[SLATE] The home-cooked meal has long been romanticized, from '50s-era sitcoms to the work of star food writer Michael Pollan, who once wrote, "far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman's attention." I have a son who does all the cooking. His wife works long hours in an executive job and he runs his business from home. I make two out of three meals in our household, always have. My wife does all the baking.
| I cook and bake because I enjoy it. Mr. Wife cleans up because he's better at it than I am. He also cuts things up when I ask, though I have to be specific. The trailing daughters helped me bake as soon as they could talk in three word sentences -- it's an easy way to teach nouns, verbs, counting and measuring -- and they therefore loved everything they'd been involved in making. My mother hated everything done in the kitchen except designing it, but she did the same with the four of us kids. |
To hell with it. Call out for pizza.
The researchers interviewed 150 mothers from all walks of life and spent 250 hours observing 12 families in-depth, and they found "that time pressures, tradeoffs to save money, and the burden of pleasing others make it difficult for mothers to enact the idealized vision of home-cooked meals advocated by foodies and public health officials."