On agency
They might not be classed as desire lines, but in my kitchen, there are worn trails and patches on the floor tiles between the oven and sink and under the kitchen table where I sit to write and eat. Around the back door, the floor is etched with the scuffed marks made by gravel embedded in the treads of outdoor shoes. These marks disappear the moment one steps outside. My friend Elena jokes that her footprints cease from the kitchen door onwards, too, only to reappear as scuff marks on the tiles surrounding the stove in her Coahuila backyard. No trace of us can be seen in these in-between spaces.
I know that a planet has only a percentage of its mass turned towards the light at any given moment. There is Elena at the head of her noisy family table or pinching out the young shoots of the epazote that grows in her backyard, and in a photo taken by her husband, her head is thrown back, caught in a spilt-pepper sneeze. Her Insta account is filled with images of her food and its art and craft, industrious hands, and family, but never paid work outside of the home. Everything else is deliberately turned from the light. We see what she wants us to see, but what we make of this is out of her control.
Having a public Instagram space in which private appetites are laid bare for public consumption can be challenging. This online diarisation for followers of what happens in my kitchen, body and appetite is vulnerable to misinterpretation. I am still smarting from a stranger who directly messaged me on Instagram to comment on the ‘amount of meals I ate’ and ‘no wonder I am diabetic’. I do not exist for some followers beyond that point at which my online footprint peters out, and the drive, energy and creativity that got me to the point of posting about the holiday I earned, a photo of a restaurant I visited, or the meal I cooked in a hot kitchen filled with noisy kids go unnoticed. For that person, I am little more than a greed-driven show-and-tell. I create nothing. My food is not an art or craft, let alone a means of production. It has no intrinsic value. My productive brain has no intrinsic value. Worse of all, in their view, my level of consumption and perceived lack of guilt or shame make me a burden on the state.
So, if the labour market does not value your work, how do we generate self-value? Do we make plain focaccia or join in with the latest Insta craze for decoration? It all turns to shit anyway. But these aesthetic indulgences can be framed as an act of kitchen power, whether they be smiley-faced plates of food or a full-blown garden on a loaf. They reference a long tradition of female folk art or even a form of play that we all know is not something women are encouraged to value as an aim or discrete goal. As Marianne Levy writes in her piece about working from home with young children: “The underlying principle of The Surrendered Wife is simple: the control women wield at work and with children must be left at the front door”. She writes of surrendering to the making of bread and the tension between ‘male’ hobbies that offer a pleasant end versus those of women who feel compelled to "create something" as if the latter defies the notion of agency. Look again at that decorated focaccia made one afternoon in a domestic kitchen and artfully photographed and see it in the context of embroidery on a traditional Ukrainian blouse, Sicilian paschal marzipan decorations, braided rugs, or the embellished jingle dresses of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. It is, above all, a declaration of intent, a statement of visibility, dramatic practicality and beauty, and a creative act in its own right.
“Here I am!”
Meredith E. Abarca wrote about “the acts of agency which transform a kitchen from a woman’s place into her space” in Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food from working-class Mexican and Mexican-American Women. An Instagram post is a visible demonstration of agency in both what it reveals- and conceals, with consequences to the creator from both. When we express our feelings about our kitchens, what we eat and where, and what cooking means to us, we actively make them our space in both the offline and online worlds. We have opened the kitchen windows to allow our art and voices to flow out in the breeze for their own sake. But there is always more to it- and us- than that.
Here are more thoughts and reading suggestions to accompany:
One thing that strikes me about lockdown is the growing visibility of small-scale female-owned food businesses, all of them operating from home, acquiring, in the process, a significant visible currency in the labour market. Many of them are named after their owners, which is something that might at first glance appear twee but can be framed as a declaration of power. ‘Lily’s Kitchen’, ‘From Jane’s Kitchen’, and ‘Baked by Lisa’ force us to acknowledge the women behind the work as they invite us into their illusory domestic realm, spaces which are the result of their having had to jump through hoops held by the environmental health departments of local councils, insurers, the HMRC and who knows how many more august bodies. These official bodies stand in the way of unofficial female bodies seeking to monetise previously unpaid skills. They are gatekeepers, and whilst I am not arguing for a lowering of food safety standards, it is worth pointing out that meeting these standards costs money and time, which hinders women disproportionately.
