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Reviews tagging 'Misogyny'
The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji López-Alt
3 reviews
officialgrittynhl's review
informative
slow-paced
2.5
I really appreciated the author’s methods to experiment with food and found the information interesting and useful. However I found the author’s style really irritating. His sense of humor rubbed me the wrong way, especially when he wrote about his wife. I thought it was incredibly weird and off-putting when he compared his wife to his favorite knife. 900+ pages of mansplaining, mostly about meat.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny
toad_maiden's review
1.0
When I brought this book home from the library, I was expecting a Cook’s-Illustrated-style analysis of food science through recipes, perhaps with a little more flavor and panache than those guys seem to be able to manage. On first flipping through the book, I thought I got what I was looking for. The book design is pretty slick, with all kinds of offset colored boxes full of at-home experiments to try and tips about choosing ingredients, etc. The photographs leave a little something to be desired, but this is a fairly utilitarian affair, so I could forgive that. Given the heft of this book (a whopping 958 pages), I was expecting something a little more exhaustive (there’s no baking or dessert section and 75% of the recipes involve meat), but that’s ok.
My first experiment out of this book failed miserably. His directions for “foolproof” soft-boiled eggs with shells that slide right off yielded barely-cooked flaccid eggs to which the shells still stuck, taking the only cooked part of the white with them. I’ve been making soft-boiled eggs since I was about ten years old and I’ve never failed so completely at it. Like Lopez-Alt, I’ve tried every old wives’ tale for easy-peel eggs and I’ve come to this conclusion: eggs are inconsistent and unpredictable organic objects and you’re never going to find a rule that will work for every one. If the egg wants to peel, it will peel. If it doesn’t, it just won’t.
This is a truth that Lopez-Alt just can’t accept. After the egg failure, I got suspicious and read through the (81-page) introduction to check out his science. Man, was that opening a can of worms. I can’t speak for other people’s taste in cookbooks or cooks, but this guy is really not for me. My first big warning sign was his blatant, pervasive misogyny. Just about every other page he makes some crack about his wife or his mom which range from mild (“I realize now that dislike of vegetables is entirely my mother’s fault (sorry to break it to you, Ma)”) to incredibly offensive (“Whether stirring sauces, tasting soups, or gently whacking cheeky spouses who disturb you in the kitchen, a wooden spoon is the tool you’ll want 90 percent of the time...”). I’m sorry, but YOU CANNOT JOKE ABOUT SPANKING YOUR WIFE. EVER.
This kind of attitude is something I can never excuse, and it’s made worse when coupled with the history of efficiency and science in the kitchen. I’m not going to outline a whole thesis here, but if you want a good read on the way that efficiency experts changed housekeeping/cooking by undercutting women’s confidence, paved the way for exploitation by advertisers, and increased women’s dependence on their husbands, check out Glenna Matthews’ [b:Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America|217051|Just a Housewife The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America|Glenna Matthews|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348991903s/217051.jpg|210141]. I’m not saying that everyone who writes a cookbook needs to be aware of this history, but if you are literally recreating it in the year 2015, you need to do some research. The Food Lab presents the perfect example of a “professional,” “scientific,” male cook debasing a traditionally female craft, improving it “through science,” and feeding it back to (primarily female) home cooks who, according to him, have been so hobbled by following old wives’ tales that they never stopped to think scientifically about why their beef is tough.
On top of all this, after following what was perhaps the easiest recipe in his book, I can’t even trust that he knows what he’s talking about.
I could go on about the gendering of cookbooks and cookery, the absolute ridiculousness of trying to study something as complex and subjective as food in a scientific setting, and about the way that cooks like Lopez-Alt teach home cooks that their instincts aren’t worth trusting. I will simply leave you with what I feel is the ultimate truth of cooking: cook with care, thought, and love, and nothing you make will be inedible. It is darn hard to completely ruin a meal if you use your head, eyes, and tastebuds well. Science and tradition both have very little to do with it.
My first experiment out of this book failed miserably. His directions for “foolproof” soft-boiled eggs with shells that slide right off yielded barely-cooked flaccid eggs to which the shells still stuck, taking the only cooked part of the white with them. I’ve been making soft-boiled eggs since I was about ten years old and I’ve never failed so completely at it. Like Lopez-Alt, I’ve tried every old wives’ tale for easy-peel eggs and I’ve come to this conclusion: eggs are inconsistent and unpredictable organic objects and you’re never going to find a rule that will work for every one. If the egg wants to peel, it will peel. If it doesn’t, it just won’t.
This is a truth that Lopez-Alt just can’t accept. After the egg failure, I got suspicious and read through the (81-page) introduction to check out his science. Man, was that opening a can of worms. I can’t speak for other people’s taste in cookbooks or cooks, but this guy is really not for me. My first big warning sign was his blatant, pervasive misogyny. Just about every other page he makes some crack about his wife or his mom which range from mild (“I realize now that dislike of vegetables is entirely my mother’s fault (sorry to break it to you, Ma)”) to incredibly offensive (“Whether stirring sauces, tasting soups, or gently whacking cheeky spouses who disturb you in the kitchen, a wooden spoon is the tool you’ll want 90 percent of the time...”). I’m sorry, but YOU CANNOT JOKE ABOUT SPANKING YOUR WIFE. EVER.
This kind of attitude is something I can never excuse, and it’s made worse when coupled with the history of efficiency and science in the kitchen. I’m not going to outline a whole thesis here, but if you want a good read on the way that efficiency experts changed housekeeping/cooking by undercutting women’s confidence, paved the way for exploitation by advertisers, and increased women’s dependence on their husbands, check out Glenna Matthews’ [b:Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America|217051|Just a Housewife The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America|Glenna Matthews|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348991903s/217051.jpg|210141]. I’m not saying that everyone who writes a cookbook needs to be aware of this history, but if you are literally recreating it in the year 2015, you need to do some research. The Food Lab presents the perfect example of a “professional,” “scientific,” male cook debasing a traditionally female craft, improving it “through science,” and feeding it back to (primarily female) home cooks who, according to him, have been so hobbled by following old wives’ tales that they never stopped to think scientifically about why their beef is tough.
On top of all this, after following what was perhaps the easiest recipe in his book, I can’t even trust that he knows what he’s talking about.
I could go on about the gendering of cookbooks and cookery, the absolute ridiculousness of trying to study something as complex and subjective as food in a scientific setting, and about the way that cooks like Lopez-Alt teach home cooks that their instincts aren’t worth trusting. I will simply leave you with what I feel is the ultimate truth of cooking: cook with care, thought, and love, and nothing you make will be inedible. It is darn hard to completely ruin a meal if you use your head, eyes, and tastebuds well. Science and tradition both have very little to do with it.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny
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