Feminist influence promotes several perversions, but I think one of the biggest is the devaluing of wives and moms cooking.

Several of my favorite TV shows feature subsistence living (eg, NatGeo’s Life Below Zero) and, related, hunter-gatherer cultures (eg, Ray Mears’s various BBC series). They provide insight through the veil of modernity on human social-cultural roots. A main theme is that whole cultures, traditions, and social/family structures are built around food.

Food is life. Mom’s cooking is life. Wife and mom feeding her family with the most nutritious attainable foods, especially her children with her blood in her womb, then milk from her breasts, then meals from her kitchen, is as basic in human relationships as it gets. Mom’s cooking is powerful verging on godliness.

The kitchen traditionally has been a source of essential life power for women. Yet feminism claims taking women, wives and moms, out of the kitchen is empowering.

Personally, I’ve always found preparing and serving a meal to be a tangible act of love for my family. And yes, I worked full time during much of my childraising years. Somehow that (the lack of time together) made the family dinner experience even more precious.

It’s all about priorities I suppose…

It sounds more like they hand picked idiots to conduct the research on; rather than doing any sort of real research or statistical sampling.

“The saddest part is that picky husbands and boyfriends were just as much, if not more, of a problem than fussy children”

That really has little to do with “home cooking” and more to do with poor choice in picking a life partner.

And “they can’t afford “basic kitchen tools like sharp knives, cutting boards, pots and pans.””

really? cannot afford pots and pans? But, I’ll bet they have a big screen TV!

A home cooked meal isn’t really about the food in my opinion. It is more about family spending time together. At least those are the memories that I have. In a house full of boys we were often going our separate ways, especially by high school. But, we always had Sunday dinner at our Grandparent’s house a couple of times a month.

Oh, and by the way – I didn’t have my first “fast food burger” until I was in high school. The closest we came to fast food as kids was when our dad would take us out to Stewart’s for a root beer float! Burgers and other stuff were made at home – it was much cheaper that way.

Notice how the study’s solutions to the “tyranny” of family togetherness are all about moving responsibility for meals out of the home to institution. Communities should hold pot-lucks (who takes the time to organize them? who does the cooking?) or schools and workplaces should supply tasty take-out meals. What that’s all about is weakening the family. If you can get people turning to the government, their bosses, the authorities, instead of their families and themselves for their daily sustenance, look how you weaken them. Take away from parents the responsibility — and opportunity and right — to sustain and nourish their own children, and what a shift of strength and power to Authority has been accomplished!

What a sterile way to grow up, on food that somebody cooked because they were paid to do so and not because they loved you, not because they want to sit down with you in the evening and hear how your day went, not because they care about what you like to eat, or about teaching you table manners or respect and appreciation for what others do for you, or how to cook for yourself. No wonder kids turn out to be whining ingrates, if they live in families where there’s no assumption that being part of a family involves shared obligations and respect.

And then there’s the loss of the opportunity to express love through work. Not long ago I ran across this poem on that subject, which seems like a typical feminist complaint — one I might have made myself, when I was younger and dumber — until you reach the heart of it.

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.

–Tess Gallagher

Sports practices and other evening obligations make it difficult.

CV’s point here highlights how changes in our society make having family meals together, which I think is so very important not only for family cohesion but better physical and emotional health for all family members, a much more difficult proposition.

When more of the country lived in small towns, where everything was just a few minutes away, extracurricular activities in the afternoons or evenings did not prevent us from getting home to dinner on time. Now that more of us live in exurbs and suburbs, where everything is spaced farther apart and traffic is often a problem, it seems as if a choice has to be made between outside activities and eating together at home.

And because extracurricular achievements seem to be given disproportionate weight these days in college admissions, most families I know go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that Jr. can list a full slate of activities through all their school years. Against that need, family dinner sinks very low on the list of priorities.

They treat it more like Italians treat their food. If you don’t eat it, and all of it, that proves there’s not enough “love” in it.

A cousin of mine solved that rather quickly. She stopped cooking, and pointed her children to the assorted boxes of cold cereal. Her children wised up and stopped complaining.

My siblings and I did some complaining- I can still hear my father telling us “this is not a short order restaurant,” but as my mother was a pretty good cook, the complaints didn’t last.

expat

McCardle talks about kids nagging for mac and cheese, as if a parent didn’t have time to develop a taste for other things before they saw their first Kraft package.

Exactly. If an adult sits a 1 year old on his or her lap while the adult eats a meal, seven will get you eleven that the child will want to sample everything on the adult’s plate.

I have eaten very little tongue in the US, but in South America, a very tasty tongue in tomato sauce is easy to find.