Meal Machine (Kitchens #2)
Reflecting on the ingrained gender roles and unequal history physically built into domestic kitchens, Lucy Dearlove speaks to Michael Etheridge and Gemma Croffie about their relationships with domesticity.
Kitchens are inextricably linked with the woman of the house. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the fitted kitchen was literally designed as a workspace to fit around a woman’s body. But what does this mean for women - and men - now? How are traditional gender roles built up and broken down by the kitchen itself? Michael Etheridge reflects on the distribution of domestic labour in his own home, and food writer Gemma Croffie talks about the narrow definition of accepted womanhood when it comes to domestic work.
Meal Machine is episode 2 of the Kitchens series.
The title Meal Machine is inspired by an opening sentence to the companion guide to the 2011 MoMA exhibition Counter Space: Design + The Modern Kitchen: “Meal machine, experimental laboratory, status symbol, domestic prison, or the creative and spiritual heart of the home?”
Credits
Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to my contributors on this episode: Michael Etheridge and Gemma Croffie.
You can read Gemma’s piece Kitchens on the Path, which inspired this episode, in the print zine released alongside this audio series. Buy a copy now at leckerpodcast.com/kitchens.
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music also by Jeremy, and by Blue Dot Sessions.
Research and production assistance from Nadia Mehdi.
Cover collage by Stephanie Hartman.
If you’ve enjoyed what you heard, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend!
And if you enjoy listening to Lecker in general, and have enjoyed this series so far, please consider becoming a patron of the podcast at patreon.com/leckerpodcast
[Full episode transcript by Nadia Medhi]
[0.00]: [Sound of gas hob clicking, then bursting into flame]
LUCY: I’ve often felt conflicted about my own relationship with the kitchen. I really, really love cooking. I can spend hours in the kitchen by myself, losing myself in familiar processes, movements or ingredients, or in the fierce concentration of trying new things, new recipes. And understandably, this love only really had the opportunity to blossom when I moved out of shared flats and started living with my then boyfriend, now husband, Rory. For the first time in my life, the kitchen felt like mine. But there's a whole load of other baggage that comes along with this. It feels like if you’re a person who loves cooking, then when you’re in a relationship, you end up being the person who does the meal planning, masterminding the clearing up, y’know, managing the responsibility of using everything in the veg box (if you get one, very stressful!). I’ve just never been sure about all that. It really makes being in the kitchen feel dutiful and weighted, particularly as a woman in a relationship with a man. Living with a partner for the first time is always going to be a process of adjustment and negotiation, and I really would honestly say that Rory and I have a pretty egalitarian approach to housework, and it’s taken some work and we’ve had some back and forth and some disagreements, but, I, yeah, I really think we’ve got there in some sense. But it just, the whole thing makes me feel a bit uneasy, particularly our roles in the kitchen. Like, do I love cooking because I love it? Or is it that I get satisfaction that society bestows on you when you do something that’s expected of you? When I was younger, the kind of house management aspect of living with people just didn’t occur to me. Like, I was just never that person in a houseshare. Like, don’t get me wrong, I would wash up after myself - I’m not an animal - and I would do other things sporadically - or when asked by someone. But when Rory and I moved in together it suddenly felt like this really significant thing - like it felt deeply important to me that the flat was nice, and it was almost like there was this vacuum of who was in charge of getting the work sorted so that it was nice.
[Cutlery drawer slams shut, the gas hob begins to click again, a shuffling beat begins to play]
Like, it wasn’t just about the work being done, like you can always ask someone to do something, like. But it was having to ask that bothered me. And I felt like I was the one doing the asking. I felt like I noticed this more than Rory did. Like why? Why?! Why was that? I’m somebody who is not tidy by nature. I have to work really hard to force myself to, y’know, be neat. So why did this suddenly bother me so much when I moved in with a man?
[Hob clicks and bursts into flame again, the noises of the kitchen intensify; cupboard doors are shut, cutlery is rattled, pots are clashed, a collage of voices talking about kitchens begins to speak over jaunty lounge music. Each speaker is separated by a dash].
