Cooking Is a Chore

Laura, a woman in her mid-fifties, lives on a farm in rural New England. Originally from Rhode Island, she moved in her thirties from an urban area to live on a small family-run dairy farm. She is a knowledgeable cook, primarily self-trained, and frequently relies on her intuition. Her kitchen is a large open room, although the "work area" is just in one corner. There is a freestanding refrigerator along a wall that also has a large built-in set of cabinets, open shelves, and a counter; on the shelves sits a large collection of cookbooks. To the right of the stove stands a counter that is cluttered with reused glass jars (filled with maple syrup, honey, etc.), bread, bowls, and other items, including a KitchenAid mixer. Over the counter hangs a set of three wire baskets that are full of a variety of dried spices. Behind the work area is a round table.

Although Laura's active cooking space is fairly small, the old farmhouse kitchen permits an ambling approach to cooking. She does not have all her ingredients set out and ready to go before she starts preparing her meal; rather, she constantly moves around the room as she cooks. Her active cooking takes place at the stove and the small counter immediately to the right of the stove. She picks up the ingredients as she reads through the recipes. While making bread dough, she moves from the counter to the cabinet to get measuring cups and spoons, goes back to the counter to cut butter into a glass measuring cup, and then puts it in the microwave — which is placed on top of the refrigerator — to melt. Meanwhile, she gets another glass measuring cup from the cabinet, takes the milk out of the refrigerator, pours the milk into the measuring cup, bending down to accurately read the measurement, and then puts the milk into the microwave along with the butter, explaining: "If you put them in together from the start, the butter does not melt well."

Laura prepares two dishes that she has made many times before: dinner rolls and a black bean soup. She checks both of the recipes often, but she also has many "tips" or "adaptations" that she has developed over the years, such as those to melt the butter and warm the milk, as described above. She is not a planner, but she is a good reactor. At another point in the meal preparation, she goes hunting for the right spices to put in the soup. Her hanging baskets are full of spices — some in clear glass bottles, some in small brown bags, and others in clear plastic bags. She looks for the dry mustard called for in the recipe by rustling through the spices in all three baskets. No luck. She goes over to the far cabinet — success. But when she opens up the jar, she sees that the mustard has caked and cannot be used. Off she goes to the refrigerator for wet mustard. She says, "This is not ideal, but the soup needs the mustardy taste." She moves back over to the hanging basket and rummages around looking for cumin, but she comes up empty-handed. So she substitutes cardamom, saying, "This is the closest." Laura's cooking is like an improvised dance.

Her engagement with cooking has waxed and waned over the years, influenced by the many obligations of raising a family and running a farm. Necessary and mundane, food always requires attention. As she puts it, "The biggest challenge [of cooking] is losing track of what I'm doing. There is so much going on in the house all the time." When she explains her relationship to cooking, she often talks about her mother. In explorations of the lived experiences of home cooks, the stories of people's mothers inevitably emerge, as they did while Claire was making butternut squash soup and as they do now as Laura cooks. Often, such memories of home cooking turn to stories of the mother's feelings about the necessity of making meals. These associations are automatic; when cooking is categorized as a type of care work, the quality of the food is directly connected to the maker of the meal. These are complex connections, however, involving the person who shopped and chopped and stirred but also this person's affective role in the family (however "family" might be defined). It appears that for most women, these are ties that bind. In her study of social inequality and commensality, sociologist Alice Julier notes that "associations between caring and food are long-standing, particularly in terms of gendered labor on behalf of families." This point is echoed in anthropologist Megan Carney's work with women from Mexico and Central America. These women, who were vulnerable due to both their undocumented status and their poverty, placed great emphasis on their effort to make meals for their families, which was seen as a form of "caring labor."

Laura does not remember her mother as either a good or enthusiastic cook; as she puts it, "I am afraid she cooked." In particular, her mother did not really think about whether or not the food tasted good or was pleasing to her family. Laura remembers that the vegetables were always overcooked:

She would do things like take fresh green beans, they always had a garden. ... She would bring the green beans in and scrub them and tail them and cut them up and put them in a pan of cold water and set it on the back of the stove. And then she would make something like a pot roast. After she got the meat going, she would turn the beans on and boil them in copious amounts of water until they were like canned green beans. She would serve [certain meals]; if it was Saturday night, it was beans and franks. And it was always — well, they didn't have much money — but it was always the absolutely cheapest ingredients and sometimes it was really awful.

