What's so hard about cooking dinner?
If you don't know the answer, you're probably not the person in charge of family meals
Every woman I know has a least favorite domestic chore. For my friend Sara, it’s unloading the dishwasher. She doesn’t mind putting the dishes into the dishwasher or even handwashing dishes, but she hates putting everything away, especially if it involves reassembling small kitchen appliances or water bottles. “If I could ‘Bewitch’ one chore I think it’d be that,” she says. For my friend Anne, it’s the laundry. She hates that it’s a multi-step, neverending process. If she’s not sorting dirty clothes, she’s folding clean ones. And the moment she’s done, she has to start all over again. For me, it’s cooking dinner. Apparently I’m not alone.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Even Aretha Franklin dreaded this chore.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
People who aren’t in charge of family dinners don’t get it. I remember sitting in a meeting about a decade ago at Walmart.com’s headquarters in San Francisco. The mostly male execs my colleague and I were meeting with were very excited about how they were going to revolutionize mealtime for moms. “We’ve got a whole new section on our website with thousands of recipes,” they proudly told us, as if they had cracked the code. My colleague was brave enough to break the bad news: “We already have enough recipes,” she said. “The internet is full of recipes.” So what’s the problem?
In short, cooking dinner is about so much more than cooking food. There are so many thought- and labor-intensive steps involved. Let’s break it down. Here’s a step-by-step look at how I “cook dinner.”
Wake up with a sense of dread on Sunday morning, realizing that it’s time for the weekly shop.
Pull up the family calendar on my computer and figure out who will be home for dinner on which nights. (My husband doesn’t expect me to cook, but like the guy in the TikTok at the top of this piece, I make a bit more of an effort if he’s home.)
Look at my own calendar and see what work looks like each day so I can figure out how much time and effort I’ll be able to devote to preparing a meal at the end of the day. And if the answer is zero, I look at other windows of opportunity: Could I prep a one-sheet meal in the morning before I sit down at my desk on Tuesday? Could I get something in the crockpot in between my 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Zoom calls on Wednesday?
Create a menu for the week, choosing easier meals for more complicated days.
Look at each recipe’s ingredient list to make a grocery shopping list. This often involves looking in the fridge, the pantry and the spice drawer to double-check what provisions I already have, so I do this in the kitchen.
Add to the list the stuff we need that isn’t for a specific meal: cereal, snacks, milk, eggs, etc.
Go grocery shopping. (This is where I most often get help.)
Unpack the groceries. Wash the fruit and veggies. Put everything away.
Make dinner. Every. Single. Night. Until I die. (And by “every single night” I mean Monday - Thursday. We eat out on Fridays and Saturdays these days and my husband cooks on Sundays.)
This list illustrates why the “one person cooks and the other does the dishes” labor split is such a raw deal.
It is — as you are probably all too aware — exhausting. My friend Sarah, whom I met at church when we first moved to Richmond, had her own version of the Memorial Acclamation that speaks to this particular exhaustion. It goes something like this:
Christ has died
Christ has risen
Christ will come again
Maybe he’ll even come before dinnertime so I won’t have to figure out what to cook
Anecdotally speaking, almost all of the men I know in my generation or younger cook. They make dinner every once in a while. They may even shop for it. They do way more than their fathers did. Working from home has made it easier for many secondary parents to help. When my husband has a quieter afternoon of work, or a meeting where he just has to listen, he’ll happily make dinner and I’m forever grateful. But, still. The secondary parent isn’t usually the one in charge of feeding the family. They don’t oversee the process, from planning to plating. They don’t swap recipes with friends. They don’t bookmark dinner ideas they find on the internet. A man isn’t the one writing this article. Heck, very few men will even read this article. They saw the title and thought, “Eh. Not my problem.” (Or at least that’s how I imagine it.)
More often than not, dinner is a woman’s problem. Even single women who don’t have kids feel guilt around meal preparation. That’s why “girl dinner” resonated so much on social media a few years ago. The TikTok that launched the viral phrase offered an alternative name — “medieval peasant” — but it didn’t take off — probably because it’s gender neutral.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
“Girl dinner” made women look silly and a little stupid (pickles, cheese and red wine isn’t exactly a balanced meal). But girl dinner is largely misunderstood: it isn’t about being lazy and indulgent. As Seema Rao, an art historian in Cleveland, explained, there’s a historical connection between girl dinner and gender norms.
“The idea of cooking dinner was historically women’s work in the home,” said Rao. (I love how she so optimistically used the past tense there.) “What I like about girl dinner is it takes away the idea that you have to cook anything: You just literally put it together. So you go from a position where the production of the food is what makes it good and makes you a valid woman, to the idea that having food is what makes you a valid woman.”
Sure, if you have enough money, you could order takeout. Or pick up a prepared meal. But we feel guilty about doing that (especially if we do it often) because family dinner is one of parenting’s sacred cows. For decades we’ve been told how important eating dinner together is. Kids who grow up in a family that sits down together for dinner every night are more likely to succeed and less likely to do a whole host of bad things, including drugs and truancy, the experts told us. But now we know that this is yet another causal fallacy parents have fallen victim, to (others include the idea that MMR vaccine causes autism and that classical music makes your baby smarter!).
“The literature is simultaneously overwhelming, in the sense that the impacts are so consistent and strong, and underwhelming, in the sense that the causality is so weak,” writes economist Emily Oster in this deeper dive into the data around family dinner.
So, what’s for dinner? I wish I had an easy answer. I’m nearing the end of my family dinner days. Soon I’ll only cook for my kids when they’re home for the holidays. And I’m at the point where if you offered me a pill that met my nutritional needs and made me feel full, I’d take it. I’d miss hamburgers and hazy IPAs, but I think the tradeoff would be worth it.