You go in the back door - It’s a really small kitchen, it’s tiny - It’s like a tiny little box - Gas hob - So you have the stove - Worktop - Counter - Sink - A small fridge - Underneath the draining board was the gas fridge - If more than one person’s in there, everyone starts to get a bit flustered. That’s the general vibe.
This is Kitchens, a podcast series by Lecker, about the most important room in the home. I’m Lucy Dearlove.
They left out any element of human emotion and emotional intelligence in what people needed from kitchens. - This kitchen is not, it’s not suitable for me, it doesn’t enable me to cook. - Kitchens are more clones of each other than living rooms or bedrooms are. Why? Why is that?
**********************
Episode 2 - Meal Machine
[Music and kitchen noise cuts out]
Michael Etheridge: So it's a galley kitchen with a big, um, bay window at one end. We've got like tall units on the left hand side, which is a - God, I sound like an estate agent don’t I - integrated fridge freezer. This is the first time I've ever had an integrated. And that was a big moment. For me. I was like, that's really posh,
Lucy Dearlove: It is isn’t it
And then another tall unit, which is where I've shoved my bin. And a microwave again, because I quite like not having to have a microwave on show cuz that's really ugly.
Michael and I have been friends since we met in first year of uni. [5.00] And one of the funny things about old friendships when you get into your 30s is seeing the contrast between how we lived then, and how we live now.
ME: And then on the inside of this cupboard, I've got a big Blackboard calendar chart thing which I designed myself, which I'm quite pleased with. And it's basically like a, this is quite a mum thing that I've done, isn't it? I guess you could say that's quite, because my mum always had a calendar in the kitchen, that had you know, everyone's schedule for the week, what the kids are doing, etc. And I mean, this doesn't have that, this just has when we're getting our jabs. But eventually,
LD: every single weekend, which friends are coming to stay at the seaside
ME: Yeah, when friends from London are coming to stay, exactly. And like when prides are and stuff like that.
Michael recently bought a house with his husband Ben - a shared ownership place in St Leonards about 5 mins from the sea. This is the first time they’ve ever lived together without any flatmates, and it’s a new build, so the kitchen is a complete blank slate and the house in general feels like a blank slate for Michael to keep house exactly how he wants.
ME: Oh mind the grapefruit tree. [Laughs]. See, in the bay is a grapefruit tree. And again, you know, I feel like a massive like…tosser, but like this is it. We have the space to put a tree in the bay window. And I mean, and that's just something that like, when I was growing up…I mean, kitchen was just so like, over all the space, every corner of it had some sort of storage unit or something that was barely space to move. And yet I have the luxury to have a tree, which is very nice.
LD: It’s not like… It's a reasonably sized tree.
ME: Yeah, yeah, sorry.
LD: It's not like a ceiling height, I feel like it could grow though.
ME: Yeah, it could! It’s going to.
LD: It’s going to grow
ME: But I like that as well. That's why I wanted a tree in the kitchen as well. So hopefully it will last you know, you can have it in like 10, 20 years.
Although this is the first kitchen that Michael is really, properly had the run of, the kitchen has been his domain in pretty much every house he’s ever lived in. That’s just the natural role he takes, and he’s known the way he wants to run this domain from a very young age. We lived together in our early 20s, in East London, and while it’s fair to say that neither of us had our shit together in many ways, Michael knew how he wanted to live, whereas I barely remembered to pick up a vacuum, because it just never occurred to me.
ME: And then yeah, so on the other side of the galley kitchen is the sink, and a washing machine. Again, like, just having a door and washing machine, like when I was a kid, like never had that. So that's really nice that you don't have to, because you look at the kitchen. It's not.
LD: It doesn't look like there's any appliances here apart from the oven. Exactly.
ME: There's not like big functional appliances.
LD: Why do you think that appeals to you?
[Music begins to play]
ME: I think just the neatness. It's really silly. But yeah.
L: No, its not silly.
ME: It's just neat and tidy. I don't look at it and associate it with work because I don't know the washing machines there. I don't love doing washing. But I can open the cupboard do the washing and close the cupboard and then it's done. I'm not thinking about it.
