What's your relationship with cooking?

It's interesting (not unexpected) to see this article "Gender & Society" by Cairns, Johnston and Baumann, go into depth about how women have been perceived as the "family" cooks. I say it's interesting because in my household, it was the complete opposite. My mother was a stay at home mom and although I recall her packing our lunch for school she never cooked dinner. I remember my dad coming home from a long day at work and always preparing our dinner--never fast food and always a "sit down" meal. Growing up I can vividly recall seeing cookbooks, advertisements and other forms of media depicting that it was women's "job" to cook her family every meal.

One thing that struck me was this sentence in the article G&S, " With the rise of food celebrities, we see long standing ways of doing gender reflected in instructional demonstrations by women in highly domestic settings, followed by exciting evening programs featuring men engaging with food outside the home." This struck me because it was another way of the media depicting different gender roles for food, aka women cook in the house for their families and men cook more for recreation or special occasions.

Another thing that I found interesting was the concept of "masculinity and meat". This immediately made me think of my dad, who loves to grill, and also my brother who is a complete vegetarian.  My oldest brother has been really into the all organic, non-GMO, etc. movement and has taught me a lot about a healthy diet and lifestyle. A lot of people including my dad and grandpa feel that being a vegetarian is more "feminine." Last class we talked about how more women than men are vegetarians and I wonder if that has a lot to do with the fact that we have this association between men and meat, like mentioned in this article.

After reading about the differences between genders and being a "foodie" I remembered my dad telling me a story about him growing up with 4 sisters. So, my aunts all had an easy bake oven.. (yes we remember that awesome and fun toy) and my dad LOVED using it ever since he was a little boy. My dad said my grandpa took it away from him because he shouldn't be 'baking'. To me this seems so ridiculous but I can see why my grandpa might feel this way. I am sure he was raised to believe that women are suppose to bake, cook and clean for their husbands and children, and therefore, when he saw my dad enjoying this, he felt it was too feminine for his only son. It's the sad truth but I think that the way our parents were raised and their opinions on things have a lot of influence on the way that we act when we too are parents.