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This is a comment by Kap on the post “What Every Man Should Know… About Cooking: 6/8“.
Kap said:
I don’t think it’s an issue of whether men can or can’t cook–it’s a question of why do they or don’t they.
The men in your house cooked growing up, still do. Great–maybe you should write about that. Isn’t that the point? To get a variety of male voices talking about cooking and what it means to them? I guess I must have missed the part where it says every household is the same or that no men ever cook.
I also don’t see how this project “feeds” any myths about men not being able to cook. (Quite the opposite, actually.) The bottom line is that one person’s experience (yours or mine) doesn’t single-handedly reproof the long-standing “Leave It To Beaver” stereotype where a man’s job is to be the breadwinner and the woman’s job is to have dinner waiting for him when he gets home. (Maybe the guy grills on the weekend during the summer–that would be okay.) That’s the way it still happens in plenty of households, and it’s a situation that’s worth interrogating.
I love to cook–am, incidentally, making black bean griddle cakes as I write this. Doesn’t mean I still wouldn’t like to hear about other men’s experiences in the kitchen–those who do cook, those who don’t, what men think men should know how to do, and what keeps men out of the kitchen. Specifically, I’d be interested in people’s thoughts about whether there is a cultural heritage element to it? In other words, do households that place more value on the Old World cooking traditions of their ancestry share the cooking responsibility more evenly across gender lines?
I’d also be interested in reading about people’s thoughts on the difference between “Chef culture” (cooking as Art) and everyday cooking culture (cooking as chore). What’s the percentage of male celebrity chefs as compared to the percentage of “ordinary” men who are the primary cooks in their own household? I’m looking forward to what people come up with.
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Photo credit: Flickr / cookbookman17
