Margaret Wheeler Johnson at Double X asks who the hell has time to bake their own bread?
The question that occurred to me reading every one of these pieces is how anyone trying to succeed in New York or a similarly pricey and competitive cosmopolis finds the time or reason to engage in elaborate culinary exercises like bread making. Perhaps these articles are geared to a middle-aged, upper-middle-class demographic secure in their careers with some leisure time to spare.
This is a strange myth that persists, that one must be a wealthy member of the leisure class to have time for things like cooking and growing things and other home crafts. My boyfriend and I both work from home, which gives us plenty of time for things like beer brewing and bread making and hallway gardening (things that may require a length of time but are not hands-on-time intensive).
But plenty of my friends who do not work from home also find times for these sorts of things, too. It’s simply a question of how you like to spend your leisure time. Do you know what I don’t do? Go to sporting events. Watch TV. Shop. Go to the gym. I do, however, spend an inordinate amount of leisure time laying on my roommate Ian’s bed watching him edit videos, sitting in my living room drinking wine and talking with Katie, helping Jables bake bread, brew beer, or whatever else he’s up to in a given week (I think he’s moving on to whiskey distilling next) and cooking things for the many friends who fill my house on weekend days. Johnson writes:
The overall implication is that if you stock your freezer with Trader Joe’s frozen entrees, or worse, anything non-organic, if you aren’t making your friends buttercream-frosted birthday cakes or whipping up truffle frittatas, you do not live “seasonally, locally, sustainably, cost-efficiently and healthily”; you are immature and possibly lazy; and the worst of all possible Gen Y fates, you are NOT WELL-ROUNDED.
I think she’s protesting too much. Sure, there are many, many busy-worker-bee Gen Y types who simply can’t, due to job demands, be well-rounded. But it’s not just a lack of bread-making that makes them so. I know many of these types, and they don’t have time for anything other than working, networking and happy hours (maybe a yoga class twice a week).
Conversely, I don’t know if I’d consider myself well-rounded. I mean, to a certain degree, yes; I have interests and endeavors ranging from food to film to theater to music to politics. But, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of things I choose not to have time for, to ignore completely. Take the Olympics. I have no interest in them whatsoever. I have not watched a single event. But do I feel guilty, or oppressed, by media coverage of the Olympics? No, that would be ridiculous.
So back off the bread-makers. If you think there are better uses of your time, fine. Awesome. There probably are. But learning to make and grow and cook things for myself has been an incredibly enlightening process for me. And a cathartic one. For someone who spends most of the day in front of the computer, constantly reading, writing, etc., cooking is a nice outlet that lets me take a daily break from the life of the mind. As Phoebe Maltz notes:
The idea that a few moments in the kitchen will ruin a budding career is basically a generation-specific interpretation of feminism. Because cooking was once part of that-which-kept-women-back, the entire activity gets stigmatized for men and women alike, but especially for women. It’s just a variant of the idea that having (hetero) romantic relationships is too much of a distraction for a woman serious about her work. Women of my generation need to remind those of our mothers’ that neither a batch of brownies nor a boyfriend necessitates dropping out of school or quitting one’s job.
Update: Amanda Marcotte responds to Johnson at Double XX, and makes some good points:
You ask if spending seven hours making bread is a good use of a young professional’s time. Well, I guess part of me has to ask why all our time has to be accounted for as maximized productivity.
[...] My potential feminist objections to the cooking craze have been mollified by the number of couples in aforementioned urban professional careers who spend their down time together in the kitchen. Turning it into a hobbyist craze has done more for pushing men into the kitchen than any amount of feminist guilt-tripping could ever do, and for that, I’m grateful to writers who push elaborate recipes as mountains to be conquered instead of just dirty work done to feed a family, thereby making it more appealing to men.
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Thank you for giving me the language to protest this unhelpful screed against the localvore movement. It is how we spend our leisure time. As writers, the idea of leisure time as spent watching television and film only leads to deconstructing characters and examining plotlines. Business time!
What is more fulfilling, more relaxing, more exciting than making something? And the small tasks, like making homemade beer, are measurable and provide acute happiness much greater than the effort involved.