“Avakian, for one, is tired of hearing people moralize about the joy of slow cooking. “There’s this romanticization of the family in which women do the nurturing, and Pollan is terrible about this,” she says. “Because it’s a very scary world, people want things to be the way they were. Or the way they never were.”...The historically inaccurate blaming of feminism for today’s food failings implies that women were, are, and should be responsible for cooking and family health. And, unsurprisingly, women are the ones who feel responsible.”
The title of the Emily Matchar article from which this quote comes - Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig? - and the context in which the question is raised in the article will certainly have me looking at his new book through a different lens. I had no idea he had said such manifestly sexist things about women and feminism, nor that his was only one of a number of voices, both male and female, that have been raised blaming feminists for everything from obesity to agribusiness. The stupefying reductionism of this line of invective is, well, stupefying.
But the article is about more than Pollan. It's a response to an 2010 article by Peggy Orenstein The Femivore's Dilemma which put forward the term 'femivore' to describe women who have 'left the work force to care for kith and kin' turning back to home and 'feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon
footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly'.
Matchar, and others - like Brittany Shoot - are highly critical of this article and others that romanticise domestic labour - and let's face it, anyone who has raised chooks or made jam knows that it is laborious - as empowering of women.
Not surprisingly, I have great sympathy with these critics.
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Good points. Makes me think of Gourmet Farmer - I often wonder what the wife is doing while he's gallivanting off on fishing trips (love the show, but she must be working very hard, bit of an unsung hero I think).
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