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2016 Home For the Holidays
LINCOLN DAILY NEWS November 23, 2016 Page 5
written by a husband who cooks (but didn’t always)
T
he job of cooking and creating the
Thanksgiving meal is monumentous (which
isn’t a word, BTW, but definitely conveys the
meaning well). A true Thanksgiving meal with
all its trimmings including appetizers, dessert
and afternoon snacks, involves multiple shopping
trips, a mountain of raw ingredients, a book full
of recipes, and a great deal of labor to bring to
completion. The once a year, phenomenal, no
holds barred delicious meal takes the endurance
and timing of an Olympic athlete.
After weeks of planning and hours of preparation,
an inadequately too short prayer of thanks uttered,
the entire meal is consumed in about a half hour,
which is then followed by football and naps for
the devourers.
That entire monumentous task of preparing
the Thanksgiving meal is traditionally done in
solitude by the woman of the family.
As a culture we have drawn gender lines about
who should labor in the kitchen. The kitchen is
women’s country, and the preparation of meals
is seen as women’s work. But this cultural
stereotype needs to be challenged. Although
mom does a fantastic job laboring day in and day
out on meal preparation, it does not need to be a
job done solely by her because of her gender. She
needs and deserves some help in the kitchen.
And who is going to help her?
Men!
Unlikely, you say.
Men have long been chased from the kitchen,
excluded from meal making, and been told that
cooking is women’s work, inferring that it is a
feminine birthright. But what they really mean is
get out of the kitchen before you mess something
up and annoy the women.
Some of the greatest cooks in the world are men.
Perhaps we could relax the tradition boundaries
for just this one day each year, Thanksgiving, to
bring men into the kitchen and train them to be
helpful.
Skeptical you are!
How do you get men into the kitchen: by trickery
or magic?
CONTINUED ►►