We’ve all read about or watched a movie about the terrifying processed food industry and its effects on how we live. The blame has reasonably been put on the corporations that somehow manage to produce modified “food” in record time, but the death of the family meal has been blamed for the increased need of (or addiction to) fast food. And who is to blame for the death of the family meal? Women, or specifically second-wave feminists, according to Michael Pollan.
Pollan’s recent piece in the New York Review of Books discusses the death of the family meal and puts the blame on women who wanted to leave the kitchen and do something with their lives other than homemaking. Pollan is quoting Janet Flammang, the author of The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, who also makes the point that to regain the family meal and stray away from fast food and processed food, men and children must join women in the kitchen.
Flammang seems to be the one with the actual words of distaste, but Pollan doesn’t disagree in her statement that women are to blame for destroying “one of the nurseries of democracy.”
Pollan is usually hard to argue with– he knows his food. But Broadsheet’s Anna Clark is asking the right question: “what about the untold men who never tied on an apron?”
