Women! Get back in the kitchen!
That’s the answer to the food-shortage crisis, says Rose Prince ‘Must go, I have to cook dinner,’ said my friend Robin, who had dropped in on his way home from work. Jumping on his bike, a fresh mallard and some curly kale in his rucksack, he pedalled off home to his young wife. It’s the ‘he’ part of this that gets me. My new copy of Delia Smith’s book hit the doormat a few days later, packed with recipes asking for cooks to do little more deft than open a can, and I am still in recovery after watching Nigella Lawson’s series about processed gloop. Meanwhile, the busy HarperCollins editor Robin Harvie’s lucky young wife Laurence gets dinner cooked for her by someone who has no intention of cheating. I asked him if it was normal among his friends for the men to take charge of dinner — they are all about 30 years old. ‘Totally,’ he said.
So I turn on the telly. Let down by the girls, I watch the men. Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are giving us bad news about cheap hens. Make stock with organic chicken bones, they chorus. In a show called Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay, a chef famous for his complex, technique-led cuisine, is screaming at the feckless keepers of dirty fridges in the restaurant world. ‘Change your f***ing ways!’ I had always thought that the nurture chromosome existed in women long after the huntergatherer instinct had died in men. My mother fed her six children three meals a day until we were as full as pelicans, but I never saw my father enter a butcher’s shop. But now we have high-profile female role models like Delia and Nigella saying ‘sod the potato-peeler’ and responsible cooking advice is instead dished out by a trinity of macho hunter-gatherers. It would not matter in the slightest, but I suspect that the economic and sociological ills connected to food relate to the great female cop-out. Childhood (and adult) obesity, food waste and all its linked environmental woes would not exist if women were in charge of kitchens. Women once drove the market. It was women who coped in a food crisis. In the second world war British women fought on the home front with their vegetable gardens and cunning ways with rations and rabbit. But the extreme effort was too traumatic, prompting the Housewives Union to march after the war demanding the end of rationing and that the incoming government sort out the food supply. This they did, with new farming techniques designed to overproduce. A burgeoning feminist movement then saw to it that cookery was gradually phased out in schools, and now the successful young woman with a family to feed has a number of tools at her disposal — in the form of convenience food produced by an obligingly inventive food industry — all of which keep her out of the kitchen.
The rising price of food throws the effect of the won’t-cook female generation into relief. The long-term reality of the food-shortage crisis may well force good kitchen management, the type our grandmothers understood, back on to the agenda. While it is nice that men are into cooking, women form the bulk of those who care for others, especially children. I can’t take in a great deal from programmes presented by men, splattered with the blood of chickens and pigs, making sausages or planting a smallholding with vegetables — because I don’t believe them. As soon as the camera stops rolling we all know they go off and do something else. We know also what most men are really like in a domestic kitchen. Too distracted to follow a recipe, unable to finish mundane tasks like chopping onions, and total failures at cleaning up. They are famously extravagant and love to grill large pieces of meat, then serve it with delicious, expensive claret. It is wonderful that men enjoy cooking for others, but you know that they are not the ones to tackle the reduced household budget with 50 wily ways with leftovers. Our TV screens suggest that men are filling a void left by women who cop out in the kitchen, but it is a fantasy. Bits and pieces served up by the cheating women who ignore the real ity of others’ needs: that is food culture with no legacy at all.
Rose Prince’s new book, The New English Table, Over 200 Recipes That Will Not Cost the Earth is published by Fourth Estate.
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