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Happy Monday!
Jan. 25th, 2021 02:18 pmI’m not contagious (AFAIK) but I feel like crap. I was really hoping to be done with this sort of thing before I was 50, much less 51 and staring at 52 arriving in a few months. And yet, here I am.
Having frightened away most readers, I will now proceed to what I have been wanting to blog about for a while: the relentlessness of food.
Recently, a delightful person on twitter tweeted about the relentlessness of food: acquiring it, preparing it, eating it, cleaning up after it, lather rinse repeat. The observation in the context of their life included disability, so when someone came along and ... was extremely insensitive / rude / wtf about it, that was an added layer of WTf. But honestly, when I saw the tweet, without (knowingly anyway) sharing any kind of related disability, I entirely agreed with the sentiment. I am well aware of the relentlessness of food and I Have Some Thoughts.
First Thought, I would like to note that most food preparation involves water and heat (Not All Food Preparation, but anyone who wants to discuss food that does not involve water and/or heat can go fuck right off because this is not about that). Hauling water and fuel (and heating the water to make it safe, for that matter) has traditionally been the work of women. Some of the earliest home automation ever include piped (or wired) fuel for heating, and piped potable water. If it comes in via a pipe (or wire), then a woman (or girl) does not have to get up before dawn to haul it on her head, back, in a bucket, basket, whatever. She can then sleep a bit longer, and think a bit better and maybe have some time to get an education.
An educated woman does not forget this. She remembers.
Second Thought: the mid 1980s beginning of women going on strike against the family dinner. It has been trendy to lament the death of the Family Dinner. And it is never hard to find someone who thinks more food should be prepared at home, because food prepared at home _can_ be lower in sodium, processed grains, saturated fats, etc. and higher in fruits and vegetables, fiber, high quality protein, etc. For many years, I have worked quite diligently to try to prepare more food at home vs. takeout, eating out, fast food, etc. I have to do this somewhat, because I have sodium sensitivities (no, I don’t have high blood pressure, but that’s because I stop it with the sodium when it makes me bloat) and food allergies (dairy, some shellfish, lemongrass, buckwheat, and a random list of other things) that make eating food prepared by other people somewhat tricky. It was not _that_ long ago, that intact, white, nuclear families in the United States had a mom in the house who would prepare snacks and meals for the rest of the people living in the house. But starting around 1984, plus or minus a few years depending on the family and the region, those women declined to continue. Fast food had created a lot of cheap alternatives, and the rise of family restaurants (chain and the expansion of Italian ethnic restaurants and similar, along with the ever-present diner) meant that many families could eat out once or twice or more a week, and take home leftovers to eat on other nights. The expansion of choices in frozen meals, and breakfast for dinner covered the balance of dinners, and lunches were typically already eaten out of the home in school or work cafeterias.
A lot of people seem to not really be aware of the women’s strike against dinner, even tho we were living with it right up to the beginning of the pandemic. I quite vividly remember, because I was old enough to be roped into cooking some dinners, but my repertoire was pretty limited at the time (I didn’t care — I had no objection whatsoever to eating the same thing night after night. My dad had other opinions), so that didn’t last. I initially thought it was just my mother, but I still attended religious services back then, and talked to the women at the Kingdom Hall and it was pretty clearly a general phenomenon. I don’t know if the strike started out with the end in mind, but we lived for decades in the world which was the result: a dramatic decrease in the amount of daily cooking done by the middle-aged-woman in residence, and a dramatic increase in the amount of food consumed by members of the household which was not prepared _by_ members of the household, other than perhaps reheating in the microwave.
Well, the pandemic changed _that_ in a hurry.
It is not really the cooking, of course. It really is the acquisition of the food. It’s not just going to the store, loading up the cart, paying, driving it home, unloading it into the fridge or whatever. You have to sort of have a plan for what you are going to be making with that food, or you wind up wasting a lot of it. You might think that you could just google what you have on the internet and make whatever you find as a recipe, but that relies upon having some selection from a number of categories — missing categories severely limit your options (believe me, since I cannot have milk products and my husband cannot have allium, we know what it is like to try to figure out how to work around not eating those).
