Is a woman’s place really in the kitchen?

Women are intrinsically better at cooking than men? I’d beg to differ, and I expect so would my boyfriend

Are we really still obsessed with linking women inextricably to kitchens? I’d expect it from a 1940s advert for the “most scrumptious pie”; where you’d find a polka-dotted, red-lipsticked, smiling housewife beaming over the steaming dinner she’s made for her weary work-drained husband, suggesting that a perfect woman is nothing more than a food and baby-maker.

But I wouldn’t expect it from people like golden boy chef Jamie Oliver, who at Cheltenham Literature Festival said: “If I’m ever a good chef, I’m thinking like a woman.” Really? Women are intrinsically better at cooking than men? I’d beg to differ, and I expect so would my boyfriend.

Maybe this comment came from a good place. Maybe Oliver, and those who have also made similar comments, are in fact trying to improve attitudes towards professional female chefs; which ironically (when considering women’s age-old association with the kitchen) are very unrepresented in the industry.

But come on. It should go without saying that women are all different, with a huge range of personal strengths and weaknesses, and don’t possess a collective kitchen-shaped brain cell that makes our cooking more “maternal”.

The problem with this kind of sentiment, however “off the cuff” or well-meaning, is that it imposes additional pressures on women. As well as being “better, more natural cooks”, we are also widely told we are supposed to look after everyone with our “feminine, nurturing traits”.

These kinds of attitudes just make men sound like Bridget Jones’s mother (and every man in an office who has ever made the women in their team social and birthday cake secretary “because you’re so good at it”).

Oliver has admitted to having suffered what he quips is “scaffolding abuse” by workmen on the streets, irked by his apparent brilliance in proving that men can cook too. So he should know.

Still, this is nothing new from chefs. Many of them in the past have loved to stereotype women. Remember when Marco Pierre-White (the floppy-haired, pretentious one who puts frogs in everything) said in 2019 that men “are not as emotional and they don’t take things personally” in a professional kitchen? Which of course, fails to explain or justify why in 2016 only one in five professional chefs were women. But I thought the kitchen was our place? How very confusing.

Just 30 seconds of watching Pierre-White cook on TV would in fact suggest men and their egos can be a little bit... emotional in the kitchen, too. Some of the footage wouldn’t look out of place in The Secret Life Of Four Year Olds.

Remember also when, struck by a sudden wave of philanthropy in 2019, Heston Blumenthal said he has “always employed female chefs, but historically and ultimately, the body clock starts working. It’s evolution, and it is one thing to have a 9-5 job and quite another to be a chef with kids.” I suppose then, if evolution tells us women shouldn’t work, they probably shouldn’t work. Right?

After all, our bodies shut down and make us incapable of work after we’ve given birth – which of course, we inevitably will. If only we could hold a spoon again (but alas, we’ve had a child). This, from a man who married a woman 20 years his junior (just to make sure she had lots of body clock left, I suppose).

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Blumenthal also expressed concerns that women can’t “lift heavy things” in the kitchen. Saucepans are out of the question, then. I didn’t realise making a creme brulee was a round in The World’s Strongest Man. He went on to say that he thinks “it is much better now than it was 15 years ago.”

I’ve an idea: if men like this kept their mouths shut on women’s capabilities for 15 years, maybe things actually would improve for women?

Yet the outpourings continue to bubble over, like a badly-fitted lid on a saucepan. Get this: just a few days after Oliver’s recent insights, famous British TV chef John Torode said on the Table Manners podcast that women’s food tastes better because it is more “loving and maternal”. Excuse me while I go and lie down in the pantry.

Is this really where we are in 2022? That every few years (even weeks) we can expect a wave of ill-thought-out opinions from male celebrity dinosaurs on a woman’s role in the kitchen? We don’t need it.

It’s not “just a joke”, it’s damaging. It’s also bizarre that men still have so much to say about women and kitchens. If it’s so obviously “a woman’s place”, why don’t they stop talking about it and leave us to it?