For those of you who still can’t see the finish line, here are a few survival tips:
First of all, stop expecting so much from dinner. This fabulous podcast explains the research behind the family dinner fallacy and offers alternative ways for your family to bond.
Share the burden. If your partner doesn’t understand why you’re always complaining about cooking, spell it out for them. Write down the steps involved (see my list above) and walk them through it. Identify the places where they can help. Could they do the grocery shopping? Could they cook dinner every Friday when they work from home? Even a little bit of help can go a long way.
Learn to love your crockpot. These inexpensive kitchen appliances get a bad rap. You just need to find the right recipes. I’ve organized mine in one spot for you. You’re welcome. (If you have any to add, drop them in the comments!)
Rinse and repeat. If you’re in an especially busy season of life. Identify the 5-10 recipes your family loves and stick to those. My friend Vicki uses devotes certain days to specific dishes: Meatless Mondays (read: pasta), Taco Tuesdays, etc. Kids don’t mind eating the same thing over and over again. In fact, the predictability of it is comforting to them and it’s a lighter cognitive lift for you.
Invest in a meal kit subscription. My friend Heather swears by Green Apron. She loves that it reduces the stress of meal planning. She uses the app to choose her meals — it only takes a few minutes per week — and says that she wastes substantially less food using this service than she did when she planned and shopped for herself. She thinks it’s fun to try new recipes, but also “favorites” meals her family loves so she can order them again.
Do a swap. Before meal kits, my friend Kathryn and I did a meal swap. One night a week, I cooked for her family and mine. And one night a week, she cooked for both families. So we always knew we had at least two good dinners a week. My friend Sarah used to do a meal swap with four other families (!) so that she was only cooking one meal a week (but for five families) and every weeknight was taken care of.
Cook in batches. I learned about batch cooking (aka “freezer meals”) from my friend Regan’s podcast. The woman she profiles in this episode is pretty intense: She batch cooks every few months and bought a chest freezer for her garage to support this effort. I’ve never gone that far, but before COVID-19, when I worked in an office every day, I would sometimes devote most of a Saturday to making a bunch of meals. I’d make big batches of taco meat, prep trays of chicken parm, and combine steaks and marinde in freezer bags so that I had a freezer full of main dishes to choose from on busy weeknights and all I had to do was make a vegetable or salad to round out the meal. I don’t do that anymore, but I do double recipes whenever I can, cooking half and freezing half for another night (think meatballs, homemade mac and cheese, etc.)
Cook dinner in the morning before the day gets crazy. Identify a few dinners you can prep ahead of time and just pop in the oven once everyone’s home. Simple sheet pan dinners are great candidates for this option.
Don’t let dinner define you. Follow Michelle Obama’s lead:
Tiktok failed to load.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Hang in there,
Also on my mind
You’re not allowed to buy anything from The J. Crew x New Yorker collab (not even the tote bag or the “Talk of the Town” kids t-shirt) until you read this commentary about the magazine’s centennial anniversary. Bonus points if you read this one about James Baldwin’s first and only piece to ever appear in the storied magazine.
Photo: jcrew.com While we’re on the topic of fashion, this behind-the-scenes look at Quince is fascinating. (Warning: it made me like the brand even less.)
This is a complicated but important read: “We can't answer audience questions about #DefundNPR without talking about the larger implications for public media.” (Full disclosure for those who don’t know: I’m an editor at WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.)
I’m in the middle of Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell and enjoying it. Other books I’ve finished recently: Long Island (which is basically part two of Brooklyn, which came out in 2009) and Hardly Strangers and Big Fan, both from 831 Stories. (I liked the latter more than the former, but mostly I’m interested in the story behind the publisher.)
Photos: Bookshop.org Sometimes outdoor gear (think down puffers and sleeping bags) are in perfectly good shape but somehow end up with a small snag or hole. Here’s a great no-sew solution: Noso patches (see what they did there?).
If your kids like mixing (non-alcoholic) drinks as much as mine do, you might want to check out this blender, which comes with two personal-sized “blender jars” — perfect for a protein shake or smoothie.
Over at my day job, we published this fabulous essay this week. My favorite bit? “For it is in our elder years that saying yes matters most. Yes to exploration. Yes to risk. Yes to yearnings, yes to it all. There’s no map, and no time to be lost.”
“When a gunman killed two of her students, Ivy Schamis was the only adult in the room. Her journey through guilt and healing sheds light on the impossible role of American teachers.”
One way I make making dinner less excruciating is by following influencers who enjoy cooking. Dan Pelosi, who is joy in human form, is one of them. (My friend Kris and I even got meet him at his annual cookie party in December!) He’s been developing a lot of recipes for the NYT lately, including this one.
Photo: Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Spencer Richards. And, lastly, this week’s poem:
A prayer for future us — by Harriet Selina Maybe, one day, we'll bump into each other, in a checkout line or a quiet car lot, and we'll smile like we didn't shatter each other once— like we didn't make an unholy mess of love.
As a single woman, I can't really weigh in on the division of labor side of this - I'm responsible for all of it, all the time, and I genuinely can't decide if that's better or worse. Pros and cons for sure.
Meanwhile, sharing another fun resource: fellow Richmonder Miranda Anderson has some interesting takes on both meal planning and division of labor on her podcast. Her meal planning strategy to is to quarterly themes days of the week to reduce decision fatigue. For example, she always serves tacos on Tuesdays but varies what kind. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0kSX6thXoBo4ythtJE0PAk?si=3cc31227e9bf4ba7
I can't find her division of labor episode, but basically she and her husband split large chores and own them for the year. He does laundry, she's responsible for dinner. I'm over simplifying it but I found it interesting. I wish you could tag people in this so she could chime in!!