It’s a Girl

So my favorite Oregonian food writer, Leslie Cole, did an article recently about people trying to get off the grid, getting back to nature, growing their own food, keeping chickens, spending more time with their families, yada yada yada. If this sounds like retro hippiedom, well, it is. But now, as an old-school activity decked out in trendy millennial clothing, it’s got a much edgier name: radical homemaking.

Radical in the sense that getting off the corporate treadmill, saying no to the big American bucks, and choosing to take the slow lane are radical, at least by current go-go standards. Not so radical, however, is the model offered for emulation: mom quits day job, stays home to raise her kids. So maybe an apron is more comfy than pantyhose, but work is still work. And guess what? Nobody pays you to stay home with the kids.

Granted, the new book Cole was writing about — the one called Radical Homemaking, natch — includes profiles of radical-homemaking men. But Cole only profiled three Portland moms, no dads. None of these moms — two writers and a landscape architect — came from what you would call corporate-ladder backgrounds, so their choices to “go radical” aren’t exactly that. And all of them have husbands who bring home the regular-paycheck bacon.

Here’s what the article really missed: All of these “radical homemakers” are busy trying to turn their thriftiness, their clever craftsy homemaking skills, into new careers. In other words, they’re mompreneurs. They’re not just housewives; they’re housewives trying to get people to pay them money to write and talk about being housewives. (Cole’s interviewees are a freelance writer who frequently writes about herself and her lifestyle choices, a cooking teacher who teaches other people how to live the way she does, and a manager of a farmers’ market.) In other words, they’re meta-moms.

Not that toiling housewives should go unsung, of course. But to pretend that a) what they’re doing is different from housewifery, and that b) they’re not trying to turn old-fashioned housewifery into a new kind of paid career, is, well, a neat bit of legerdemain.

It’s not much different from what Newsweek books writer Jennie Yabroff did in her recent lambaste of food memoirs. Like Cole, Yabroff started out well, swinging punches against traditional ideas of gender roles and satisfactions, taking down female memoirists for equating food with love and male memoirists for equating food with sex. But then Yabroff held up a lone memoir as a model for the New Woman to emulate: Dalia Jurgensen’s Spiced.

Spiced, in Yabroff’s estimation, is a genre-busting book because it’s by a female chef (a rare bird indeed) that acknowledges the macho world of chefdom without succumbing to weepy feminine sentimentality. But Yabroff ignores the invisible line in the professional-cooking world: the one dotted between chefs (generally male) and pastry chefs (often female, including Jurgensen). Is that line sugary or salty? Yabroff is too busy applauding Jurgensen for being a female chef (not like those poseur amateurs Ruth Reichl and Kim Severson) to notice that Jurgensen is still making female choices in her career.

Now, a buncha stay-at-home dads wielding chef’s knives and clogs and bonding with their kids while prepping dinner? That’s radical.