While boys were told to wash cars, put on the generator, and maybe pound yam, the girls were tasked with all the cooking and cleaning.
From an early age, girls were told that they needed to know how to cook, not for their own sustenance but for their families. You can’t blame the women who taught their girls that because they spent hours in the kitchen cooking for their families, that’s all they’ve ever known to be true.
Because of this, many young boys never knew how to cook and believed that all women were automatic chefs and excellent cooks. Such that we heard that 'The way to a man’s heart was through his stomach.' Every other quality when looking for a partner was inconsequential when compared to the skill of cooking.
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I remember time when I stayed with my uncle, who lost his wife. One day he called me from my room to boil water to make tea for him. I was shocked. He couldn’t put a kettle on a stove? Where did the audacity come from?
Cooking and gender roles
Food is pivotal to life, but it’s difficult to cultivate and even more difficult to prepare. It might have been understandable in ancient times for the person responsible for farming (usually a man) to not be the one responsible for cooking, but in today's world, it is difficult to justify such a division of labour. Women work full-time jobs, take care of the house, take care of the kids, and are still expected to cook. The modern woman is suffering.
The vagina doesn’t come factory-fitted with a stove, just like men are not born to drive cars. Cooking is not a gender role; it is a skill. Only a few things are gender roles, and they are biological; e.g., ejaculation for conception can only be done by men, and getting pregnant is something only women can do. However, everything else is learned through socialisation and cannot be fixed or unchangeable.
Some might say it’s just cooking, but every day, we hear of women killed in third-world countries for not cooking for their husbands.
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Who should cook?
The person who should cook is the one who is hungry and has the time, energy, and interest in cooking.
If you are so concerned about eating, why don’t you make the meals yourself? If you don’t like cooking, you outsource that responsibility and order out or buy from local vendors, like you did before a woman came into your life.
It’s bewildering to expect someone’s sole responsibility in life to be feeding you, such that if she doesn’t, you won’t eat because you did not bother to learn such a life skill.
When we think of the most renowned chefs in the world, most of them are men. So, cooking cannot be gendered.
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A kitchen is a place where hungry people go to prepare food, man or woman; it’s not one person's place.
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