Sunday, November 23, 2014

The New York Times article about cooking dads

The New York Times posted a short article about an increasing number of dads who spend a decent amount of time in their kitchen.

Some interesting facts and statements of the article include,

# A study reported that 42% of men and 68% of women spent time cooking on any given day. Although a large gap still exists, it has been shrinking.

# However, a male interviewee also said that people are still surprised to know that he is the primary cook of his family.  

3 comments:

  1. I think it's interesting to look at home dynamics versus professional dynamics here because as much as this article points out the equalization of the stove at home, we still see a hugely male-dominated professional cooking culture. My first real kitchen job was at a bakery/cafe in Boston. The owners were two women who also had an incredible restaurant and a number of James Beard Awards. One was in charge of savory and spent most of her time at the restaurant while the other was in charge of the pastry side of things and spent the majority of her time at the bakery. The way the bakery ran had us (the bakers) working in the morning and then the savory guys coming in around noon. When I say savory guys, I mean guys. The savory shift was exclusively men and when I was there, the pastry team was only women. Even though Maura (the owner who was in charge of the sweet side of things) was in the bakery with us every single morning, the savory staff consistently disrespected us and our space. They saw their work as more important, their craft as more developed...all the while forgetting that Maura had written at least half of their recipes. The relationship was complicated by the condensed space and almost historical animosity between pastry and savory teams within restaurants, but their inability to respect a female chef was always kind of incredible to me. Just food for thought! Always interesting to see how women are expected to run the kitchens at home, but not even respected when they run professional ones.

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  2. Interesting story Sarah!
    When I think of the few young cohabiting or seriously dating couples I know, it's usually men who are the ones doing the cooking, while the women will do the dishes afterward. I would believe that this change is less men stepping up to do housework than the combination of men taking an interest in cooking (now that it's less gender-specific) and women stepping not being taught to cook in school as children. I never learned to sew (my mother gives me grief about this all of the time), and I am a poor and frankly disinterested cook (but getting better at baking, which is much more interesting to me). Furthermore, when I was in the dorms over the summer with a big kitchen included, I saw men choosing to cook and spending a long time at it way more often than women. They would even cook at lunchtime instead of just eating a sandwich or leftovers. Even with the dining halls open during the school year, there are a few men on my floor who choose to cook on weeknights or weekend mornings.

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  3. This is an interesting find. On top of the fact that men are spending more time cooking, it's also being less stigmatized and I think it partially has to do with the fact that the boundaries that define "women's" space and "men's" spaced are blurring. I always found it interesting how my dad never volunteered to make a meal/cook a dish for the family, even when my mom was away. I didn't think of it in gendered terms but I wondered why it never occurred to him that he could try and make some food too. I think it's such a deeply ingrained thing in our minds that unless the woman explicitly asks for help, or unless the man actively searches for way to help with the food, it stays that way.

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