In 2024, Men Can Take Over Kitchen, While Women Sip Wine

An interesting assignment in an online Feminist Leadership workshop during COVID was to define Feminism your way taking in as many aspects as you liked from the many definitions already in place, right from the 1700s when women around the world started questioning social inequalities in voting, education and marriage to the Fourth Wave modern day concepts of breaking glass ceilings, pay parity and #metoo. 

The one I kind of veered to was broadly this: “Feminism is an inter-disciplinary approach that believes in the social, political and economic equality of all genders taking into account intersectional dynamics such as race, ethnicity, socio-economic situation, class, religion, ability and sexual orientation.” 

Not a “we hate men” cohort or “the unhappy women who can’t find husbands” club as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie clarifies in her iconic “We Should All Be Feminists” talk. 

Certainly, a long way from the classic Women’s Lib movement. And that then takes us to the kitchen where sadly things seem to be stuck in the stone age in many homes that demarcate it as strictly female turf. The Great Indian Kitchen is one such eye-opening depiction that tells the story of a woman’s culinary confinement post-marriage. 

Shakira’s lips don’t lie when she puts the truth out there blatantly: “The worst mistake of a woman is to go to the kitchen because then she never gets out of there.” Every home has examples of a ma, aunt, grandma, wife, sister forever parked among the pots and pans grinding chutneys, boiling tea, ladling curries, chopping salads or rolling perfectly round chappatis.

Time then to get to the bottom of what’s called “benevolent sexism” sub-texted in cutesy stuff like “in the childhood memories of every good cook there’s a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot and a mom” and kick in some Kitchen Feminism of our own in 2024!

1. “A woman’s place is in the kitchen – sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner.” Don’t take it the wrong way, I'm just trying to be a little sarky here that’s all. What we’re getting at is cooking is not just for women. No, we disagree with anyone who thinks “a woman who can’t cook is as useless as a man who can’t fix things.” Men too deserve to be freed from any gender stereotypes.

2. Get into the kitchen guys and julienne, strain, fry, bake, steam, saute! With the hype around organic ingredients and clean eating, cooking is an essential life skill, not a gender role. Cooking in fact “is a philosophy, not a recipe,” according to the Michelin chef Marco Pierre White. Totally worth a try dude.

3. NB – “Cooking is incomplete until you clean the kitchen after showing your artistic skills”: Natural corollary! It’s not as if you just get into the K-zone rustle up a storm and peace out. Cleaning is part of the deal. You got to leave the kitchen “as is” – spick and span. Till you ensure the whole thing the feminist bit doesn’t count. No, just because you made the biryani or the bibimbap from scratch you can’t just bail. Time to clean up your act and make all that cooking count. 

4. Men have choices that women don’t. Feminism is about giving women choices: Translated to kitchen lingo general home menus tend to be alpha male-centric. He only likes masoor chilka. He prefers bhindi and gobi alu. The paratha isn’t crisp enough for him. No, no he eats chicken, not mutton.

5. Generally starts with one food adjustment and in extreme cases suddenly it’s all about only “his” taste buds. On the flip side: what if the women of the house go “Here’s today’s menu: eat it or starve!” Hello? Where’s the democracy here? Granted, it’ll require a lot of work but changes got to be made. Meet each other halfway at least. That’s a start. 

6. Who eats first? A straightforward question, with a straightforward answer in most cases: Men. Typical scene: table laid out, the males take seats and are served hot from the tawa! The swirl of cream on the dal makhni is mostly spooned into the katori of the head of the table. Condiments of all kinds, made to their specific taste, are lavished upon the gents who go about approving the day’s spread with a barely perceptible nod of the head or disapproving with an explicit tsk-tsk-ing. What we need here is something between “ma kitchen ma rules” and “a family that eats together, stays together.” 

5. And finally, the subtle nuances: who gets the big, boneless pieces from the butter chicken; who ends up heating and re-heating the lunch thali for everyone when there’s a time lag; who eats only freshly stir-fried tofu noodles and who “takes care” of the leftover Asian Greens; who puts the dishes into the dishwasher; who cleans the vegetable scraps clogging the sink; who stacks grub into the fridge in neat boxes? Speaking of boxes, masculinity, laments Adichie, “is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.” On the other hand, girls are “expected to do housework and put men first,” she laments. 

Snap to 2023 guys: “Gone are the days,” some say “when women cooked like their mothers, now they drink like their fathers. Cheers!” By that logic, 2024 seems to be the time then for guys who drank like their fathers, to start cooking like their mothers. Cheers mate! Just offloading the weight of gender expectations. No offence! Bon appetite! 

Views expressed by the author are their own