126 animal, vegetable, miracle
eighteen-year- olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and
class—turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down
to a family dinner table. It’s not just the food making them brilliant. It’s
probably the parents—their care, priorities, and culture of support. The
words: “I’ll expect you home for dinner.”
I understand that most U.S. citizens don’t have room in their lives to
grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next
step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and
takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and
an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically
entangled in the answer. I belong to the generation of women who took as
our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won’t have to
slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a hus-
band presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration.
We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force.
We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes,
and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our full-
time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at
a cash register all day. At the end of a shift we deserve to go home and put
our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the
backside: now most women have jobs and still fi nd themselves largely in
charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we
could live without.
It’s a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food
culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen
we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a
tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. “Hey, ladies,” it said
to us, “go ahead, get liberated. We’ll take care of dinner.” They threw open
the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food
supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions
for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into
bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter
what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture.
Ours now runs on empty calories.
When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly prom-