Owning the production method is integral to female agency, whether the latest Kitchen Aid or the skills and knowledge handed down through generations. In this way, mechanisation is not always the friend of women, no matter how much we are told that the modern food industry helped emancipate us from the home's travails. Invent a mechanised method of making tortillas? You remove from the hands of indigenous women the power to generate capital within their own space, be experts, and set (to a certain extent) their own terms and conditions. Yet I will not romanticise this; we are still talking about backbreaking days spent bent over a metate.
I wrote about the ‘American Dream’ and Mira’s temporary re-swallowing of it in a previous newsletter, and my feelings remain complicated on the subject. So much of what we do in the kitchen is scut work; we are the scut monkeys. At home, we have the relentless execution of meals for hungry children or elders, the menu planning, the budgeting, the shopping lists, the mental maps of every aisle in every shop and market we’re likely to visit and who has what ingredient at what price and at what quality and should our dislike of the sexist owner of one particular stall override the fact that his greengages are sweeter than anyone else’s?
Scut work. Where is the agency in that? It could be in yet another meal for the kids where the food is arranged into a face with a broad grin of ketchup instead of *merely* being plated in undistinguished dollops. Who most needs these acts of art? The kids or the cook? Then there is the skill involved in creating aesthetically pleasing meals by staff in care homes for adults living with dysphagia, a location where market forces frequently exert their most malign effects (You should read Ruby Tandoh on this). A lot of this remains women’s work, and it is low-paid or no-paid to boot. Food budgets are appallingly low, and creativity is impressively high, and we marvel at this ingenuity and compassion. We hear the same refrain about communities of people with few resources, too: "But they make you so welcome, they give you food and cook for you even though they have so little", and not once do we stop to consider that this in itself is an act of agency, that to be able to cook for and feed people is powerful magic, especially in the hands of women.
We share food, our table, and our recipes. Hence, it feels weird when someone withholds the latter and, speaking personally, even weirder when I am required to withhold one, usually because it’s something I am still working on or pre-publication. It feels unfriendly and ungenerous. But as Janet Theophano points out in her book, ‘Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote’, nearly all cookbooks (and indeed, recipe exchanges online) represent more than one social universe. Feeling able to ask is a form of power, and feeling able to refuse is an act of agency. Cooks move between worlds; assuming all contributors to a church cookbook or an anthology like The Best American Food Writing series possess the same status and rights is erroneous. Theophanos says, “the network of exchange may have been fluid, permeable, changing and not always comprised of social equals.”
Susan Leonardi refers to the original definition of a recipe as ‘exchange’ and the giving or withholding as ‘an act of acrimony or largesse’, but I cannot view it through a binary lens that seems to root the act in ancient female behavioural stereotypes. Yes, an exchange of recipes and hospitality can be underpinned by trust and a desire for affinity. Still, the kitchen's secrets are also a form of fiscal currency in a world where power relationships are often misrepresented because there is only an illusion of affinity and trust. Last year, I spent a day in the basement kitchens on the Ickworth Estate in Suffolk. They were once the professional domain of a cook named Margaret Sangster, who turned out meal after meal for the family and its guests, their visiting servants and the many workers on the estate. Mrs Sangster did not write down her recipes, we were told, and nor did she offer any record of her trade secrets, which should not surprise or shock us. As Mrs Sangster aged (and developed a gastric ulcer), her vulnerability to replacement by a younger cook must have been a concern. Ensuring she retained her own fiscal currency in a working sphere still regarded as uniquely female was crucial, so making oneself indispensable was the best -if the most challenging way.