In contrast, while Laura is cooking the black bean soup, she points out that she is using olive oil and mentions that her in-laws introduced her to using it in cooking. Then she elaborates: "I never would have found [it] in my mother's house."

Laura did learn from her mother that one way to manage the chore of cooking was to have a method:

On Sundays, we generally had a roast, usually a pot roast, so Monday was sliced leftover pot roast with gravy, heated up in the gravy, with boiled potatoes. Tuesday night was usually American chop suey or spaghetti. It was a pasta dish, except we didn't call it pasta, we called it macaroni. Wednesday night varied a little bit. I'm trying to think what we had on Thursday. ... Oh, Wednesday was usually tuna and noodles.

With the passage of time, Laura realizes that her mother's rigid approach to meals must have helped her cope with a daily task that she did not enjoy, but Laura still seems to wish her mother had been a better and happier cook.

Social obligation has long defined domestic cooking for the Americans who have dominated as home cooks: women. Learning what it takes to make a meal has historically been women's work and so, to a certain extent, it remains. Women have cooked because their families, the dominant domestic unit, needed to be fed. Cooking is often defined as a chore, a necessary daily task, but also as one's obligation to others; it is part and parcel of social networks and thus creates webs of expectation. Cooking can thus be classified as a chore when the series of skilled tasks also involves constant expectations and obligations. In many ways, this category — cooking as a chore — serves as a given, like a street name for a road traveled often, so often that it is easier to describe by features rather than by name. Cooking (and foodwork in general) intersects with both obligations and expectations to such an extent that separating the tasks from the associated values is no easy feat. In this sense, the category of "chore" highlights the necessity of the task of meal preparation as well as women's ambivalence toward it. Laura's reflections on cooking capture such an everyday push and pull between cooking as preparing a meal and cooking as the obligation of preparing a meal for oneself and for others.

Carol, who is in her late twenties, is a single professional living in urban Boston. Her kitchen does not resemble Laura's cavernous room; it is a small galley space where every item is neatly stored in cabinets and all surfaces are kept clean. She admits that she is a planner in all aspects of her life and certainly in her approach to preparing a meal. She likes to host dinner parties on the weekends and clearly enjoys the entire process, from creating the menu to shopping and cooking to hosting the event: "If I'm having a dinner party on Saturday, I plan my Saturday so that I can clean the house, clean the kitchen, get all my stuff ready, go food shopping, make sure that I have every thing. ... I kind of have a timeline." Carol is documented preparing for a dinner party; she wants to share her love of hospitality. Carol proudly displays the printed menu for the evening's dinner, and then goes on to display what she calls her tricks of the trade. One is a baked brie appetizer: "The secret to this is you don't buy the baked brie they sell to warm up, you just buy a wedge, slice some apples and put that in halfway through: heat it for twenty minutes, put in the apples, and pour on maple syrup." She serves this to her guests and then continues to prepare the main dish. Another of her secrets is spending money on ingredients: "This is a $40 bottle of olive oil, which makes a huge difference." She prides herself on her engagement with cooking, which she characterizes as being important to her social life: "When I cook for others I take it very seriously. I put a lot more time and love into it." She enjoys all aspects of preparing a meal when it is a special event: "I love doing it, and I love the display. ... I spend a lot of time prepping." She likes being known for being a good cook, but she aims even higher: "I think my next step is to be more creative in what I'm doing. It's one thing to be a good cook, but I want to be really creative." She actively engages in the process, figuring out a good recipe, testing it before she uses it at a dinner party, shopping at multiple stores (e.g., Shaw's, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Russo's) to get the best ingredients, and setting up her house. In fact, the excitement of the process of making a meal for more than sustenance — the adventure of cooking, in a sense — is her passion: "The part about cooking that I love is seeing something I've never done before come out. I guess I like the final product."

Carol acknowledges, however, that not all domestic cooking is about adventure. When she is by herself, the type of cooking she does is generally different: "I will throw a salad together, and I will do very simple things for myself." When she's just cooking for herself, she shops once a week and doesn't plan ahead. She also sees that her love of cooking for others relies on the fact that these meals are special events: "I think I wouldn't love it as much if I had to cook for my family every single night, but [I enjoy it] because it's more of a novelty." Her sense that cooking can, in some circumstances, be more of a chore than a pleasure comes from seeing her mother's relationship to cooking change over the years: "I just never saw my mom loving cooking. I never saw her just love to cook. There were always five of us running around. ... The food was always awesome, but I don't think we truly appreciated what she gave us." At another point, Carol both identifies with her mother's burden and distances herself from it: "She cooked every night, and she was an awesome cook, but for her it was a chore. ... I think it's a generational thing."

