Once upon a time back when I was a little kid, I remember how housewives and mothers used to treat cooking as though it were a favorite pastime or hobby or even an art. Cooking back then fell into the same category as pottery, painting, crochet, gardening, and every other talent that people absolutely loved to cultivate.
There were these places in my area called "bread makes" where men and women were able to prepare bread, place it in a disposable tinfoil pan, and take it home to bake in their oven. What ever happened to those places?
Entire organizations, communities, and even societies were built around the art of cuisine. Therefore, there was always some place where you could easily find a hot home-cooked meal, if you were someone who didn't know how to cook yourself or simply didn't want to cook.
I remember Dinah Shore on television shows in which she would be standing in front of a large table with cooking utensils and all sorts of different ingredients. A mob of women would be surrounding her and the table, and their eyes would light up and they would get all excited as Ms. Shore showed them how to prepare and cook their favorite dish.
Well, unfortunately, Ms. Shore has been dead for several decades, and the enthusiasm, the excitement, and the desire to cook one's favorite platters have diminished to near nothing in this day and age. Women's liberation encouraged housewives and mothers to leave their kitchens to pursue careers in the corporate world.
Many men struggle even to make a spaghetti dinner in their kitchen, because most of them never learned how to cook and are too set in their ways to start learning how to do so now. Feminism or no feminism, cooking has never really been a man's job.
There is a male cook on the Internet whose name I cannot recall and who acts as though he is entering through the gateways of Paradise every time he goes into a kitchen to cook a meal, and even he stated that most men aren't calibrated to cook. I don't present this topic as a pet peeve but rather as a major concern for a whole host of men who were born either to suck at cooking or to be unable to cook at all or even as so much learn how to cook.
Cooking has become a dirty, thankless job that many people abhor with a vengeance. It has fizzled out into a dreaded chore that many people cannot avoid no matter how inventive they get about getting someone else to come into their home and do it for them.
Now, if someone likes pottery, painting, crochet, or gardening, they can set any of these hobbies aside whenever they don't feel like messing with them. Well, gardening may be the only one out of them that they have to keep up with; but if they neglect to do it and their garden dies, nobody will suffer from it.
Cooking, on the other hand, is usually not something you can set aside whenever you don't feel like doing it. That is, unless you can get someone else to take on that same responsibility for you, because everybody has to eat. When you're simply not suited for cooking and you're stuck doing it, you feel like a hostage to something that you eventually grow to detest.
As I was surfing the Internet, the artificial intelligence ("AI") feature on Google Chrome delivered to me on my screen some kind of quote of wisdom or the likes that read:
Cooking is ultimately a creative outlet, but not a mandatory life skill for everyone to master.
Hmm. Try telling that to all these radical feminists who force their live-in boyfriends and husbands into a kitchen cold turkey and expect them to learn how to become the next Emeril Lagasse overnight after reading one or two recipes in a cookbook. These women are completely out of touch with reality.
Whenever a radical feminist ends up in the burn unit of a hospital with severe burns over 98 percent of her body after shoving her live-in boyfriend or husband into a kitchen and ending up with an accidental house fire, then she realizes that she has to eat her own bitter feminist words. The same principle applies to radical feminists who end up in the hospital with food poisoning after doing something so stupid.
What part of it do these radical feminists not understand that average men simply cannot cook and don't want to cook inasmuch as recipes look to them as though they're mostly written in Greek or Hebrew? Jennie Gage is a self-proclaimed feminist who has her own YouTube channel, and she argues that it's not that men cannot cook but that they don't want to cook. Well, if they don't have the knack or ability to learn how to cook, they're not going to want to cook, Ms. Gage. Duhhhh!
I mean, men never go to these radical feminists and tell them that they need to become a varsity football quarterback or learn how to repair cars. So, why can they not understand that there are many men who simply do not have the ability to learn how to cook and are not wired for it? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this fact out.
I know that I seem angry. Well, I am angry. If you're a man and you're talented at the art of cuisine insofar it is something that you look forward to doing every evening and it feels like an adventure, chances are that you probably grew up in a family full of male chefs and male cooks. There is no other explanation for it.