It is not just the acquisition and cooking, either. It is eating it, or not eating it because it is terrible and you are still hungry and now what do you do and can you afford to throw it away? That is extra fraught now: can you afford the risk of returning to the store, or getting takeout or whatever?
It is not just the acquisition, cooking and eating. It is also the cleaning up. I’m pretty efficient in a kitchen. I long ago figured out how to stock a pantry so I could cook a large fraction of the kinds of meals I like without having to preplan any of them (much less all of them in detail, a process my sister has described to me repeatedly, and which I always balk at). I’m a consistent and reliable judge of what I will enjoy, and also at preparing those things. If I make something, barring some sort of weird, unexpected event (major appliance failure, type of thing), it’ll be fine. I know how to package up leftovers to eat later, possibly turned into some other dish. There is, still, The Cleaning Up.
O.M.G. Is there a lot of cleaning up. 4 people eating meals and snacks means at least one full dishwasher a day, and a lot of rounds of hand washing dishes that do not safely go into the dishwasher, and then waiting for them to airdry or towel drying them and putting them away. And because I sorta disapprove of throwing away disposable paper towels, we almost exclusively use dish towels and cloth napkins, so there is laundry as well.
Also, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, cleaning the stove, counters, tray in the toaster oven, splatters in the microwave.
Food. Is. Relentless.
I have not even gotten to having to sort through the fridge at intervals to dispose of things that were not eaten in time, fruit which has molded, etc.
I kinda suspect that we have (somewhat) permanently moved a bit back on the continuum to eating more meals at home, and that will hold up even as we transition to a post-pandemic world, some time in the next year or so. I suspect that because I can see that I have many men friends who are doing a lot of cooking. If we’ve meaningfully broken the back of gender programming in terms of Getting Dinner on the Table, then the arguments in favor of eating more meals at home, together as a family, are powerful.
We shall see, however, because Food. Is. Relentless.
Having frightened away most readers, I will now proceed to what I have been wanting to blog about for a while: the relentlessness of food.
Recently, a delightful person on twitter tweeted about the relentlessness of food: acquiring it, preparing it, eating it, cleaning up after it, lather rinse repeat. The observation in the context of their life included disability, so when someone came along and ... was extremely insensitive / rude / wtf about it, that was an added layer of WTf. But honestly, when I saw the tweet, without (knowingly anyway) sharing any kind of related disability, I entirely agreed with the sentiment. I am well aware of the relentlessness of food and I Have Some Thoughts.
First Thought, I would like to note that most food preparation involves water and heat (Not All Food Preparation, but anyone who wants to discuss food that does not involve water and/or heat can go fuck right off because this is not about that). Hauling water and fuel (and heating the water to make it safe, for that matter) has traditionally been the work of women. Some of the earliest home automation ever include piped (or wired) fuel for heating, and piped potable water. If it comes in via a pipe (or wire), then a woman (or girl) does not have to get up before dawn to haul it on her head, back, in a bucket, basket, whatever. She can then sleep a bit longer, and think a bit better and maybe have some time to get an education.
An educated woman does not forget this. She remembers.
