & Spencer. I liked cooking for my daughter, but I didn’t have to do it that often, as I had nannies. I’m not proud, but it’s what happened.
And it’s what most of my girlfriends did, too — we were career women and we were making an active choice to spend the time that we might have spent cooking doing other things — such as being in the office. But we didn’t think what impact this might have on the next generation.
It is no accident that the obesity epidemic has grown in direct proportion to the amount of processed convenience food sold in supermarkets and on our High Streets — precisely the kind of food that’s easy to reach for when time is squeezed.
When my era of Women’s Lib kicked off in the early Seventies, our idea of what should happen in the future was fairly simple. We wanted a big chunk of men’s lives: the work, the responsibility, the money and the fun. In return we wanted them to take equal responsibility for what we did: the childcare, the cleaning, the ironing, the cooking.
But for most of today’s couples, that bargain hasn’t worked out. According to the Office for National Statistics, despite more women than ever working just as many hours as men, they’re still doing 40 per cent more domestic work. For women aged between 26 and 35, this adds up to 34 hours a week. That’s a lot of extra duties on top of a busy career.
Heavily processed, caloriestuffed food is the cheapest and easiest thing for us to buy which will — temporarily — fill up our stomachs. Food giants spend fortunes advertising food to us which isn’t healthy. That’s the food on which they make a profit, and the food which we can’t resist.
Unsurprisingly then, aided by the fact that many feel ill at ease in the kitchen (cooking went off the curriculum at school some time at the start of the Seventies, so a whole generation came of age not knowing how to cook), women plump for quick fixes such as ready meals and convenience foods.
Tellingly, 40 per cent of UK households no longer even have a dining table. Never could I have imagined that by encouraging women to ditch filo pastry for Filofaxes, and not persuading men to step into the kitchen on a 50/50 basis, we would be faced with this crisis.
Some 20 per cent of children start primary school overweight and obese and a third leave school that way. Their courses are set for less healthy, less fulfilled lives that will cost the NHS a fortune because of the diseases associated with bad diets.
Childhood obesity rates in London are the worst in Europe. Yet the city has more than 8,000 chicken and chip shops and there is — much to my endless frustration — no way of legislating to prevent them lowering their prices at the end of the school day, or having ‘special offers’ for youngsters in uniforms.
But in a world where children’s obesity is one of the greatest health threats we face, how do we turn away from high fat, high sugar convenience foods and get cooking again?
As Chair of the London Food Board, I think about food every day — for most of the day. And this question really troubles me. What I see is that in middle-class families, men (and especially young men) are shopping and cooking and sharing the household chores and childcare.
But in large sections of our society, women are still the main
providers of care — and that includes all the meals. Stressed by lack of money, tough jobs, poor housing and the distorted economics of the food system, it is no wonder that a burger and chips, is so often the answer to filling stomachs at the end of a long day. Clearly, we have to get cooking again, but how do we do that without it being the responsibility of women? How do we feed our children healthily without sacrificing all that women have fought for? If the price of getting us and our children to eat healthily is to see women having to return wholesale to the stove, then it will not work. We have, thankfully, gone far enough as women to resist this.We have lots of men on the TV doing the cooking. Hasn’t that helped?
Yes, I think Jamie Oliver in particular has been inspirational to a generation of young men, but his message fails to connect with large swathes of our population. And many of our male chefs, with Gordon Ramsay the chief culprit, throw their pots and pans around as though they are in a war zone, rather than a kitchen.
All right, they’re spreading the message that men can cook too, but it’s not the kind of cooking we need to get back to. It’s man-as-chief-carver, showing his status as head of household by wielding the carving knife over a large piece of bleeding meat, or man-as-chief-burger-flipper to demonstrate his brawn round the barbecue.
Jamie, had a brilliant thought: if you want to get the girl, then learn to cook for her. That could definitely work. And there’s a project in Australia where young offenders and teenage boys who have had run-ins with the law get to do an eight-week cooking course as a group. That’s bonding and learning.
Cooking is also — finally — back on the school curriculum, for girls
and boys, though I worry that if free school meals are stopped school kitchens will close and the initiative will peter out.
When I talk to women about this, the answer is invariably that they don’t have time to cook. life has changed because of going to work, commuting, ‘me time’, other time. For too many people, there isn’t a choice about having enough time in the day to shop and cook.
I know that in the end it comes down to what we prioritise in life. But I long to get back to the days when Mum, Dad and the kids ate together every evening, round the kitchen table, but with Dad doing half the cooking and half the washing up.
It was more than just the food, it was a time for generations to talk and argue and grow together. By kicking cooking out of our daily lives, we’ve lost more than our health. But you can’t legislate for this and you can’t insist on it. Meanwhile, the food companies know that women (especially) are easy prey. I saw a survey of African countries recently: when women started working outside the home, the fast food companies moved in.
The best way to guarantee a healthy diet for us and our kids is to cook: vegetables, pulses, small amounts of meat. It needn’t be expensive. I know heroic teachers who teach courses titled ‘how to feed a family of four for £20 a week’. But it needs confidence, planning and a choice to make it a priority.
Nowadays, I love to cook because I have a choice about doing so and over the years I’ve acquired enough knowledge to be able to cook quickly — and cheaply. We have to sort it out, as our children’s health won’t wait. What we eat really matters — to our health, our kids’ health and their educational achievement. Food is not a woman’s issue; it’s a vital human issue.
I no longer have any doubt that we all need to cook if we are to have any hope of dragging our society back from unhealthy eating habits and finding a way to get decent, wholesome, tasty food back on the tables of Britain. If we don’t, our future health prospects look grim indeed.