Ultimately, Carol's articulation of her own identity as a cook is intertwined with her social relationships. These are between her and other cooks but also between her and a group of eaters. She understands she is not obliged to these eaters, although as she attests, her mother was not so lucky. As the contrast between Carol's passion for cooking and her mother's sense of drudgery reveals, cooking skills and knowledge, especially when categorized as a chore, cannot easily be extricated from the Gordian knot of social expectations. Cooking can all too easily develop a negative connotation, or at least a sense of ambivalence. Women often talk about their mothers' cooking with a twinge of regret; although cooking can be an expression of nurturance, it certainly isn't always. Carol intuitively makes a distinction between her planned dinner party — an event enhanced by the labor of thoughtfully making a meal — and her mother's daily social responsibility to make a meal for her family. She sees the complexities of the ties that bind when making sense of her relationship to cooking.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary gives the following definitions for the word "chore": "1. the regular or daily light work of a household or farm; 2. a routine task or job; 3. a difficult or disagreeable task." Defining cooking as a chore seems to make a lot of sense at first glance. It is certainly part of the regular work of a household; the fact that we must eat to live makes cooking a necessary daily activity and thus it could easily be considered routine; and this regularity and necessity can certainly make it disagreeable, if not difficult. What a dictionary definition does not make explicit, however, is that the symbolic meanings of all chores are not equal. Cooking is not the same as sweeping or taking out the trash because the end result is not household cleanliness or order. Making a meal merges certain types of household tasks, webs of social relationships, and needs for nourishment and nurturance. Categorizing cooking as a chore is tempting, and it is common in contemporary American discussions of the task, but perhaps Carol's point that cooking can be a chore but can also be much more needs to be examined in more detail, especially in terms of what cooking means to nurturing social relations.

The entanglements of food and care work are well documented. In her rich ethnographic work A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, Carole Counihan intersperses long excerpts from women's food-centered life histories with analysis of the meaning and purpose of food in the lives of a group of women all residing in a small Colorado town. Many of these excerpts weave together discussions of the importance of social relations to cooking and sharing meals, revealing that "women have usually valued cooking, ... but [it] has represented challenges to their agency." The women of this town, along with Laura and Carol, were well aware of a tension between, as Counihan puts it, expressing "creativity and nurturance" versus carrying out "inescapable domestic duties." Perhaps when people invoke the "chore" of cooking, it is a proxy for a series of other expectations and responsibilities that extend far beyond preparing meals, such as feeling maternal guilt or promoting healthy behaviors.

This labor, whatever the affective meaning of the actions, is widely understood to be women's work, as linked to biology as it is to culture. Whether they live in small tribes of hunter-gatherers or apartments in vast urban areas, women have been primarily responsible for feeding families, however those are culturally defined. In the Arctic, Inuit women were solely responsible for transforming raw seal, caribou, and other animal meat hunted by Inuit men into palatable meals. In rural Mexico, women have long been responsible for making tortillas, the caloric and symbolic center of Mexican cuisine. The daily responsibility for food production has remained strongly associated with gender in all manner of modern societies: urban and industrial, western and eastern, northern and southern, rural, agrarian, and hunter-gatherer. A 1973 survey by anthropologists George Murdock and Catarina Provost of 185 cultures documents the near-universal cultural connection between women and cooking, reporting that "women were predominantly or almost exclusively responsible for cooking in 97.8% of societies." In fact, Richard Wrangham argues that the gender division of labor understood as crucial to the evolution of modern humans long relied on women being in charge of cooking food for entire families.

The acts involved in preparing meals are clearly nested in a number of social obligations; they are more difficult to transcend and harder to divorce from gender than other daily chores such as taking out the garbage or shoveling snow. Such obligations, however, are also not always consistently integrated into the many changes in circumstance that often occur over the course of any person's life. A young girl of eight may feel no responsibility for making meals, but by the time she is twenty-one, this may be crucial to figure out. At fifty, after thirty years of being obligated to make meals, that same woman, like Peg Bracken, may have had enough of cooking or at least be much less ambitious about it. All over the world, cooking remains very strongly associated with women's work, although there can be significant meanderings in any woman's life from a straight path of cooking all meals. So, gender identity always matters when it comes to making meals, but how and when it matters — which depends on location, life course, and lifestyle — is also revealing and meaningful.