Well I think, I think a lot of it came from my mum, and the fact that she was always very kind of proud of her spaces. And the kitchen was certainly like her space in the home. And, you know, whilst, you know, they didn't have a fancy kitchen or anything like that. And it was a little Housing Association house that like it was two adults and three kids shared, I think, because there wasn't much space, you had to kind of take pride in it to maintain the order, right? Because otherwise, it's just chaos. And so yeah, she would always take a lot of pride in it keep make sure that it was super clean. And yeah, massively instilled that in me as well.
[Music fades].
When I was younger, like I was, I became pretty aware pretty quickly that the kitchen was a safe space, as it were, it was where my mum was most of the time. And I felt a natural kind of affinity with with her and a closeness that, you know, I'm close with my dad too. But it was just in terms of like being young and thinking about my own identity, she was the more natural person that I would have those discussions with. And the kitchen was the space for that, you know, my dad would, was out at work and would come home, and then would be sitting in the in the lounge, which was separate, it wasn't open plan and watching telly. And then that would be his space, because he's relaxing. And we would be, well, my mum would be cooking, and I would be helping her and stuff. And so I think that's, that's kind of where it started with me.
[Pensive music begins to play]
When I ask people about their kitchens, as I have done many times over the past few months, You know, I’ve been asking people about the way they like to organise them and how they like to live generally, and how they feel about it and so often, mums come up as a natural point of reference.
You know, Michael’s saying he opens the cupboard [10.00] and there’s a calendar painted on the back of the cupboard with all their schedule on, that’s a mum thing, like I just think that’s so telling. Obviously not everyone grows up with a mother in the home, and not everyone has a mother that behaves in this way. Still, so often the woman of the house is inextricably linked with the kitchen. And that role isn’t just about being a great cook.
The academic Emily Contois published a great book recently called Diners, Dudes and Diets and in it she looks at how men’s cooking has evolved over the 20th and 21st century. She looks at how the boundaries of masculinity have flexed to incorporate notions of engaged fatherhood, but they still uphold the traditional connections between food, care work and femininity. She talks about how more men these days are actively partaking in domestic duties like food shopping and cooking but these domestic practices continue to be coded as feminine, and women still do them more often. And on top of that, lots of food media frames men’s cooking as a hobby or leisure activity, maybe even a refined skill or talent. But portrayals of women’s home cooking remains a quotidian and expected duty, as she puts it. So when you think of those food magazines that are, y’know, quite overtly targeted at women, there’s often just a focus on getting food on the table or budget meals for four or y’know, quick meals, easy meals, meals to make after work. That’s very much the focus.
[Music fades].
ME: You know, at family occasions and stuff. I'm in the kitchen with my mum Christmas Day. And my sister to be honest. So there is the gender dimension to that. Yeah, we make jokes about it now, in a way we wouldn't have then because we didn't have the awareness. But, you know, when my sister's husband comes in, he'll make some sort of sexist comment, but he, he will, I will be included in the women do you know what I mean? It's so like, ingrained? Like, he's not even reflecting on that. And I'm fine with that, in a way. Like, obviously, it's not that he's being sexist, but that it's assumed that it's our space. And that there has been a positive decision about that. Do you know what I mean? Like my mum. It's like, it's her space. It's her kitchen and she dominates. And I think I had the same thing. And I was aware of that. When, when, yeah, I went to uni and met new people and started sharing spaces because you have to negotiate it. Maybe it's my personality, but I think I kind of naturally became a bit of a like, Well, not really patriarch, but matriarch is there some gender neutral term for that. Gaytriarch figure. Yeah, that was a part of just having that sort of personality. And then that brought conflict sometimes, obviously, because I overstepped the line or whatever and I’d like to think I’ve learnt from that.
[Pensive music resumes]
And there was always this aspect of well, like, I always lived with girls. And so I kind of, in a slightly sexist way expected them to have a level of cleanliness similar to mine, because, you know, that's the stereotype isn’t it that girls are cleaner and tidier. And that's not the reality in my experience. [Laughs] No, sorry, of course, that's not always the case. But it Yeah, I was always the cleanest one.
