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November 20, 2003
Dish of the day
What you cook for the one you love says a lot about the state of your relationship. So what does shop-bought sauce and a greasy takeaway mean? Catherine Jarvine reads the menu
There is a complicated emotional language built around how we prepare what we eat and who we prepare it for. Food has long been associated with sensuality — entire industries are dedicated to its role in that department. But in relationships, food is weighted with an emotional status that goes beyond heightened sensuality or its workaday function as mere fuel. The way to a man’s heart, we are told, is through his stomach, but just as surely the way to a woman’s is through hers. Perhaps it’s not for nothing that the kitchen is called the heart of the home.
For my own part, I was culinarily seduced by a bowl of particularly good chicken noodle soup (and reader, I married him). But while the gender cliches have flipped as more men enter the kitchen and more women leave it, rather than being diluted by this culinary egalitarianism, the emotions we invest in food have merely mutated to create a whole new set of issues with which we must contend.
A quick straw poll of the female friends and acquaintances who all, like me, benefit from a partner who has happily carved a place for himself in front of the stove reveals a number of discrepancies in what you might think would be a blissful state of affairs.
One tells me her lack of gastronomic finesse and reliance on quality ready meals when it’s her turn to ‘cook’ leaves her partner (finest ingredients, prepared from scratch) convinced that such culinary carelessness is a mark of emotional carelessness, too.
Another complains that her partner’s near-total domination of the kitchen leaves her feeling expelled from indulging in an activity she once loved; while yet another reports that she feels insecure about cooking in the face of her husband’s much bigger culinary talent.
As someone who finds it difficult to create anything that doesn’t list as one of its main ingredients some manner of bought-in sauce, I have to say that I count my blessings that my husband not only can cook, but actually wants to. That said, I have recently been struck by some anomalies in our gastronomic relationship, too.
When eating food that my husband has prepared, for example, I feel impelled to clear my plate, something I would never consider when eating out. Likewise, I eat things that I don’t particularly like or feel like at that time, for fear of dismissing what I know to be displays of affection.
“You provide food to show people that you love them, and they eat it to show that they love you,” explains Dr Jane Ogden, reader in health psychology at King’s College and author of Psychology of Eating: From Ordered to Disordered Behaviour.
As food has become more plentiful, she says, it is no longer simply about sustenance, but has become “a kind of communication about how you fit into the world. How you eat or how you don’t eat, how you prepare food or how you don’t prepare food; it’s become another language, really.”
Ogden’s view is shared by Nadine Field, a consultant psychologist. “Part of communication in a relationship is the ability to communicate mutual pleasure, and food is primevally a demonstration of that,” she says. “If you look at it from a Darwinian point of view, the provision of food is about keeping your mate very well-nourished and likely to survive.” The better the food, then — the more care that has gone into it — the stronger we physically become and the more we subconsciously believe we are nurturing or being nurtured.
“There’s something very passionate about food, which is why people get passionate about it,” Field continues. “Something of the relationship is in the food; the loving is in the food. It’s a token, a real demonstration of feeling.”
Which perhaps goes some way to explaining why a quick, ill-considered takeaway dinner can leave a partner feeling uncared for, or why we instinctively understand that a partner’s culinary efforts, no matter how poor, must be endlessly praised (I’m thinking of my own tired efforts here). Put in the context of our old hunter-gatherer selves, I can see that such responses may be understandable, but in these days of relative plenty, shouldn’t we have all collectively moved on and got over it?
It seems, however, that our response to food is now so innate that grown-up, modern-day sensibilities often don’t get a look-in. One friend, who prefers to remain anonymous in the face of the far from PC feelings that cooking for her partner excites in her, sheepishly acknowledges: “For me, it’s about that whole idea of being able to look after your man and being needed. I find it hard to reconcile that from a feminist point of view, but that’s the way it is.”
It’s interesting to note that since men started making the kitchen their own, their role as cook often bears little resemblance to that traditionally ascribed to women.
As Plaxy Locatelli, who is married to top chef Giorgio Locatelli, points out, having a man who cooks well prepare a meal for you is “very sexy”, something that “feels like you’re being looked after in a very masculine way”. She finds it hard to equate this with women in a similar role. After all, “If you imagine a woman cooking,” she points out wryly, “you immediately think of your mum in a pinny.”
On the other hand, Maddy, 38, complains that her partner only ever does what she calls the ‘glamour cooking’ — special dinners @ deux, or big productions when they have friends over to eat. “You don’t see him anywhere near the kitchen when it’s time to make the kids their lunch,” she points out ruefully.
Indeed, a recent survey in the US questioning men and women about how they saw themselves in the kitchen highlighted a number of similar incongruities between the sexes: namely, that women still cooked because they had to, while for men it was more about fun. (And when asked to describe how they saw themselves in the kitchen, more women replied ‘plain and simple cooks’, while men were more inclined to elevate their abilities as ‘gourmet’.)
And the platform has changed. Our recent courting of everything ‘lifestyle’ has meant that whereas the kitchen once signalled drudgery, it is now fetishised — or at least transformed into a seat of domestic power.
It has become a place for men to display not only their prowess but also their love, while women either embrace their inner domestic goddess or demonstrate categorically that they have better things to do — we are hunter-gatherers now, too. —Dawn-Observer News service
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