Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives by Steel Carolyn

Author:Steel, Carolyn [Steel, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781446496091
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

The kitchen at Villa Stein-de Monzie in 1926.

Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook

Despite the best efforts of early feminists to raise the status of cooking, they failed to address one essential fact: their contemporaries had no more desire to cook than their ancestors had. Hygiene and efficiency were all very well, but they weren’t much fun – and the fact that every household guru from Catherine Beecher to Grete Lihotzky had denied there was any pleasure to be had from cooking hardly helped. To have admitted that cooking for its own sake might actually be enjoyable would have risked undermining one of the central props of feminism. Better to insist on it as a science or profession; at least that way, one could pretend that it was not the thankless drudgery that, deep down, everyone really believed it to be. With so much subterfuge surrounding their early development, it is hardly surprising that modern domestic kitchens evolved into such ambiguous spaces. By the 1920s they had become highly sophisticated machines for cooking in. The trouble was, no one wanted to cook in them.

American women had another reason to be reluctant to cook. The Depression meant that increasing numbers were having to go out to work, and for those who remained at home, economic hardship removed any vestiges of pretension about lab-coated housewives, reviving instead the much older tradition of the hardy homesteader’s wife, with her make-do indomitable spirit. The new role was epitomised by American Gothic, a 1930 painting by Grant Wood in which a plainly dressed couple (she with gaze averted, he clutching a pitchfork) stand resolute outside their clapboard Iowan farmhouse. The portrait captured the pioneer spirit of small-town America, but increasing numbers of women no longer lived there. They lived in cities and worked for a living, and were still expected to conjure up wholesome meals for their husbands every night. The stage was set for the creation of one of the twentieth century’s greatest fictions, the domestic goddess – the product not of painterly imagination, but of something even more potent: advertising.

To nascent American food-processing companies, a nation of overworked, guilty housewives presented the perfect market for their new convenience foods. All the industry needed to do was to press home the message that cooking delicious meals was a housewife’s sacred duty. The bakery giant General Mills was one of the first to get in on the act, creating in 1926 the first official domestic goddess, ‘Betty Crocker’, a fictional character with her own radio show, in which she interviewed celebrity guests and dispensed domestic advice and recipes. Betty’s message was simple: a happy home was one filled with the smell of fresh baking. ‘Good things baked in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘will keep romance far longer than bright lipstick.’ The programme attracted a huge following: 40 home economists had to be employed to answer all its correspondence, amounting to hundreds of thousands of letters every year.64 Rival food companies soon set up their own propaganda machines, with

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