By Tracy Clayton
Recently, The Grio ran an article by god-is Rivera entitled “Fear of a Black Stove: Are Women Still Putting In Work In the Kitchen?” It’s an utter fail. I’d like to say that it is at least a well-intentioned fail, but that’s inaccurate. This piece is, essentially, a ham-fisted argument for women remembering their roles and getting back in the kitchen, awkwardly and ineffectively disguised as concern for childhood obesity and the family piggybank.
This piece was posted about a week ago, but my timeline is still buzzing about it. The author makes several disclaimers–she says that as a mother she can understand being too tired to cook, that she isn’t “some southern belle brainwashed by the ‘barefoot-and-pregnant’ syndrome,” and refers to her inner feminist. Then she goes on to basically say that women should be able to cook because, well, they’re women.
Her argument never really gets any deeper than that. She tries, pointing casually to the very real problem of health and childhood obesity. But suggesting that women not cooking is the reason for the epidemic is problematic and astoundingly incorrect. Rivera blames the “decline of cooking sistas” on “the recent rise in the number of professional women” and “the bump in fast food availability.” She never seriously considers the bigger, more expansive problem of the lack of healthy, affordable food available to families living in poverty (an overwhelming number of whom are black). What good will cooking for your family do if the only food you have access to is high in sodium, MSG, and high fructose corn syrup? Without affordable, accessible food, little Ron-Ron still risks losing that foot to juvenile diabetes, no matter who is–or isn’t–in the kitchen.
Also worth noting, there is a privilege that Rivera never acknowledges: she is married. The high rates of single parent households in the black community is fairly well known, and motherhood itself is a full-time job. Rivera has a benefit: she is married. That she has another parent in the household who can hold down the fort while she chooses to prepare a nutritious meal for her family is a privilege that should be noted in an argument about black women not cooking enough. The author has a greater chance of having someone help her around the house, to watch her child/children while she cooks. Married working women have the luxury of two incomes with which to pay the bills and still have the money to buy healthy food, and a car with which to bring it home in. Single mothers often don’t have the benefits of that extra time, energy, or money. But, no, let’s not mention any of that. The problem, she says, is the black woman’s “fear of the stove,” and it is “punishing our children.”
The author then points to cooking as a cultural tradition as a reason for women to get back in the kitchen. What’s that? Why can’t men get in the kitchen? Shh! This is not the time for making sense! Rivera says that cooking “used to be a way for women to pass down traditions, culture and family history to their daughters,” and that it is “a way to ensure that their daughters would grow into women who were self-sufficient.” The implication is that unless women get back in the kitchen, those cultures and traditions will be lost, and their daughters won’t be able to take care of themselves when they become women.
Let me pause here to give a bit of background about myself.
I am 30 years old. I am a woman raised in the South. I do not enjoy cooking, and as such I rarely do it. I was raised by my mother and grandmother, who watched my brother and I while my mother worked. My grandmother was a phenomenal cook, and since she was always in the kitchen, I never really had to learn. I was much more interested in reading and learning to build things with my mother, who is pretty much a female Bob Villa. That is how we bonded. That was our culture, our tradition. Sure, I can’t make lobster thermidor, but I can hang a door and put my own furniture together. I didn’t lose a bit of our family culture in not cooking with my mother or grandmother. The author’s argument that something will be lost, culturally, if black women don’t get back in the kitchen is flimsy, at best, and bulbous and clumsy, at worst. Traditions change and morph all the time; that is not a bad thing.
I can’t help but marvel here about the lack of concern for and responsibility ascribed to these mythical sons, which the author never mentions. What do they learn as their mothers and sisters are slaving away in the kitchen? Can they not help pass on these traditions? Where does their self-sufficiency come from? Shouldn’t they learn how to cook so that they can, like, feed themselves one day?
The author never mentions teaching boys to cook because it is clear that cooking is, in her opinion, woman’s work. Were this not true, she wouldn’t have made this a gendered argument to begin with. She does dedicate an entire single sentence to men and cooking, saying: “Men should also be able to handle their share of the kitchen responsibilities.” Since she never elaborates on what these “kitchen responsibilities” are, she could mean anything from taking out the trash to setting out a trap to catch the varmint that’s been gnawing through your boxes of Cream of Wheat. A better argument would be “adults should know how to cook because they should know how to feed themselves and their families,” as opposed to “women should know how to cook because they are women.”
Teaching these invisible sons to cook would very well prevent other scenarios that Ms. Rivera mentions in her piece, particularly this one: “I know a few couples,” she says, “in which the woman doesn’t cook and when they moved in with their equally kitchen-clueless men, both people in the couple immediately packed on twenty pounds from continually eating Chinese take-out.” The implication here: they’re gaining weight and becoming unhealthy because she can’t cook. Never mind that he is a grown man just as capable of learning to cook as she is. That’s her job. How does it feel, black woman, to know that your selfishness gave your man high cholesterol?
And that’s exactly what the author calls women not cooking–selfish. Then she asks the question, “What’s the point of growing up, ladies?” Are you kidding me? What’s the point of growing up if you can’t cook? Maybe the point is to, I don’t know–to live?? Maybe that’s the point? Come on. Are we really defining womanhood by whether or not we cook in the year 2013?
Most aren’t. But Rivera is.
In case you haven’t rolled your eyes enough just yet, check this out. Rivera quips that “not cooking may be the reason why so many black women are unable to find and marry a good man.” Wait, there’s more! She also says that “every woman who knows how to get it poppin’ in the kitchen and keep her man happily fed will admit that they feel they have a little something over women who burn boiling water.” Girl! Don’t come in here acting like men don’t and won’t cheat on a woman regardless of her skillset. A professional chef can and will get cheated on just as quickly as a woman who can’t tell a spoon from a fork because a man who is going to cheat is going to cheat regardless.
It’s bad enough that black women have to sit and listen to men preach to us about how we can’t get a man, about what we do wrong in relationships, about how pretty much every problem we have in the love department is our fault (I’m looking at you, Steve Harvey, Tyrese and other hackneyed “relationship experts”). To hear it coming from another woman is tiring, and to have it packaged under the guise of true concern for black children and families is insulting. Rivera’s bottom line is this: if you are a woman, “you should always know how to feed yourself and your family; it’s just part of the natural order of human behavior.”
Know what else was once thought to be part of the “natural order of human behavior?” Slavery.
Just saying. Things change.
Photo credit: Shutterstock, and Shutterstock
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