And I recognize that you can't, you know, it's a shared space. So you have to kind of meet in the middle in some way. And I would willingly do more. But I think where I probably struggled was like, expressing my frustrations. I may not have done that in the best way sometimes.
According to the Office of National Statistics, in the UK in 2016 women did 60% more of the unpaid work in the home than men did. However, there’s another side to this as a BBC article about division of household labour during the pandemic points out, studies over the past few years indicate that couples in same gender relationships tend to divide tasks in the home based on ability, preference and time, rather than along the lines of traditional gender roles. So in a way statistics that separate women’s and men’s domestic workload in this way are ignoring anything that falls outside of a heteronormative context. Traditional gender roles are immediately challenged when they’re pulled outside of this framing. But it doesn’t stop people trying to apply them.
[Pensive music fades out]
ME: you know, someone who doesn't know us very well. If they come into the house, they would make certain assumptions based on the fact that you probably even my neighbours, the fact that they [15.00] see me in the kitchen with a tea towel over my shoulder, or serving dinner. I'm very aware that they will be making assumptions, probably about what happens in the bedroom, and they're wrong. [Laughs] You know, it's just, it's just it's just yeah, it's a load of bullshit. I mean, gay relationships also perform gender
LD: sure
ME: It's inevitable. The weird thing is, I don't know how much of this is my personality, but I mean, I do absolutely everything in our relationship. And he will be fuming when he hears this and aside from anything else he has a complete misconception about how much he does, do you know what I mean, that's quite common thing. I think, I mean, we all do.
LD: Yeah, I can relate to that
ME: But, I mean, it probably doesn’t sound it, but I’m fine about that [Laughs]. No, I genuinely am fine about it, because it's not that big a deal. Like now, if I can keep things clean, it's not that much work. So I really don't mind doing it. And because I know that it's for me, really, all I ask is that he keeps things, you know, he maintains things. And sometimes he doesn't. And I, you know, the house will be spotless, and then I walk into a room. And, like, they'll just be like, a dirty pair of pants on the floor. And I'm like, literally, what are you doing? You're trolling me? Aren't you, you have to be trolling me? And he maintains is not but but so yeah, in a way, we are like performing the same gender roles, you know, I am doing absolutely 100% of the domestic labor
LD: Right
ME: And he's doing 0%. I mean, we subvert it in the sense of it's not like he's going out and earning all the money and looking after me. I’m also doing that! I’m just giving.
LD: Do you think one of the reasons you don't mind is, because, I feel like I, a lot of the reactions I have when I perceive to have been slighted in some way by might, you know? In some way.
ME: Yeah.
LD: I think like, because it's caught up with so much baggage of like, well this is about the subjugation of women. I guess you don’t have that in the same way.
ME: Yeah, totally, well, yeah, we’re free of that and so I'm not angry in the same way. And I like it because I have the luxury of not, you know, that doesn't materialize, then into me actually experiencing disadvantage in a [murmurs] real way in society. I have male privilege. And that in a Yeah, so it doesn't it doesn't make me angry in the same way, obviously. But I'm surprised it doesn't create more arguments. It really doesn't. And I don't know if that's because because we live in a Yeah, queer relationship where that the rules just aren't the same. Now I'm thinking about it. I'm getting a bit angry. Why does he not do anything? It's just ridiculous!
LD: Yeah, sorry!
ME: No, it's fine. Because I think you have to look at the total package. It's like, he brings other things to the relationships. And it's not. Yeah, it's not like transactional, I'm doing x therefore you do y like, it's just it doesn't work like that. And he brings things to the relationship that I could never bring, because I don't have that in me. And that's Yeah. To me, that's what successful relationship is. We complement each other.
[Music begins playing]
LD: I've had I've had this conversation with Rory where I'm like, he's like, if you feel like something in the house needs doing and I'm not pulling my weight, then just tell me and I'm like, No, but that's kind of the point. Like, I'm not the manager. Yeah, we live here together. Like if something needs doing, you should see it.
ME: Yeah. I think that's where you're going wrong. I think we both recognize that someone has to be in charge. This is not, there's no equality in this household. I'm in charge.
LD: Okay. So you’ve turned it on its head. Okaaaay.