If you're man and you wish to excel at the so-called art of cuisine, then it is something that you have to have an absolute passionate love for the kitchen. Otherwise, you will continue to hate it more and more every time you enter a kitchen.
If you're a man and cooking has never been among your life's aspirations and it's not something that you've ever been exceptionally well at, you're eventually going to fall flat on your back if you have to cook every day for someone other than yourself. It simply doesn't have the same appeal to most men that it has to women.
Not too long ago I was on the telephone with my cousin. He is the oldest of the grandchildren on my mother's side of the family. I complained to him how treacherous it was for most average men like me to cook. I admitted to him that I was someone who found everything offensive about cooking. He insisted that I was being a male chauvinist. I replied to him that it has nothing to do with male chauvinism.
It all comes down to the fact that there are men who simply do not have the psychological DNA to be a cook. Plain and simple.
There's a woman who works for my mother with whom I had this same type of conversation. I told her that I absolutely hated cooking, and I wanted to find someone to do it for me instead. She called me lazy. Well, for her information, having an aversion to cooking has nothing to do with laziness. There is even a video on YouTube that supports my stance on this topic. You can find it below.
An Aversion To Cooking Has Nothing To Do With Laziness Or Chauvinism
I couldn't have said it all better myself. If the narrator of the video above does a video about mageirocophobia, I'll be the first to watch it.
Do you ever wonder why you see more stories on the news about male cooks spitting in their customers' food at restaurants and getting arrested for it than you do stories about female cooks doing so? It's because a number of men are simply not cut out to be cooks. Some of them will fool themselves into believing that they're culinary geniuses and actually go work as a cook; but when they have to face the music, reality comes falling down on them like a ton of bricks.
The reason that my cousin can act so casual about believing that men should learn how to cook and that he loves to cook is because he has worked in a number of restaurant positions. His son has that same level of experience as well, so he finds it easy and even enjoyable to cook. Both of my mother's brothers cooked regularly.
I'm beginning to believe that being a talented male cook is something that is passed down through the Y chromosome rather than the X chromosome, because I don't know any men on my father's side of the family who know how to cook. Not even any young men in my father's bloodline who know how to cook. At least I've never seen any of them cook.
My paternal grandfather cooked easy stuff, but he eventually brought someone in to cook his meals. After my paternal grandmother died, he expected the women in the family to do all the cooking whenever he held holiday gatherings.
If you're a man, you're only going to do well at cooking if it is something that you absolutely love and look forward to doing. Cooking comes to women and even little girls naturally. That's why little girls always jump for joy whenever their parents buy them an Easy-Bake Oven for their birthday or for Christmas. Are those things safe for little girls to use?
If you're one of those people like me who are challenged in their culinary abilities, cooking is going to feel like an ongoing jail or prison sentence for you. There's no in-between for those two types of male cooks. You'll never meet a man who claims that sometimes he's enamored with cooking and other times he hates it with a vengeance. As a man, you either love it or you hate it. I hate it, but you already knew that.
If you're single and you live alone, you can cut a few corners here and there to avoid the aggravation and the time drain involved in cooking. You could throw a TV dinner into your microwave oven. You could order a delivery of pizza or Chinese food to come to your front door. There are many creative ways to avoid the stove and the oven and still satisfy your appetite.
When you're a man, it's not until you move out of your parents' home and find out for yourself what it's like to have to prepare your own meals that you realize how good you had it back when your mother cooked everything for you. Then you never take your mother for granted ever again from that point on.
When I was 15 years old, one morning my mother was really tired and she wanted to take a shower. My father expected her to put breakfast on the table for everyone. I offered her that I would make the bacon and eggs and fix the toast.
My mother was so happy about it. I told her to go back to sleep and that I would let her know when everything was ready. However, she wanted to go take a shower. It wasn't until years later that I realized why she had appreciated my offer so much. It was one less torturous task for her to tackle.
