I was alive during the women's lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Women's cooking has always had a big influence on me personally.
'Outlaw Cook' was a revelation. Folks like Jeff Smith and Marcella Hazan got me interested in cooking, but John Thorne pushed me into the path that I follow to this day. This is the only cookbook I've ever read that understands how men really eat: over the sink, in the dark, greasy to the elbows.
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts.
As a chef and activist, I'm particularly concerned with food politics issues such as the farm bill.
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.
There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
My mother doesn't cook; my grandmother didn't cook. Her kids were raised by servants. They would joke about Sunday night dinner. It was the only night she would cook, and apparently it was just horrendous, like scrambled eggs and Campbell's soup.
I wasn't passionate about food until I'd been cooking for a while. I started long before food became part of the mainstream media. I just wanted to cook, period.
Keep in mind that in 1975, when you became a cook, it was because you were between two things: you were between getting out of the military and... going to jail. Anybody could be a cook, just like anybody could mow the lawn.