"The femivore phenomenon: Cooking as creative homemaking"

From Salon.com the article, Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig?, Emily Matchar writes:

"Though it’s easy to mock this kind of thing as the twee preoccupation of the privileged classes, it’s much deeper than that. These women are part of our country’s burgeoning new food culture, a culture that places an immense amount of faith in the idea of food as a solution for a variety of social ills, from childhood obesity to global warming to broken families to corporate greed."

A great paragraph describing a growing trend of DIY-ers, urban homesteaders, and from-scratchers. However, this article takes a pleasantly deeper turn and explores food culture and gender roles and how they might be changing and different from those of yore. (We get to Pollan later, don't worry his omnivorous badge of green honor remains intact... for the most part.)

'“The return to domesticity by young, intelligent, educated women like you see around here is a reaction against a broken food system in America,” says Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on food culture. “We’ve lost our connection to traditional handmade cuisine, kids could have shorter life spans than their parents [because of obesity and poor diet], there’s global warming. This new food culture is a response to an industrial model that’s not working.”

Our country is clearly in a dire state when it comes to obesity and the environmental impact of factory farming, so the fact that more people care about food is terrific. But the kitchen’s always been a fraught place when it comes to gender and class, and the twenty-first century is shaping up to be no different. For some, the new cooking culture is incredibly empowering. Others are finding themselves tied up in apron strings all over again." 

As a young woman, I've thought a lot of the gender roles created for and pushed upon me. Like many others before and after me, we say things like, "I am woman hear my roar", or in general decide to rage against the patriarchal machine. Things like sexual freedom and career-first mindedness come to mind, but to spite or put down or diminish motherhood, stay-at-home moms, or anything of the like doesn't make us better women. Doing what we love to do and doing it well, whether clad in a suit at work or an apron at home, makes us great and making it our personal choice to do makes us courageous and strong. (Doing both makes you a robot.)

 "In 2010, writer Peggy Orenstein coined the term “femivore” to describe a certain breed of stay-at-home mom whose commitment to providing the purest, most sustainable foods has become a full-fledged raison d’être. These are the women who raise backyard chickens, grow their own vegetables for their children’s salads, join raw-milk clubs to get illegal-but-allegedly-wholesome unpasteurized milk. 

“Femivore” is an infelicitous-sounding term (do they eat women?!) but an on-target concept. Femivores, Orenstein says, use food as “an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper.”

As Orenstein describes it, femivorism helps give social legitimacy to stay-at-home motherhood, which is something we see in many facets of New Domesticity. She writes:

'Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and     personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food—who these days can’t wax poetic about compost?— it also confers instant legitimacy.'"

Finally. Cue sigh of relief. I love cooking. There I said it. I like making my own ice cream, my own chicken stock, pesto, sofrito, you name it. A small part of me always begrudged the idea of domesticating myself or just naturally falling into this role created for young women like myself. Recently and throughout my college years though, I've grown to empower myself through what I love doing regardless of the oppressive connotations "woman's place is the kitchen" brings forth. Cooking skills and food knowledge is a rarity these days afterall...

"Here’s another quote: “[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.”

Nope, that’s Michael Pollan. Yes, that Michael Pollan, the demigod food writer and activist at whose feet so much of progressive America worships. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Pollan’s pro-local, pro-organic manifesto, spent years on the New York Times bestseller list, and Pollan’s motto of “eat food/not too much/mostly plants” can be heard murmured like a mantra in the aisles of local grocery co-ops nationwide.

Yet there he is again, in the New York Times Magazine, dismissing “The Feminine Mystique” as “the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” In the same magazine story, Pollan scolds that “American women now allow corporations to cook for them” and rues the fact that women have lost the “moral obligation to cook” they felt during his 1960s childhood.

[...]

Comments like this make me—owner of not one but two copies of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”—want to smack Pollan and the rest upside the head with a spatula. Claiming that feminism killed home cooking is not just shaming, it’s wildly inaccurate from a historical standpoint." 

There's your Pollan drop as promised.
Read more about how historically flawed Pollan's (and many others') view on feminism's contribution to industrial food is; and the article in full here: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_michael_pollan_a_sexist_pig/

--RS