ME: Exactly. If something needs doing. I will do it largely because it's easier, but if I want if or if I need to direct him to do it, I will direct him to do it. And it will be done.
LD: Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. I don't want to do that. Because I don’t want to manage the house? That is not what I want to do.
ME: No, of course. No, I want to do, I want to manage the house. I want to manage everything.
[Music begins to play]
Since I spoke to Michael for this episode a few weeks ago I’ve thought a lot about what he said. I actually reorganised my whole kitchen, partly inspired by the neatness and order in his. It just felt so satisfying and relaxing, in a way. And doing this made me think about whether it would be easier if I just completely took control, and totally managed everything that goes on in the kitchen, like I owned that and I asked Rory to do things when needed to. Like Michael does. Would that be easier? Maybe. [20.00] But wouldn’t it also just be accepting the hand society has dealt women since it became commonplace for us to work outside of the home? Wouldn’t I just be resigning myself to what Arlie Hochschild has historically called The Second Shift?
[Music ends]
I think part of the issue is the actual built environment of our particular kitchen. It’s a small, windowless U-shaped room, it’s completely separate from any living space and its also just completely devoid of anything related to socialising, or leisure. There’s no chairs or places for people to hang out. It’s hard for more than one person to be in there really. It’s a room where it’s hard to forget that the modern fitted kitchen was designed and constructed as a woman’s workplace. The fitted kitchen that we’re so familiar with today, with its built in cabinets and work surfaces, was literally constructed around a woman’s body. Have you ever measured the height of your work surfaces? I would guess there’s a pretty strong chance they’re 36 inches from the floor. In an essay for Quartz called The Specifications of American Kitchens Are Actually Sexist, Rachel Arndt writes: “Over the last 100 years, kitchens have grown, walls have fallen, and appliances have multiplied, but the kitchen protagonist—a woman, standardized—has stayed the same. So has the height of the countertops, sink, and oven.”
As Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan talked about in the first episode of this series, kitchens prior to the interwar period looked very different. And it was around this time that engineers and management experts started to turn their attention to the kitchen. The way was arguably paved by Catharine Beecher, who was an American domestic educator, and wrote a book 50 years prior to this period in 1869 called The American Women’s Home. In this book she suggests using a steamship kitchen as a model for designing an efficient kitchen in the home. So this idea of a small, narrow, confined space, with everything that was possibly needed to feed a large amount of people, quickly and efficiently. The whole idea was it wouldn’t require a lot of movement from the cook, and that was exactly what she was getting at!
[Music ends]
This is when we first started to encounter the idea of a kitchen as a workplace. After that, around the turn of the century and just after, the housewife turned home economist Christine Frederick started writing newspaper columns and then books that about kitchen innovations that were influenced by Taylorism.
[Music begins]
Taylorism is an industrial management discipline, aimed to increase time efficiency in processes. So Taylorism is basically why we have production lines and workflows in factories in the way that we do today. It’s the idea of doing things in a certain order and in a certain way in order to speed things up and maximise both productivity and profit. Christine Frederick applied this to kitchen design. She urged women to arrange their kitchens ergonomically by grouping tasks together in areas where you would do that task, and also to reduce the size of their kitchens to conserve energy so they weren’t running around all over the place. Frederick even created a chart pairing work surface height with the height of the woman in the kitchen - a woman who was 5’6”, according to this chart, would be most comfortable with work surfaces 31 inches from the floor.
Also around this time the engineer Lilian Gilbreth developed an L shaped kitchen and she also first came up with the ‘working triangle’ - the three sided angular workflow that recommended oven, fridge and sink be arranged at three points, all a couple of steps apart. These are two ideas that still persist today as best practice kitchen design. Lilian Gilbreth had demonstration kitchens to showcase her labour saving designs and innovations, and these kitchens were specifically designed for a woman who was 5’7” - which seems kinda arbitrary, because the average height of a woman in the US at the time was 5’3”. And the thing that happened after this, was that, as demonstrated here, the work of Frederick and Gilbreth encouraged flexibility and customization in kitchen design, but in the mid 20th century standardization in manufacturing meant that, for whatever reason, kitchen companies just picked a measurement and we ended up with this 36 inch height that still exists today. And while some kitchen cabinet manufacturers offer adjustable height cabinets and work surfaces, often this is only within a few inches either side of 36 inches. Which for lots of people, isn't any good.
