Another example of the instant gratification culture. Things like “family social life” are mere accessories one does not have to work for.
Mothers work to provide a home. Fathers work to provide a home.
The key here is “work.” It takes work to have a loving home, and work and toil go into relationships.
Anything less is disingenuous.
Hey sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton, that sandwich ain’t gonna make itself!
“Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?
A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology”
-Amanda Marcotte, Blogger extraordinaire for Father of the Year, John Edwards
This article brought to you by Boston Market.
I have a wonderful idea; let’s stop idealizing feminism. I’ve never seen a more unhappy group of women anywhere.
Omg! The expression of love and nurturing that even a bad cook gives far outweighs the loneliness and emptiness of the processed meal.
How about having the kids put together a meal or at least help with setting the table and doing the dishes. This is a skill they can learn at an early age. Girls and boys both. It is only stressful if you whine about having to do all that work.
I (male) am the cook for 4. Yeah, there’s stress ... yet few things are as satisfying as cooking a good meal from scratch. Even when in a rush, it doesn’t take much to throw something together (at worst, keep a few bags of Bertolli meals in the freezer: 10 minutes heating in a skillet and you’ve got something worth slaving over, under $3/person).
Reminds me: my 45 lb bucket of raw wheat hasn’t shown up yet. Taking “from scratch” ever farther is a worthy challenge.
Sorry, people, life is work. You want good health at low cost? you’re gonna have to cook it yourself from raw ingredients.
Wrong. The trend of parents constantly taking their kids out to eat, or ordering take out or delivery food for dinner, is horrible and immensely damaging. It has nothing to do with the “idealized” 50s family structure that Amanda hates so much. It has everything to do with people making less and less effort to create cohesive social units, whether they are families or neighborhoods or communities. If a mother and father can’t even cook for their kids, its a sad statement.
I suppose it all depends on the cook and the family. My mother-in-law is a terrible cook and a vicious woman who doesn’t feel any sentence is complete if it doesn’t denigrate someone. Home-cooked family meals with her are unhealthy for mind and body.
Hey slate writer....
P155 OFF!
Well adjusted, healthy children (now adult)and as often as possible there was an evening meal with all hands possible in attendance. Here’s a twist also...if Uncle Sam didn’t have me “out of town” or later the office had me “out of town,” this head of the household did the cooking.....breakfast as often as possible and the same for dinner. The younguns ate cereal as a snack, they got protein and complex carbs for morning meal and real food....meat, carb, vegg, vegg for dinner.
It is only the control freak, nanny state ‘wog’ that thinks there is nothing to be gained from the bonding and camaraderie found at the family table.
Again, a communist propaganda organ of the White House attacks another American family value!
To them, I say, CHUCK FOO! (It’s harder to write it in anglicized Russian.)
I COOK!
Yea, sure, I could go out and get something, but my DAD (G-d bless him), taught me how to cook as a kid in my own cast iron pan. (Among things, he was in one of many lifestyles, a short order cook. “My boy ain’t gonna grow up and waste money in no greasy spoon, when he can do it himself!”)
I watched a whole generation become nothing than slaves to the golden arches, the red haired girl, the false faced king, or a ‘hardy’ sandwich, or any chain chicken place (before the days of the cows protesting to eat chicken).
I have my own pans, stainless and iron. I do use a stovetop more, and proved, to myself, that baking is not a niche for me to conquer. I do ‘have some books’, and ‘my pen and ink books’, but once I got ‘the method’ down. I’m ok throwing something together. (And no, I don’t burn water, either!)
Lastly, cooks, whether home or business, just might a hidden geek, whether it is gadgetry, cutlery - European or Asian, or machinery.
Me? I can say that a dollar paid for a kitchen knife had better be of value, and worthiness. I own both European and Asian designs. No ‘gyutos’, or ‘pettys’, yet. Too many dollars, for right now.
In all, home cooking can bring a sense of accomplishment, that getting in a car or bus to go to a restaurant, just does not bring. Mind you, it was a Korean G.I. wife home cook, that in a food show competition, won her place as chef in one of the many casino restaurants in Las Vegas, last year! (Her secret was that she learned English, and American cooking, watching that cable food thing!)
The bottom-scraping scenarios the author presents are consequence of an unwillingness to SOLVE THE PROBLEMS and DO THE WORK. Utensils & cookware? cheap from Goodwill et al. Dirty living conditions? _clean_up_. Erratic work schedules? toss ingredients in a slow cooker, easy to prep and ready anytime. Fresh produce unavailable (costly or absent)? frozen is just as good _and_ lasts longer.
Turn the G-D TV off and put everyone to work. Get dressed before 7AM (much less NOON) and get productive. People lived much better on far less because they _worked_at_it_.
Stress, what stress? Cooking is a stress RELIEVER for me. It's a hobby, like crochet or cross stitch.
My cats hate car trips, so there’s no way I’m taking them out to dinner every night... I don’t care what this bimbo says.
“the stress that cooking puts on people, particularly women, may not be worth the trade-off”
Yeah, stuffing your children with garbage food from grossly overpriced fast food restaurants and watching them blow up like blimps, get Type II diabetes at age 21 and heart disease at age 29 is far less stressful, particularly for the mothers. On the plus side, if the husband has a LARGE life insurance policy and he kicks the bucket prematurely from a eating a diet of crap all his (short) life, that might take away a bit of the sting. Still, on the downside, he’s just as likely to develop some chronic, debilitating disease that might not be worth the tradeoff after all.
(BTW, its mostly been the males in my extended family who have been the cooks, and that’s been the case with most of my best friends, and in almost every other case in my experience, the cooking duties have been split. So, this “burden” on the woman is nonsense as well.)
I had to check up on these three “sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton from North Carolina State University” to see how big their gaseous feminist resumes were.
“Undoing Gender”...blahblahblah... living as a man for a year (”I got to the dance floor and was like ‘be cock of the walk!’”)...blahblahblah...studying the food “access” of low income women...blahblahblah...
In other words three whole lifetimes of utterly worthless and resolutely dilettantish hogwash. A perfect trifecta of self-absorbed, doctrinaire idiocy.
No wonder cooking in one’s own kitchen is treated disdainfully by these clownish gems.
“the stress that cooking puts on people, particularly women, may not be worth the trade-off”
Yeah, stuffing your children with garbage food from grossly overpriced fast food restaurants and watching them blow up like blimps, get Type II diabetes at age 21 and heart disease at age 29 is far less stressful, particularly for the mothers. On the plus side, if the husband has a LARGE life insurance policy and he kicks the bucket prematurely from a eating a diet of crap all his (short) life, that might take away a bit of the sting. Still, on the downside, he’s just as likely to develop some chronic, debilitating disease that might not be worth the tradeoff after all.
(BTW, its mostly been the males in my extended family who have been the cooks, and that’s been the case with most of my best friends, and in almost every other case in my experience, the cooking duties have been split. So, this “burden” on the woman is nonsense as well. Oh, and something tells me Amanda probably doesn’t like to cook.)
I’m cooking some homemade chili for tonight’s Packer-Seahawk game. I’m so stressed out I’ll have to take a nap. /sarc