The Boy Wonder, looking out the window of the Ford Tri-Motor he rode in last Saturday.



I've written before about the differences between my mother's experience in home economics classes and my own. To recap: she and her classmates learned to cook and then catered sports banquets. I learned to make pudding pies and English muffin pizzas and then ate them in the 4.5 minutes after the bell on my way to the next class.

Leaving aside the sexual politics involved in classes of exclusively young women preparing and serving meals for banquets honoring (most likely) exclusively young men, I don't think it's a mistake to say that her experience was the more useful by far. She actually learned to cook, after all, whereas I learned nothing in particular that I couldn't have absorbed from reading the back of boxes or can labels. I have my theories about why my class was so different, so useless, so watered-down. In no particular order, these theories are:

1) Pudding pies, snack pizzas, and other pre-fab simple foods, were ideal for teaching a generation of latch key kids how to prepare something easy when they were home alone, while also managing to avoid burning down the house.

2) The 80s marked the start of marketing disguising itself as curricula. Most of the materials we used in our home economics classes were written and distributed by major food processing companies. It is, of course, in these companies' best interests that young cooking students don't actually learn to cook.

3) Prevailing and developing cultural norms at the time suggested that girls would not grow up to be "just" moms and homekeepers but that they would inevitably avail themselves of any number of lucrative and powerful careers so cooking as an instructional topic was considered perversly out of date. (I can't help but wonder why, rather than dumbing down a topic that was traditionally the province of female students, schools did not respond to the whole career-negates-domesticity thing by putting the subject on boys' required schedules. That they did not says to me that either no one really believed that girls truly would grow up to engage in professional work, gave any thought at all as to who would be making the food we would be required to eat career or no, or could not conceive of a future in which women would not be the designated cook despite the potential presence of a chosen career. I have my suspicions which might be true, but it's all too depressing to think about for long.)

I am not a scholar (nor do I play one on my blog) so I don't really know if any of my theories are on the right track. I do know that my experience wasn't terribly unique - of all the women I know who took home economics in school, none of them credit it with teaching them anything enduring or especially valuable. And today, of course, schools are under so much pressure of all kinds and classes like home economics or life skills or whatever are back-burnered even more than they had been when I was a teen (waaaaaay back in the 80s, for those of you keeping track).

Whatever the reasons for home ec's slide, I think that cooking as a skill was further hampered by the advent of the advertisingeverywhere culture (AEC) we live in (seriously, I was thoroughly gobsmacked to discover advertisements on the inside doors of the toilet stalls in a national chain restaurant that a) I will not name and 2) I will never visit again). The AEC made it much easier for FoodProcessing Conglomerate, Inc. to convince newly careered women and homemakers alike that cooking for oneself or one's family is drudgery, a chore, something to avoided and/or reduced at all costs and - behold! - we have this handy product which you can open, warm and serve without breaking a sweat.

The result is that we now have a major food company that gives away a million dollars annually to the person who can most creatively use its frozen, boxed and canned products (last year's winner made stuffing out of frozen maple-flavored waffle sticks), any number of "cook"book authors who claim to be able to save you time and money by helping you fake out dinner guests with things like Naan-Style Flatbread made out of canned pizza dough, and an entire populace who thinks that meal preparation is either some kind of daily chore to be endured only by referencing some "meals in 20 minutes" website or an occasional thing you do for people you want to impress. And all the while the AEC keeps beating its drum...cooking is hard, cooking makes you suffer, open a box, open a box, open a box.... I haven't even thrown in yet the existence of those products the packages of which proclaim "Includes Meat!"

O.K., this is getting long and I've got to run to pick up the kids. Would you be shocked to know that I've got more to say about this? No? Good, because we haven't yet covered those mom's night out meal-assembly places, OAMC, a host of new books aimed at helping the beleagered and over-worked to feed themselves, children's cookbooks, Alice Waters, the war on poverty, or my new manifesto. Oh, and the jerk sauce I made the other day.