If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

by Geraldine DeRuiter

This is what it means to love someone. You cook for

them. You help them carry the weight of their own memories.

I laughed. And as I ate, surrounded by people I loved, it hit me, without a hint of the doubts that plagued me all my life, that this is the only thing I’ve ever truly believed in.

If we start accepting that the work women do in the home has value—all the cooking and meal prep and cleaning that is overlooked and devalued—it throws our entire society into chaos a little bit. Our economic system is built on the understanding that women working inside the home (for free, for decades) is a given. That historically, in order for society to have functioned at all, women had to quietly and competently and single-handedly do a great deal of invisible labor, and a hell of a lot of that centered on cooking.