I have a new post up at Christianity Today on Michael Pollan’s new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation:
“Lord, bless this food, and bless the hands that prepared it…
As far back as I can remember, whenever I heard this particular cliché in a mealtime prayer, I’d involuntarily picture a pair of magically disembodied hands, white and fluffy like Mickey and Minnie’s gloves, hovering over the kitchen counter, chopping carrots, lifting pot covers, and sweeping minced onions into pans of sizzling oil. “Why are we blessing the hands?” I’d think. “Why not the rest of the person?” It seemed a strange way to bless someone, especially at church dinners, where we all knew the women whose hands had prepared the food, and who, quite often, did the serving and cleaning up as well. Even so, this blessing did evoke the hidden nature of so much domestic work. It still does
Emily Matchar recently took author Michael Pollan to task for blaming women for the decline of home cooking. She notes that in his popular book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan insists that appreciating cooking “was a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.” His take resembles Barbara Kingsolver’s, who in her memoir of local eating claims that the food industry essentially encouraged women to devalue home cooking as they sought equality in the workplace.
Pollan’s newest book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, consciously takes a few steps back from that harsh assessment of feminism’s impact on home cooking, noting that while women’s liberation is sometimes blamed for the decline in home cooking, the actual situation is more complicated.”
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