By Kristin Wartman
The New York Times
May 10th, 2013
The
home-cooked family meal is often lauded as the solution for problems
ranging from obesity to deteriorating health to a decline in civility
and morals. Using whole foods to prepare meals without additives and
chemicals is the holy grail for today’s advocates of better eating.
But
how do we get there? For many of us, whether we are full-time workers
or full-time parents, this home-cooked meal is a fantasy removed from
the reality of everyday life. And so Americans continue to rely on
highly processed and refined foods that are harmful to their health.
Those
who argue that our salvation lies in meals cooked at home seem unable
to answer two key questions: where can people find the money to buy
fresh foods, and how can they find the time to cook them? The failure to
answer these questions plays into the hands of the food industry, which
exploits the healthy-food movement’s lack of connection to average
Americans. It makes it easier for the industry to sell its products as
real American food, with real American sensibilities — namely,
affordability and convenience.
I believe the solution to getting
people into the kitchen exists in a long-forgotten proposal. In the
1960s and ’70s, when American feminists were fighting to get women out
of the house and into the workplace, there was another feminist arguing
for something else. Selma James, a labor organizer from Brooklyn, pushed
the idea of wages for housework. Ms. James, who worked in a factory as a
young woman and later became a housewife and a mother, argued that
household work was essential to the American economy and wondered why
women weren’t being paid for it. As Ms. James and a colleague wrote in
1972, “Where women are concerned their labor appears to be a personal
service outside of capital.”
She argued that it was a mistake to
define feminism simply as equal pay in the work force. Instead, she
wanted to formally acknowledge the work women were already doing. She
knew that women wouldn’t stop doing housework once they joined the work
force — rather they would return home each evening for the notorious
“second shift.”
Many feminists at the time ignored the Wages for
Housework campaign, while some were blatantly antagonistic toward it.
Even today, with all the talk of the importance of home cooking — a huge
part of housework — no one ever seems to mention Ms. James or Wages for
Housework.
But ignoring this idea once again devalues housework
and places a premium on working outside of the home. Since women first
began to enter the work force, families have increasingly relied on
processed foods and inexpensive restaurant meals. Those foods tend to
have more calories and less nutritional value than fresh vegetables,
fruits and meats, so it’s easy to see how the change in meal patterns
led to a surge in obesity.
In 1970, Americans spent 26 percent of
their food budget on eating out; by 2010, that number had risen to 41
percent. Over that period, rates of obesity in the United States more
than doubled. Diabetes diagnoses have also soared, to 25.8 million in
2011 from roughly three million in 1968.
It’s nearly impossible
for a single parent or even two parents working full time to cook every
meal from scratch, planning it beforehand and cleaning it up afterward.
This is why many working parents of means employ housekeepers. But if we
put this work on women of lower socioeconomic status (as is almost
always the case), what about their children? Who cooks and cleans up for
them?
In the Wages for Housework campaign, Ms. James argued for a
shorter workweek for all, in part so men could help raise the children.
This is not a pipe dream. Several Northern European nations have
instituted social programs that reflect the importance of this work. The
Netherlands promotes a “1.5 jobs model,” which allows men and women to
work 75 percent of their regular hours when they have young children. In
Sweden, parents can choose to work three-quarters of their normal hours
until children turn 8.
To get Americans cooking, we need to make
it possible. Stay-at-home parents should qualify for a new government
program while they are raising young children — one that provides money
for good food, as well as education on cooking, meal planning and
shopping — so that one parent in a two-parent household, or a single
parent, can afford to be home with the children and provide wholesome,
healthy meals. These payments could be financed by taxing harmful foods,
like sugary beverages, highly caloric, processed snack foods and
nutritionally poor options at fast food and other restaurants. Directly
linking a tax on harmful food products to a program that benefits health
would provide a clear rebuttal to critics of these taxes. Business
owners who argue that such taxes will hurt their bottom lines would, in
fact, benefit from new demand for healthy food options and from
customers with money to spend on such foods.
If we truly value
domestic work, we should also enact workplace policies that incentivize
health, like “health days” that employees could use for health-promoting
activities: shopping for food, cooking, or tending a community garden.
We
can’t democratize good food without placing tangible value on the work
done in the home. So while proponents of healthier eating are right to
emphasize the importance of home-cooking and communal meals, we will
never create an actual movement without placing a cultural and monetary
premium on the hard work of cooking and the time and skills needed to do
it.
Kristin Wartman is a journalist who writes about food, health, politics and culture.