Second Thought: the mid 1980s beginning of women going on strike against the family dinner. It has been trendy to lament the death of the Family Dinner. And it is never hard to find someone who thinks more food should be prepared at home, because food prepared at home _can_ be lower in sodium, processed grains, saturated fats, etc. and higher in fruits and vegetables, fiber, high quality protein, etc. For many years, I have worked quite diligently to try to prepare more food at home vs. takeout, eating out, fast food, etc. I have to do this somewhat, because I have sodium sensitivities (no, I don’t have high blood pressure, but that’s because I stop it with the sodium when it makes me bloat) and food allergies (dairy, some shellfish, lemongrass, buckwheat, and a random list of other things) that make eating food prepared by other people somewhat tricky. It was not _that_ long ago, that intact, white, nuclear families in the United States had a mom in the house who would prepare snacks and meals for the rest of the people living in the house. But starting around 1984, plus or minus a few years depending on the family and the region, those women declined to continue. Fast food had created a lot of cheap alternatives, and the rise of family restaurants (chain and the expansion of Italian ethnic restaurants and similar, along with the ever-present diner) meant that many families could eat out once or twice or more a week, and take home leftovers to eat on other nights. The expansion of choices in frozen meals, and breakfast for dinner covered the balance of dinners, and lunches were typically already eaten out of the home in school or work cafeterias.
A lot of people seem to not really be aware of the women’s strike against dinner, even tho we were living with it right up to the beginning of the pandemic. I quite vividly remember, because I was old enough to be roped into cooking some dinners, but my repertoire was pretty limited at the time (I didn’t care — I had no objection whatsoever to eating the same thing night after night. My dad had other opinions), so that didn’t last. I initially thought it was just my mother, but I still attended religious services back then, and talked to the women at the Kingdom Hall and it was pretty clearly a general phenomenon. I don’t know if the strike started out with the end in mind, but we lived for decades in the world which was the result: a dramatic decrease in the amount of daily cooking done by the middle-aged-woman in residence, and a dramatic increase in the amount of food consumed by members of the household which was not prepared _by_ members of the household, other than perhaps reheating in the microwave.
Well, the pandemic changed _that_ in a hurry.
It is not really the cooking, of course. It really is the acquisition of the food. It’s not just going to the store, loading up the cart, paying, driving it home, unloading it into the fridge or whatever. You have to sort of have a plan for what you are going to be making with that food, or you wind up wasting a lot of it. You might think that you could just google what you have on the internet and make whatever you find as a recipe, but that relies upon having some selection from a number of categories — missing categories severely limit your options (believe me, since I cannot have milk products and my husband cannot have allium, we know what it is like to try to figure out how to work around not eating those).
It is not just the acquisition and cooking, either. It is eating it, or not eating it because it is terrible and you are still hungry and now what do you do and can you afford to throw it away? That is extra fraught now: can you afford the risk of returning to the store, or getting takeout or whatever?
It is not just the acquisition, cooking and eating. It is also the cleaning up. I’m pretty efficient in a kitchen. I long ago figured out how to stock a pantry so I could cook a large fraction of the kinds of meals I like without having to preplan any of them (much less all of them in detail, a process my sister has described to me repeatedly, and which I always balk at). I’m a consistent and reliable judge of what I will enjoy, and also at preparing those things. If I make something, barring some sort of weird, unexpected event (major appliance failure, type of thing), it’ll be fine. I know how to package up leftovers to eat later, possibly turned into some other dish. There is, still, The Cleaning Up.
O.M.G. Is there a lot of cleaning up. 4 people eating meals and snacks means at least one full dishwasher a day, and a lot of rounds of hand washing dishes that do not safely go into the dishwasher, and then waiting for them to airdry or towel drying them and putting them away. And because I sorta disapprove of throwing away disposable paper towels, we almost exclusively use dish towels and cloth napkins, so there is laundry as well.
Also, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, cleaning the stove, counters, tray in the toaster oven, splatters in the microwave.
Food. Is. Relentless.
I have not even gotten to having to sort through the fridge at intervals to dispose of things that were not eaten in time, fruit which has molded, etc.
I kinda suspect that we have (somewhat) permanently moved a bit back on the continuum to eating more meals at home, and that will hold up even as we transition to a post-pandemic world, some time in the next year or so. I suspect that because I can see that I have many men friends who are doing a lot of cooking. If we’ve meaningfully broken the back of gender programming in terms of Getting Dinner on the Table, then the arguments in favor of eating more meals at home, together as a family, are powerful.
We shall see, however, because Food. Is. Relentless.