Slaving over a hot theme

The name Amanda Marcotte should sound familiar to WORLD readers. She’s the one whose strident defense of abortion (which sounded like an attack on humanity) attracted some compassionate attention from our editor in chief Marvin Olasky last spring. As a regular contributor to Slate and a writer at her own blog, Marcotte can be counted on to colorfully slam mainstream America, motherhood, and apple pie. Her problems with America and motherhood are well known, but last week she took on the apple pie. That is, home-baked apple pie, and the menu items that typically precede it.

In “Let’s Stop Idealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner” Marcotte cited a study (“studies” are the heavy artillery of the culture wars) conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University who interviewed 150 mothers from a wide social strata and spent many hours observing lower-income families go about the daily business of feeding themselves. The researchers concluded that the expectation of home-cooked meals can place an unnecessary burden on those most responsible for providing them: mothers.

“While some wax nostalgic about a time when people grew their own food and sat around the dinner table eating it, they fail to see the invisible labor that goes into family meals,” the NC State researchers wrote. I trust it takes only a few minutes for “some” to understand that the homemade spaghetti sauce doesn’t whip itself up, but let’s take the researchers at their word for a moment.

Home-cooked meals, which we need to “stop idealizing,” are burdensome for three reasons:

As Marcotte summed it up, home cooking is “expensive and time-consuming and often done for a bunch of ingrates who would rather just be eating fast food anyway.”

But what’s the alternative? Even ingrates have to eat. Home-cooked meals have always been equal parts satisfaction and drudgery. In his 1888 novel Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy envisioned a utopian community where family dwellings do not include kitchens—everyone gathers in dining halls for meals, freeing most women from the never-ending cycle of food preparation. The idea has never caught on, maybe because too many adults still remember their school cafeteria.

Family meals are about more than food. Marcotte’s manifesto ironically appeared the same week another study affirmed the value of regular mealtimes for fostering children’s self-worth and stability. Here a human necessity becomes a means of grace. The kids might not always appreciate Mom’s experiments with asparagus, and Dad may tactfully request more meat and potatoes. But all the while, material need serves a spiritual purpose (see Deuteronomy 8:3), and the hands that serve it are standing in for God’s hands.