What's For Dinner, Dad? A Post-Father's Day Tribute To a Dad Who Cooks
Yes, he did make this loaf of sourdough bread
My husband cooks for our family. We fell into this arrangement shortly after we got married. It wasn’t a practical decision: he works more hours than me and is around the house less. We also weren’t on a mission to make an ideological statement about gender roles or marriage equality. Our arrangement came about for one simple reason:
He likes to cook, and is good at it. I don’t like to cook, and am bad at it.
This puts us in the 20% of households with children under 18 where the dad, rather than the mom, is in charge of meal planning, grocery shopping and meal prep.
You might be wondering how he came to be such a good cook. The story goes that shortly after college, he took a job in rural Wisconsin and moved into an apartment. Fending for himself after a lifetime of home cooked family meals, followed by a pretty well-stocked college cafeteria, he quickly learned that eating out all the time was bad for both the pocketbook and the waistline. Rather than continuing to eat SpaghettiOs and Kraft mac & cheese, he committed to learning some new tricks in the kitchen.
He joined the “Cooking Commitment Club” with a group of long distance friends who agreed to make the same recipe once a week and report back on how it went. I understand that during the years before we met there were some mishaps—blackened Dutch oven meals around the campfire and crispy pad thai noodles because, who knew you needed to soak them first?
By the time I met my husband (he was 25, I was 23) he had mostly learned from his mistakes and was pretty competent in the kitchen. He lived in a condo and would invite me over for dinner, sometimes with a group of friends and sometimes alone. In case you’re thinking I’m very superficial, I didn’t marry my husband ONLY because he can cook. He has a lot of great qualities (and he is also very good-looking.) 😉
But I do wonder if, at sometime during our 2 year friendship, my subconscious started screaming “The man can make a perfect stuffed roast chicken. What are we waiting for???”
Since locking him down, I must admit that like any normal spouse, I sometimes take his culinary contributions to our household for granted. It’s easy to forget that food procuring and meal preparation takes hours, and that our division of labor is not that typical. But then I have an experience that brings me back to reality…
We were invited to a friend’s house for dinner. My daughter, 3 years old at the time and assuming that all households run like ours asked, “What is Evelyn’s daddy making for dinner?”
On another occasion, we brought a dish to the church picnic and I had to deflect so many compliments from people who assumed it was made by me that I eventually gave up and just started saying “thank you.”
Another time, my mom was visiting from out of town. She spent the day with me and my three kids, all of whom were under 6 years-old at the time. When my husband got home from work, he greeted us and then went straight to the kitchen to start working on dinner. My mom was incredulous and, probably worried about the staying power of our marriage, said:
“He’s making dinner even though he worked ALL DAY?”
In my defense, we were at that point in our family life when going to work was a vacation. I highly doubt that his day was harder than mine if you count the number of diapers I changed or how many times I’d kept our toddler from running in the street. But the message was clear. As the “non-working” parent that day, it was my job to make dinner. And maybe I would have, if my family was more open to eating toast and soggy noodles…
I hope you don’t think I’m lazy. The truth is that I contribute too. Sometimes I preheat the oven or help carry in groceries. And as the person in charge of kitchen clean up and dishwasher loading, I make it a point not to complain about the splatters of sauce all over the counter or bits of charred vegetables baked into the stovetop. His creative genius can be a bit messy sometimes.
Recently, I was listening to an episode of the Parent Data Podcast, where Emily Oster and Eve Rodsky had a conversation about household division of labor and “invisible labor.” This is the labor that is done without anyone seeing or receiving credit. So, it’s not the loaf of sourdough bread. It’s remembering we’re low on flour when you put in the weekly grocery order, and feeding the sourdough starter every 12-24 hours.
SPOILER ALERT: most of this invisible work is done by women.
In my case, listening to this podcast made me stop and think about all the unpaid, unrecognized, and unrecorded work that my husband is doing in order for meals to show up on our table.
In summary: he puts in the grocery order and picks it up. He remembers the extras—the dish for the school banquet, the additional lunch for a day off school—and adjusts meal timing around soccer, wrestling, and piano lessons, even if it means making something in the Instant Pot that can be eaten by different family members at different times. He cooks the food, then endures the complaints and insults from my children, who moonlight as untrained food critics. He’s a genius at leftover management. We waste very little food.
When he’s out of town on business, he plans ahead and leaves me with healthy, easy-to-reheat meals. While the temptation to secretly get carryout is strong, I usually resist—partly because I agree our kids should eat healthy, but mostly because I can’t bear the sad, disappointed look on his face when he finds out I fed his children Culver’s twice in one week.
It’s funny, because growing up in rural Iowa, there was a saying I heard frequently. It was oft repeated by older women in my church and in my family in the 1980s-90s. They were probably advising child-me on how to find a husband one day.
“The best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”
This reflects some pretty outdated gender norms that don’t exactly flatter men or women. In it, men are simple, easy-to-trick, appetite-driven creatures. Women’s worth is primarily dependent on their culinary skills (I would not have thrived in this environment).
But I wonder if this saying also partially communicates a universal truth about humanity, specifically the deep bond that forms when someone offers you food, especially if it is food they have worked hard to procure and prepare. It communicates “I love you and I care about your survival” in one of the strongest ways possible. But I would argue it doesn’t just apply to women trying to attract a man.
I thought about that bond differently after the birth of our third child, when I had a pretty bad postpartum hemorrhage, followed by pretty bad anemia (my hemoglobin was 7.2 g/dL and, if you’re not familiar, that’s REALLY LOW. As a midwife, I usually recommend a blood transfusion when hemoglobin drops below 7.0 g/dL.) I found myself weak and exhausted. One night, a few days after we’d arrived home from the hospital, I was eating dinner and looked down at my plate: steak, potatoes and a spinach salad. Kind of surprising, since my husband is a pescatarian and usually shies away from preparing red meat.
“Wow, this is a really iron rich meal.” I pointed out, assuming it was a coincidence.
He rolled his eyes and looked away before saying, “That was intentional.”
And….yeah, that moment when you realize someone loves you enough to engineer meals in order to address your nutritional deficits. 🥺
So there is a lot of discussion these days about division of labor and dissatisfaction in families and relationships. Apparently, a lot of people are opting out of marriage and having kids. Among those who are married with kids, you read about discontentment among overworked, burnt out parents (mostly mothers). There’s also confusion and resentment among men who seem to feel women’s expectations are too high and the deck is stacked against them. At it’s ugliest, this turns into sexist “make me a sandwich” memes within the manosphere. In my opinion, that sandwich would be worth a lot more if it were freely given.
I don’t pretend that one man cooking dinner will solve all the complex dynamics of modern families or gender roles. But I do think it’s worth noticing the quiet, consistent ways family members show up for each other. My husband isn’t flashy or loud about his culinary contributions, just like the 80% of moms who typically do this work often don’t get noticed. But make no mistake—this work and this love feeds a family and it feeds life.