This is quite the a third-rail topic, even among women, but there is no way we can address our food pillars without it.

As mentioned before in the Food Pillar Introduction, this isn’t a pro- or anti- feminist site.  It’s intention is not to point fingers or cast a negative light on any lifestyle choice, rather to take an objective look at how the progress of women’s rights affected our current food system.

Because as much as people like to bury their heads in the sand about it, it did.

A lot.

Lets take a look at that for a second.  Why do people inherently avoid the topic of the side effects of women working outside the home?  Whenever I bring it up I’m usually met with an instantly defensive (and negative) response.

A few premises before we continue:

1.  Equality is recognizing the potential that we can all, men and women alike, achieve the same things. This doesn’t necessarily mean a man can or should do everything a woman can do, and vise versa, nor does accomplishing these things make either side “equal.”  To me, true equality is respecting those differences and using them to work in harmony.

2.  Discrimination in this arena often stems from the belief that one sex’s skill set is more important or valued than the other.  However that’s simply not the case, and that approach and our subsequent response is partially responsible for how our food system got to where it is today.

3.  I am a woman now on her second career, both of which would not have been possible 60 years ago.  I am a direct beneficiary of women’s rights and have run the gambit of jobs from the high responsibility, on-call 24/7 working 16 hours a day, to housewife, to cook, to student multiple times.

And I have been discriminated against in both jobs, ironically by different, and sometimes unexpected, groups of people.

But back to it- why the defensive response?  By merely asking the question of the after-effects of working women on food and reviewing that cause and effect, I often find myself painted as a non-supporter of women’s rights.

And most often, by other women.

Why aren’t we allowed to review this topic and learn from it?  No good thing has only good consequences- even the best meals still produce dirty dishes.

On the surface, the defensive reactions I get seem to be rooted in confusion and/or guilt.

Confusion because as women we have so many avenues available to us now, which in itself isn’t a bad thing of course; but we are so thoroughly bombarded by constant judgment that we forget how to make decisions to please ourselves. Assuming we ever learned in the first place.

We’ve either forgotten or never been taught to follow our gut on what job feels right to us.  As a woman I’m not sure you can even select a course of action for your life these days without someone giving you constant flak, regardless of what that course is**.

Guilt because regardless of what we pick, something will get sacrificed. It’s the same as balancing real food and time, and until the day comes when men can gestate babies there is absolutely no way around that.

Incidentally that’s also the core reason why the sexes can never truly be “equal;” woman simply have an additional option that men don’t have, and that option shapes a lot of other decisions in our lives.

We can’t escape that reality any more than the decision of which sacrifice we’re going to make in our pursuit of happiness, and that results in a surprising amount of women feeling constantly agitated.

Most women in my generation (mid-30’s) were brought up by mothers entering and breaking ground in the workplace. It was a phenomenal example of strength and courage, and taught us to open our minds to what was possible and not take crap when people trampled on us because of our gender.

It also taught us, I believe subconsciously and accidentally, that choosing to be housewives and mothers, especially those that used valuable time to make food from scratch, were no longer jobs that garnered respect.

Titles and salaries became the judging factor for this movement, because that was the only way we could compare ourselves to men and see progress.

Is measuring progress bad? Nope. I can’t describe how thankful I am for all of my career opportunities. Do I think we’re using the wrong scale to measure said progress… maybe.

But what I do know is in this pursuit we’ve lost a few things, and they need to be acknowledged for change to occur:

– Respect for jobs that don’t carry titles or salaries, but are hard as shit (often harder than jobs that do carry these things), and still need to be done and done well for future generations to thrive.

– Techniques and knowledge in the kitchen that used to be handed down from generation to generation, essentially creating a void that is usually now filled by cheap, processed foods.

– Less supervision of younger generations’ eating habits.

– Less supervision of our own eating habits.

– Less willingness to spend time in preparing real foods, which funnel us into the ready-to-eat processed out of a bag or through the drive through category.

–   A connection to how certain foods make our bodies feel, and how to seek out and prepare those foods, especially when feeling stressed or injured.

And most importantly: We’ve lost a significant amount of respect for certain careers, like motherhood and housewifery (yes, those are careers too), which has in-turn kept us out of the kitchen.

In fact, that loss of respect for these jobs among women has driven both women and men out of the kitchen for fear of not being respected or appreciated by even, and especially, their loved ones and family members.

Really consider that impact for a minute.

We’ll delve a little deeper and hit each of the topics mentioned above, but for now take a look at your kitchen dynamic and try to identify what’s really influencing it- either positively or negatively.

 

**  Something to consider:  Sometimes flak for career choice comes in the form of constantly being asked when you’re going to do XX instead of what you’re doing right now.  For example, “when are you going to leave the house for work, or go back to school, or start your XX or on and on…”  This happens a lot to mothers and housewives, and even though I don’t believe the questions are consciously meant to imply those jobs aren’t jobs, they do.  Our society is very title-oriented these days, and this is a side effect of that.

An additional note in this arena- I’ve noticed many people don’t know what to say to people with jobs in this category.  Here’s your solution:  Just ask.  I mean is hearing about how some server at some corporate office malfunctioned and all the steps to repair it really more interesting than hearing about how a new dinner was cooked?  Honestly?  About .02% of us have James Bond jobs, the rest are pretty ordinary yet fascinating in their own subset.  The point is, everyone experiences the same ups and downs in their jobs.  Ask, and chat about it.