[Music ends]
[25.00] The focus on setting up your kitchen in a way that fitted your body specifically as a woman was all in the name of ‘labour saving’. The aim was to free women from the household drudgery that had dogged them for centuries, and was becoming more untenable now that more women were entering the workplace outside of the home. In the book More Work For Mother, a history of both housework and the tools with which housework is done, Ruth Schwartz Cowan writes about this real contradiction in how advances in technology and industrialization affected the American home and reduced the total amount of work necessary to maintain a household, but in doing so these advances only really reduced work for men, children and domestic servants. Because of how the divisions in household labour historically developed, modern technology has actually, arguably, created more work, more isolation, and increased social expectations for women.
And as Rachel Arndt in the Quartz article puts it: “Was the new kitchen a realistic response to the existing societal structures that held women in kitchens? Or did it end up reinforcing sexism by pronouncing the kitchen a space made specifically to fit women’s bodies?”
[Music begins]
Gemma Croffie: The first kitchen I remember it's my grandmother's kitchen. When I was about seven, when my siblings and I went to live with her.
In the Kitchens zine released alongside this series, there’s an essay by Gemma Croffie.
GC: My grandmother, she sort of worked from home, she baked cakes to sell to businesses. She used to sell the cakes to the ladies, we used to go around selling. So she was very busy lady, very, she didn't have time to faff about. So her kitchen was very basic. She had a separate area, somewhere for her cakes. And this kitchen was just basically a rectangle, a room, very basic room and there were coal pots And she had a clay stove. And lots of pestles and mortars in a cupboard with big saucepan. But because there were so many of us there was a big house and they were cousins and aunties and uncles we all lived there. I think about 15 of us at some point.
The piece that Gemma wrote – called Kitchens on the Path – took as a starting point this kitchen that she grew up with at her grandmother’s house in Accra, Ghana, and then travelled forward tracing the path of her life through the kitchens she’s lived with since, both in Ghana and in England, where she was born and where she moved back to for 6th Form. But this particular kitchen - like many of our earliest memories of the room - was significant. But not in the way you might expect...
GC: I didn't didn't enjoy being in that kitchen. It was just all about work and everything had to be pounded or ground or mashed or whatever, there was always chopped, and there was just always so much work and I didn't want any part of it. So I used to avoid being in the kitchen. I used to find excuses not to be anywhere near the kitchen.
LD: Would you get into trouble for that?
GC: She would worry, she worried a lot, she used to moan a lot and say you're never gonna find a husband. She says you're never going to find a husband if you don't learn how to cook. And that used to push me in the other direction because I thought why don't the boys need to learn how to cook? Why do I need to learn how to cook? It just wasn't good. So I used to say I wanted to be a nun because I was in a Catholic school as well, so I can want to be a nun so I don't need to learn how to cook because I'm not going to get married, so it's fine. But it worried, worried her that I didn't. I was around sometimes I would do a few things sometimes you know, chop, do some chopping or deveining prawns. I remember she told me to do that. There were some jobs I quite liked. So I would do little jobs like that. But I tried to avoid most of the other jobs.
Because she was so determined to reject the social expectations that her grandmother claimed were necessary for her to fulfill, it wasn’t until much later that Gemma discovered almost by accident that she actually really loved cooking.
GC: I moved to England back to England when I was 17. I lived with my mum’s friend, I had a guardian for a while and then I lived with my sister, because my sister was still at university, so I lived with her and some of her friends. I wasn’t cooking much in those days. I was just like, eating I don't know. Chicken and mushroom slices and stuff like that. [30.00] Pasta, very basic stuff like that. I could just about make a tomato sauce I think so there was, warm baked beans or something. It's just, it's very basic food. So the kitchen didn't matter so much to me, em, yeah, and then I'm going to invest in myself and I think that's when I started getting interested in food. And I don't know if it's a coincidence, but it was the year my grandmother died, that I started getting interested in food and cooking and learning how to cook.