After I moved out on my own and relocated to New York City, I found myself eating Campbell's Soup quite often. A woman in my office named Evelyn had a joke about Campbell's Soup being "Mm Mm Good" until one has feasted off of it for so long.
My landlady back then was an Italian-American woman. She and her husband would invite me up to their dining room to have dinner with them periodically. The Italian platters that she made were delicious and well-crafted.
One of my co-workers suggested that I paid her to cook my meals. I felt somewhat tempted to approach her with that offer, but somehow it seemed somewhat awkward for me at the time. My co-worker tried to convince me that I should not have been afraid to admit that cooking was not one of my strong points in life. At least at the time, it wasn't.
After I moved to Los Angeles, California, I did develop a curiosity about Mexican food; and I tried to make Mexican platters myself from scratch. After a while, it became exhausting to cook these types of meals, but it was something different.
When you have complete control over when you're going to cook or if you're even going to cook at all, it's not so bad. However, if you're single and little kids or an elderly family member depend on you to cook their meals, you can start to feel as though you're trapped in a nerve-wracking routine.
Professional volunteer cooks who cook for the elderly are out there, but they can be like finding a needle in a haystack if you don't live close in to a major metropolitan area. In some parts of the United States, Meals On Wheels expects you to be nearly homeless and destitute before they'll approve your application for their service, unless, of course, you have deep pockets and you're willing to pay a fee.
Cooking can be like an inescapable descent into the bowels of Hell when you know you suck at it and you simply cannot find someone to fill in for you on a regular basis. You start out with your frustrations over having to do it all the time by joking around about it as a coping mechanism, but then the whole routine starts to become less and less funny and an aggravation more than anything.
It takes only one time for something hot to hit your skin and burn you before you feel like taking all the pots and pans and throwing them against the walls of the kitchen. It's also not very comforting for you whenever you attempt to pour spaghetti noodles into a hot, boiling pan of water and a number of them go flying down onto the kitchen floor. You keep repeating, "There has got to be somebody else willing to do this for either modest pay or no pay at all."
There is danger everywhere in the kitchen for you; and unless you really like to immerse yourself in that environment, you're constantly going to feel as though you have to be on your guard for any safety or fire hazard that may come flying at you out of nowhere. Cooking is simply not a pleasant experience for many of us men.
Cooking is something that I simply don't get any pleasure, gratification, or redemption out of. I'm always wondering when it is all going to be over whenever I'm in the kitchen, cooking something on the stove or in the oven. It's not merely, "Let's just throw something into the microwave and it's a done deal." There are so many ways you can screw up in the kitchen that it's not even funny, and those screw-ups can even be deadly if you really do the wrong thing.
When you're too tired to cook, it's even worse and dangerous. Women have natural culinary instincts that allow them to cook on auto-pilot when they're tired. When you're a man, you simply don't want to do it at all in that event, period, inasmuch as it's a recipe for disaster and even a house fire. Pardon the expression. Of course, if you don't like it in the first place, you're never going to develop the enthusiasm to do it inasmuch as it has never really been your scene.
The word "cook" even has a vulgar sound to it. It makes you think of someone's gizzard being ripped out of their belly. Well, actually humans don't have gizzards, but you know what I mean. It doesn't sound so bad in other languages, but you still continue to loath it in any event if you're not in love with it.
When I was 11 years old and in the sixth grade, I had to take Home Ec in school for the first time in my life. I remember that very first day in Home Ec class. Several boys and I were all happy about learning how to cook. When you're that young, the world feels like an oyster. Your mother is still fixing your meals every day anyhow, so you don't feel overwhelmed in learning how to perform at least the basics of the culinary arts.
Once you get older, you start to feel less and less motivated to indulge in the kitchen duties, so to speak. You eventually realize that it's just another chore that never seems to go away.
Perhaps someday AI and science will invent a robot or android that does the cooking for you. Probably only rich people will be able to afford something like that. Until then, cooking continues to be that dreaded walk every day into a torture chamber we call "the kitchen."