We see this in ‘Below Stairs’ by Margaret Powell, an account of her time spent as a scullery maid before climbing the career ladder to become a cook for a series of grand families in London and Hove. Her books reflect the vernacular of the time with language and attitudes that are unacceptable now. Still, they remain a fascinating insight into class, feminism, and female working-class ambition (a voracious reader. Powell writes about one cook, Mrs Bowchard, who fiercely guarded her secrets. Fifteen-year-old me found this incredibly mean. I get it now.
“The food is hidden away inside homes, inside heads,” writes Prajna Desai in her book, ‘The Indecisive Chicken: Stories and Recipes from Eight Dharavi Women’ which records the lives and cooking of eight of the women who attended a series of cooking workshops she held in Dharavi, a heavily-populated and resource-poor part of Mumbai. If necessity is the mother of invention, then these women are some of our most creative, stirring shards of pottery through a dish of aubergine to imbue extra smokiness (and as someone who used to nibble the edges of earthenware plates for the flavour, I relate to this). Here, we have an “amazing intersection of rote thinking and confidence”. We see how the women inhabit the world and the magical thinking and storytelling that becomes part of transmitted wisdom, with windows flung fully open.
Here’s Nigella on how home cooking can be a feminist act, and once again, it is not only biological sex and gender that comes into play but class and culture too. Once upon a time, we looked to be ‘educated out of the kitchen’ but now? Not so much, I hope.
“Never cook to feed your husband. Cook to sustain yourself” was Sonia Mittal’s mother's advice. I wish someone had said this to me because whenever I state that I am my own favourite person to cook for and that cooking for others will never be as satisfying, I still feel a pang of guilt.
When nourishing others causes your own death (and I do worry about the current western fashion for cooking over live fire, I hope the chefs and cooks engaged in this are protected.)
Here’s Larrison Campbell on Junior League Cookbooks (via Paula Forbes Stained Page Newsletter).
How do we eat in public and private? This short film gave me much pause for thought. Yemisi Aribisala is an excellent writer on this subject, too. And here, we have two female artists making art from food as a commentary on the fetishisation of food and the privilege of food security.
Lisa Donovon on notebooks and how they tangibly express her journey from ‘home cook’ to a chef, which chimes with the Nigella piece I linked to earlier. Donovon's new book sounds great:
How women hold power until the culinary space becomes a business.
On deconstructing the childhood recollections of white women (and this needs to be read before you read ‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett) in Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960 By Rebecca Sharpless, Dorothy Witt is cited as she points out that “there is a disjunction between the minimal power that African-American women have wielded in the United States and the often exaggerated perceptions of their power.”
“Booksellers who deal in newer cookbooks usually want a clean copy, Lindgren said. But wait long enough, and marginalia may add value or at least saleability, as it can convey useful and often gripping information about a rare book’s history, and by extension ours. “It’s an entirely new narrative, on top of or in addition to the narrative that the author has given us." The symbolism behind the monetisation of marginalia is rather poignant.
The Art of Mexican Cooking: culinary agency and social dynamics in Milta Alpa. Mexico by Leonora Joy Adopon is useful background reading.
A photo exhibition, "I am a leader, indigenous woman, and producer", showcases the efforts made by Panamanian indigenous women to protect their foodways. They play a crucial role in the preservation and perseverance of food security.
An academic paper on autobiography and history in two black women's cookbooks. (Also published in 'Food in the USA: a reader' by Carole Counihan.)
In 'Cooking as a cornerstone of a sustainable food system’, Kim O'Donnel argues that sustainability doesn't just happen on a farm.
An academic paper exploring First Nation indigenous elders' relationships with food from a sociological, ecological, and historical perspective. Accounting for the effects of environmental dispossession is crucial for understanding how contemporary patterns of food insecurity have come about, it points out. I am a trained health promotion and health education officer, and I accept that my discipline has neglected this in the past. I think this point also applies on a micro level to the dispossession individual women experience in their own kitchens as market forces, feminism, and cultural change exert their effects.