I did a placement year. Part of my undergrad. And I remember reading the Sunday papers one weekend, and David Thompson’s book was reviewed. Thai Food I think it was called… I can't remember. But it was reviewed. And they had things like red curry of scallops. And I don't know why. But I remember this vividly. I just thought this food just sounds so great. Something just clicked. But I didn't do anything about it. I mentioned it to this lovely lady. I used to work with called Doris saying, oh, there were these really nice recipes. And Doris said, oh, there's a Thai supermarket not far from where we work. I'll take you there. We went one lunchtime. And Doris helped me choose lots of ingredients. And Doris loved Thai food as well. And she’s, Chinese but she loved Thai food. Anyway, she photocopied pages from a book that she had for me. And I tried, I spend the weekend, like cooked, like, five or six different things. I don't know what came over me. But yeah. And everybody was like, Oh, you know, it’s really nice. And we really enjoyed the food. And I thought, okay, maybe I can cook after all. I think if Doris hadn't said anything, then maybe my life might have taken a very different path.
LD: It’s really interesting that you had a person who then, almost, was, I guess in a sense doing what your grandma tried to do, in that she tried to teach you to cook but it just felt like the motivations were so different. Like, Doris wanted you to cook because she could see how interested you were in it and a curiosity, and she wanted to share that passion, but like, it definitely felt like from the family point of view there was like this obligation, like, did you have to separate those two things for you to be able to enjoy it?
GC: Did I have to separate…?
LD: So separate the obligation and then the love of the cooking? Did you feel conflicted when you first started to learn to cook?
GC: Did I feel….? No, I don't think I felt conflicted. I felt, I think what I felt was regret, I felt a deep sense of regret, a deep sense of, you know, I deprived myself of something for so long, because of the connotations or what I thought, like, you know, everybody needs to eat, I think it's important to everybody to learn how to cook. And maybe my grandmother went about it the wrong way. If she really knew me, she would have known that that was the wrong way to try and motivate me.
Things shifted a little, as they do for many women, when Gemma and her husband had children.
GC: Because before my husband and I were both working, it was probably a bit more evenly matched in terms of who did what. But then when you have kids, this balance sort of shifts, because he went back to work when I had a two week old baby, he was back at work. And you were there all day. He used to home and he would be like “there’s cake, but there’s no dinner!”. Because I would like bake a cake. Because I would think, I would do the dessert first, because I love puddings. And would think I have time, but then something will happen. And then I'll end up having only a cake and no dinner. Um, so yeah. So maybe that's where maybe a bit of resent-, no not resentment, resentment is too strong a word. But I started to feel like, because I had I loved cooking and I had been doing um my share of the cooking was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and now I had a baby and now I was doing all the cooking. It was like what have I, what kind of hole have I dug myself into? I'm going to be the the cook forevermore? Then it's not you're not doing it because you wanted to?
LD: Yeah
[Music begins]
GC: It’s like not doing it because you want to, but because you feel like you have to. It’s almost like it’s the fault of the system. Rather than think from the beginning, things are stacked up against women, things are stacked up against mothers, because [35.00] if somebody only has two weeks off if they're lucky. Well, they don't get a chance to really bond with their child in it. So you end up doing a lot of the things you'd end up doing. I know people say emotional labor, and you end up booking appointments. And you know, doing-
LD: You’re like the manager
GC: Exactly. The manager of the household. And it's very hard to, once you get into that. It's very hard to come out of that role.
Before having this conversation with Gemma, naively I’d never thought properly about how the paltry 2 weeks paternity leave that’s still the norm in so many UK workplaces really screws people who have children. But it’s true - the majority of the caring work will probably fall to the parent who is most bonded with their child because they've spent more time with them and is most across their needs on a day to day basis, because they’re the one who’s taken the parental leave to be with them in those early days. And although things are changing very very very slowly, so often this is the mother.
