Men Who Cook - Mark Morford

What Whips Your Spinach?
What's it mean when the men do all the cooking and the women sit back and talk about God?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, September 15, 2004


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



And then, as he was happily consuming his baby greens 'n' goat cheese salad, one of the youngish men at the dinner party I just attended just so happened to mention the unbridled glory that is the salad spinner, and the night was never the same again.
Immediately, all three males at the table (myself included) nodded and swooned and cheered and extolled the virtues of this most amazing and elegant and mandatory plastic cooking gadget that whips rinsed wet raw spinach or lettuce or kale or chard or whatever around in a wicked-fast hurricane of insta-dry perfection.

We three immediately agreed: It is a device that, despite its landfill-ready synthetic wastefulness, is actually one of humankind's finest contributions to the culinary universe, and the three of us swapped knowing glances and approving manly nods as if we were tossing around the stats of the Raiders defensive line.

As meanwhile the three women at the table looked at us as if we were utterly insane, each of them rolling her eyes and holding on her face a totally baffled and amazed expression born of the fact that, as it turned out, not a single one of them knows how to cook and not one of them had ever really used a salad spinner before and one of them hadn't even heard of the thing until very recently.

A fact that was, to the men, both bizarre and wrong and very nearly incomprehensible, like saying you've never seen a cheese grater before, or a garlic roller, or a car, because oh my God salad spinners are just so obvious and brilliant and indelible proof of progress of the human animal, at which point it suddenly became stunningly clear: Oh my God we are so not in 1958 anymore. Or 1978, even.

My S.O. does not know how to cook. None of her female friends knows how to cook. None of the three 30-ish women at the dinner party knew how to cook, and, when I think about it, very few of my female friends overall (ages ranging from 25 to 45) know how to cook, yet all three men at our table and most of the boyfriends/husbands of the above-mentioned females know how to cook -- and very well, at that. Which is, in its microcosmic way, a bit surreal and humorous and, you know, illuminating.

Something has happened. Some significant modal change has occurred (and, verily, is still occurring) when the straight men do all the cooking and are fluent in cookware and take all the cooking classes and are into spices and flavors and delicate plum/duck reduction sauces, whereas the women are into, well, something else entirely, something we weren't quite clear on and about which they were all sort of evasive and coy, which makes me think it must be related to space travel and quantum physics and transcendental orgasms. You know how women can be.

But no matter how you slice it, something has shifted, some weird hybrid mutant amalgam of feminism and modernity and rebellion and just plain role reversal has appeared such that it is now -- at least in the cities, at least among us painfully confessed metrosexuals and wickedly educated urban femme fatales -- perfectly OK to switch gender roles and "traditional" functions while still maintaining every semblance of our respective gender's most delicious and desirable attributes. Embrace the salad spinner, pal. You'll be OK.

Was it one of those "only in S.F." conversations? Was it one of those exchanges that would get you beat up in Butte and strung up in Crawford because gul-dangit a man is supposed to be out shootin' stuff and wearin' his baseball hat backwards and whoopin' it up at NASCAR while the wimmin stay home vacuuming the prefab's salmon-colored carpet and makin' sloppy joes for the rug rats? Maybe.

Or, maybe, as many pinched right-wing readers of this column regularly suggest, I and all those like me here in the City are just way, way out of touch with the "real" America, where if the men talk about food it's about which part of which large animal they just grilled to a bloody crispy slab on the monster Weber last weekend while the women are off comparing Brad Pitt's hunky sword in "Troy" to Orlando Bloom's luscious quiver of stiff arrows in "The Lord of the Rings." That, they tell me, is the "real" America.

Then again, maybe it's a little deeper than that, and more interesting. After all, roles change and energies shift and men and women swap slices of identity all the time despite ourselves and despite the culture's rampant stereotyping and despite the regressive sexist homophobic Christian Right's attempts to strip women of their power and keep 'em in their place. We inhabit each other's aspects all the time; we just don't always want to admit it.

Maybe the salad-spinner episode is simply another tiny indicator that the labels we normally associate with the genders are becoming much more fluid and silly and irrelevant, and that it is, in fact, a sign of progress and maturation and pride on the part of both sexes that we can defy stereotypes and repressive cages of identity at will, that such labels hold less sway, that who the hell says God is a man and women are weak and life is this conservative rigid hunk of tedious angry gender captivity, anyway? I mean, besides the church. And the government. And the media. And the textbooks. And the corporations. And history.

Maybe, after all, this is the grand question. Forget war and insipid foreign policy and Karl Rove's shriveled soul. Can you move like liquid laughter between the genders? Can you grin in the face of what you think it's all supposed to mean? Can you, in short, be proud of your salad-spinner acumen?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark's column archives are here
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.