You could pay someone to do the cooking for you, but you have to know that it's not going to be cheap. For that matter, you can order cooked food to be delivered to your front door, and you can even subscribe to the delivery of precooked meals like Factor to you; but you know it's still going to be more expensive than simply purchasing the food at a grocery store and cooking it yourself.
There's no easy way out of cooking, unfortunately. People have less and less time these days to cook meals on their stoves and in their ovens, but every alternative you explore is not going to be cheap. Cooking can feel like a never-ending prison sentence, because it IS a never-ending prison sentence for many of us men. Also, you can't force yourself to love doing something that you absolutely hate.
Older ladies will tell you that men need to step up and do their part in the kitchen. They'll insist that recipes are fairly easy to read. However, if they haven't gone a major part of their lives without cooking and, all of a sudden, have to learn how to do it for one reason or another, then they don't know what the average man is going through whenever someone shoves him in the kitchen without a clue on what to do.
It's like someone who is musically talented and can play the clarinet. That person will brag to you how easy it is to read sheet music and interpret the keynotes on a staff. However, if you have never played a musical instrument before in your life, you're going to be completely lost when you're looking at a sheet of music. It's the same situation when a man is trying to read a recipe when his experience in front of a stove and an oven is very little to none.
Ladies? If you're a feminist or a women's libber, don't force your live-in boyfriend or husband into the kitchen to cook every evening if it's not already his skillset. Cooking is not fun and games but rather hard work. If you're a dude, and you don't know how to do it and you don't have the ability to learn how to do it, it's pointless for anyone to force you into doing it.
Now, I completely get it, all you ladies out there who are feminists. You and your significant other have a liberated marriage or a liberated domestic partnership; and you simply feel that if you're working hard at your job to help bring home the bacon, your significant other should not expect for you to be the only one to cook the bacon. However, for men, the art of cuisine is very much like singing.
Anyone who saw Rosanne Barr deliver an embarrassing performance of the national anthem at a football game realizes that all the singing lessons in the world are not going to turn her into the next Karen Carpenter or Barbra Streisand. The same principle applies to cooking. All the cooking lessons in the world and reading all the cookbooks in the world are not going to turn a culinarily challenged man into the next Emeril Lagasse. It's as simple as that.
Nothing says that after women's liberation fought to get laws for gender equality, they magically forgot how to cook. Feminists and women's libbers can still cook. If your hubbie or live-in boyfriend simply cannot cook, talk with him about hiring someone to come in to your home in the evening and fix dinner. If both of you are raking in money with your respective jobs, you should be able to afford something of that nature.
Ladies? Here's the thing. You would never want someone with only a fifth-grade education to perform an appendectomy on you, would you? Of course, you wouldn't. Therefore, if someone simply doesn't know how to cook nor has the ability to learn how to cook, why would you want that person to fix you meals in the kitchen? Pardon the pun, but it's a recipe for food poisoning and all sorts of other awful things.
Women's libbers need to think this matter out with their brains instead of with their feminist egos. It could very well save a life. Anyone who has worked in the emergency department of a hospital could tell you that much.
If you're one of those feminists who shoved your live-in boyfriend or husband into a kitchen with only minimal culinary skills on his part, you're probably going to notice that he is serving dinner no earlier than seven o'clock at night. If that is the case, you may be waiting all hours of the night for him to serve you dinner inasmuch as he doesn't want to be in the kitchen in the first place and he moves slowly in tackling the cooking duties for which he never signed on.
When someone sucks at cooking, they suck at cooking, period. Men who can barely cook or cannot cook at all do not wish to pretend that they are the culinary geniuses that they are not.
Being a cook is not like being a dishwasher or a busboy in a fast food place as some women may believe. Cooking is a specialized line of work and talent that not everyone can master. Women's liberation overlooked that fact in their quest to enlist husbands and live-in boyfriends in the duties of the kitchen.
If it's too expensive to hire someone to cook for you, get a relative to come into your home periodically to cook if you have to do so. There's probably at least one relative in your family who would be willing to cook for you now and then for a modest amount of money.
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