[Music fades]
This also has an impact in the value that is placed on women carrying out work in the home: in More Work For Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan writes about how, in the interwar period, the messaging and narrative around housework in adverts and women’s magazines shifted from being perceived as a chore, to being viewed as an expression of the housewife’s personality and her affection for her family. She writes: “Laundering had once been just a task to be finished as quickly as possible, now it was an expression of love. The new bride could speak her affection by washing tattle-tale grey out of her husband's shirts. Feeding the family had once been just part of a day's work, now it was a way to communicate deep-seated emotions.”
[Music starts]
Women have more choices now than they did previously. They can choose to go out to work after having children. They can choose to stay at home. But, in Gemma’s experience, these choices have judgements assigned to them by other people and she also questions whether they’re really choices at all…
[Music ends]
GC: They say to you things like, oh aren’t you bored? Or people say things to you like, I would want to use my brain. But I think I'm more interesting now that I don't actually have a paid job. And not traveling somewhere every day. And I used to fall asleep on the sofa at eight o'clock when I was working. But I would never denigrate someone else's choice.
Oh, I’ll tell you the worst experience was, I went to a Woman of the World Festival. And there was a panel. And this one of the mothers - I'm not going to mention her name, but one of the people on stage was talking about rushing from work to go and pick up her child from school and the child say, you know, you're late, blah, blah, blah. She's like, Oh, it's so difficult to get, there, and then you get there and this way you get, and it's because of the “slave mothers in their four by fours with their oatcakes”. And I was just, I was... [Pause]. Yeah. It's like, Why are you pushing whatever inadequacies you feel? Because you can’t do what you want to do. We are trying to do too much onto other people who've made very different choices.
Yeah, and I was so upset. I sent an email afterwards. And to her credit, she responded, and she apologized. But, eh, nobody pulled her up on saying, she said slave mothers. And nobody pulled her up on it. And I just felt like it was really unnecessary. And as a black woman, I just found that really offensive. Yeah, and but she apologized, and she said she wouldn’t use that again. And to be fair, she said it was probably her own insecurities. I just feel like women, we pit ourselves against each other sometimes instead of working together so that people will have real choices because people don't really have a choice. If childcare is, if you have to pay 2000 pounds a month for your children to go to a nursery plus your transport to work. For a lot of people. You just can't afford that. So it's not you don't really have a choice, then, [40.00] if that’s the case.
Pleasure and Resistance in the Kitchen. I’ve had this phrase rattling around in my head since I saw in the announcement about Rebecca May Johnson’s forthcoming book, described as a feminist repurposing of home cooking. In a world where the home and the kitchen, has been traditionally built around women’s unpaid labour, maybe it is a radical act of resistance to take pleasure in being in the kitchen.
LD:What do you think your grandmother would say? If she knew how much she liked cooking now?
GC: She would be shocked. I do think, I think she'd be relieved. I like to think she's somewhere. Look, looking down on me. And yeah, and I think I've inherited my love of baking from her. And my mother's mother is a fantastic cook and baker as well. Yeah, in some ways, I feel sad, that she didn't. Because she was so worried about me. So I'm sad in a way sometimes to think she didn't live long enough to see me, you know, do the things that she never thought do, like have children, get married, learn how to cook...
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[Credits music begins to play]
Lecker is written and produced by me, Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to my contributors on this episode: Michael Etheridge and Gemma Croffie.
You can read Gemma’s piece Kitchens on the Path, which inspired this episode, in the print zine released alongside this audio series. Buy a copy now at leckerpodcast.com.
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music also by Jeremy, and by Blue Dot Sessions
Research and production assistance by Nadia Mehdi.
If you’ve enjoyed what you heard, please leave a rating and review wherever you're listening, and tell a friend!
And if you enjoy listening to Lecker in general, and have enjoyed this series so far, please consider becoming a patron of the podcast at patreon.com/leckerpodcast
Thanks for listening to this episode of Kitchens. Coming up on the next:
On one hand, I’m being told that my place is in the kitchen, on the other I’m being told I physically can’t get in…
If you think about a fitted kitchen, you’d think they’re planned efficiently, they’re not! Because you have a counter, you have a gap, you have an eye level cupboard, the eye level cupboard is half depth. That’s not proper storage and you can’t get into it!