On the Table: We are no longer slaves to the stove

As we mark both Mothering Sunday and International Women’s Day this month, Cambridge Cookery MD Tine Roche looks at the historically umbilical connection between women and the kitchen - and asks what society should do now that cord has been cut?

The month of March heralds the return of sunlight, warmth, bird song, green shoots - everything that winter deprives us of. March is also the month of International Women’s Day, which this year has as its theme gender equality and breaking the bias.

Women and girls across the globe continue to be annihilated at the hands of fanatical men. When following the horror unfolding in Afghanistan over the past winter months, I find it a little tricky to write a column on what to have for supper. Scenes from a frozen landscape, of utter despair and hunger, put our own lives into perspective.

The act of preparing meals for others, cooking for loved ones, sharing and nurturing is so intrinsically linked to being a woman. And yet, thank goodness, women’s lives in most parts of the world have become infinitely better and it seems incongruous that we are still celebrating “Mothering Sunday” in our society. Surely it is by now obsolete?

Cooking and preparing food has been at the core of women’s lives for millennia. As we move away from traditional roles and women enter the workforce in developing countries, the need for fast food grows and women no longer wish, nor have the time to grind spice, bake bread or prepare time consuming, traditional food.

Without doubt, being liberated from such duties is a hugely positive step forward for women around the world but it comes with the undesirable side effect of creating new markets for quick, processed food which makes our species sick, not well fed. Malnutrition has increasingly come to mean two seemingly diametrically opposed things - not getting enough nutrition and getting too many nutrients of the wrong kind. The same populations in developing countries now suffer both obesity related diseases and what we historically think of as malnutrition, ie starvation.

What we eat, how we consume, what we grow at what cost, who prepares food, the effects on family structures and what big food brands sell have such a massive effect on life on earth, none more than so than the existential threat to our planet and to our public health services.

“We are what we eat” came into the English language via the French gastronome Brillat-Savarin - “Dis-modi’s ce que tu manges, me te dirais ce que tu es” - and the German philosopher Ludwig Feurbach who wrote “Der Mensch ist was er ißt”. Clearly not meant to be taken literally, but to draw our attention to how the food we eat affects our minds and our health, the phrase has remained on our political and socioeconomic agenda.

It was adopted in the 1960s by the hippie movement for which it became an inspiration to eat whole foods and macrobiotic foods. Now it has become mor than ever a hot potato dividing those with privilege and those with none.

For most of human history, food was scarce and food preparation arduous and very much a woman’s task. Progress has liberated us but as a result the highly processed food which has replaced simple homemade meals is killing us. The debate is full of so many agendas, from how to feed the world to farming policies, food costs and inequalities in society.

If we are to turn around the rapid decline in home cooking and to halt the progress of highly processed food we must surely consider a monumental societal change, starting at the very beginning of life. Future generations need support to understand that a healthy life starts at conception. It is too late once children are at primary school - it has to start at home.

Understanding how to prepare inexpensive, nutritious food is essential to avoid a life of chronic illness. A diet of ready made processed food results in what is far too lightly referred to as “lifestyle related illnesses”.

The processed food diet could not be further from “life” nor “style” and nor is it a choice. The processed food diet prevents social mobility, condemns parts of our society to poverty, ill health and dependency.

Apart from the human misery such profound ill health causes, we can not afford to provide life-long care for what is already a sizeable, and rapidly growing, number of citizens suffering diet-induced chronic ill health from the moment they are born.

We need drastic action addressing this division in our society which will, ultimately, completely undermine the relative social welfare we all enjoy.