Good Riddance to the "Home Cooked" Meal

From a couple of years ago is this article by a dude who laments the decline of home cooking.  He thinks we should mourn it because cooking at home is allegedly cheaper and "healthier."  Neither is true.

When you figure in the time and labor in preparation and cleanup, not to mention the time and money it takes to buy the ingredients, it is NOT cheaper and it is a time suck.  It isn't "healthier."  There is no evidence of that whatsoever.  People are living longer anyway, and it has nothing to do with whether mommy is cooking meals at home from scratch, for crying out loud.  And face it:  It IS always the woman who is expected to perform this time sucking bullshit day in day out, in times of yore three times a day, for decades.

Though the author denies he is shaming women for rejecting the bullshit "homemaking" role whether out of choice or necessity, he is doing exactly that.  Men as a rule do not do it if women are anywhere around.  It's changing, to be true, but cooking is still seen as a sex-typed chore.  And it is a CHORE, a giant pain in the ass.

I have written about this topic before.  I was way, way, way ahead of my time rejecting this housewife bullshit.  My mother and two sisters (the latter way older than I am) performed this nonsense because it was expected of them.  It was a way different era.  I was a little girl then, and I wanted no part of it.  I always thought it was an inferior endeavor, as I noticed men never would lower themselves to doing it.

Good riddance to the expectation of a home-cooked meal along with the family eating together.

Men Who Insist Women Should Cook for Them Should Be Ditched

It's amazing to me how outdated concepts of sex roles--gender--still persist even though times have so radically changed from fifty or sixty years ago. I was sure way ahead of my time as a little girl in 1963, the year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique (of course at the time I had never heard of it), when I rebelled against the idiotic "women's work" around the house, being called "lazy" and "worthless" by my abusive parents while of course the males never did one goddamned thing around the house.

After all, nothing was expected of the girls in my family other than find some blue-collar idiot to marry, pop his kids out, and be a stupid servant around the house in exchange for the man "taking care" of them, to use my mother's revolting phrase as if women were little kids or invalids.

Naturally, I rejected all that.

I don't mind cooking for myself. I have never cooked a meal for anybody else, including and especially men, because cooking is expensive and a major time suck, despite all the howls by self-styled nutritionists and health food nuts, many of them MEN, bemoan the lack of home-cooked meals (ALWAYS prepared by women) these days. Furthermore, I am not some man's goddamned servant. If he wants a meal, he can fix it himself.

People always peddle the fiction that eating at home is "cheaper" and cooking at home is "healthier," but neither is true, plus people who make those claims always have sexist motives trying to guilt women to return to their "feminine" roles.

When you figure in the cost of transportation getting the ingredients, the cost of the ingredients and food, the time involved in preparing the food, and cleanup, it isn't cheaper at all. The time factor is the absolute worst when it comes to cooking anything other than basic meals. There is simply not enough time to fix five-course meals for dinner, let alone three times a day.

The last thing women need to hear is some sexist asshole trying to tell them they need to cook meals like their mommies and grandmommies did knowing full well their efforts would NOT be appreciated by their spouses/SOs and their kids.

In times of yore, "homemaking" textbooks like Teen Guide to Homemaking, a copy of the 1967 edition I bought on Amazon a couple of years ago, were very much mired in the 1950s idea that women had to fill all of the spare time available with making the home "arts" a full-time endeavor.

Given how "meal planning" was viewed in this book, that alone was a full-time job.

Here is an example of a "menu," which the authors of the book encourage young girls--and they WERE young girls back then because this was pre-Title IX--to literally have for each meal, and remember, this had to be done THREE times a day, FROM scratch for the most part. You couldn't go out and purchase microwavable meals (which didn't exist) or buy pre-made dessert dishes or pastries.

Breakfast:

Orange Juice
Scrambled Eggs
Bacon
Bran Muffins
Butter or Margarine
Milk
Coffee


Lunch:

Cream of Tomato Soup
Toasted Cheese Sandwiches
Baked Apple
Milk


Dinner:

Swiss Steak
Green Beans
Fruit Salad
Whole-wheat Bread
Butter or Margarine
Baked Custard
Milk
Coffee or Tea

Fuck this shit. I am SO glad that crap went by the wayside although mostly through necessity as women simply don't have the time to do this bullshit anymore.