One of the how-did-we-get-here narratives of food goes something like this: Starting in the late 1960s, the women’s movement called upon educated women to forge a new path into professional life while an increasingly convenience-driven industrial food complex conspired with demanding weekday schedules to culminate in empty kitchens and the near extinction of home cooking. It’s a tale that oversimplifies the reality. But when Michael Pollan, in his 2009 New York Times essay “Out of the Kitchen Onto the Couch,”  singled out Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as the tome that convinced women that cooking is drudgery, he set off a feminist firestorm. Several angry blog posts and counter-defenses later one thing is clear: If more home cooking is essential to changing the food system, men had better get into the kitchen as well.

It’s happening. In 1965, fathers accounted for only five percent of the time spent cooking for the family; now they’re in the kitchen nearly one-third of the time. John Donohue’s new book Man with a Pan, a collection of essays by fathers about cooking for their families, celebrates this change. Donohue, a New Yorker cartoonist and editor, pulled together thoughts by food writers and culinary professionals like Mario Batali, Michael Ruhlman, and Mark Bittman. But one of my favorite things about the book is the inclusion of the voices of “ordinary” dads who have come to cooking simply because it’s work–pleasurable, of course–that needs to be done for their families every day.

“It was very important for me to include a broad cross section of men who cook for their families in the book,” Donohue says. “I wanted the well crafted essays by professional writers, but I also wanted to hear from other working fathers, ones who might have more demanding jobs than being a successful writer. It’s one thing to make your own hours, it’s another to have to be on the job as a fireman, a bond trader, a carpenter, an economist, and still get food on the table. I wanted the book to be an inspiration to men of all professional stripes.”

Inspiration comes from surprising places, like from horror novelist Stephen King, who urges readers to lower the heat and take a “gentle” approach to cooking. Screenwriter Matt Greenberg contributes an homage to King in the form of a screenplay about a man who becomes fatally obsessed with a barbecue grill while caring for an empty, isolated hotel in the off season. There is the classic “overreacher,” Manny Howard, who writes about how his “stunt foodways” (like roasting a whole pig on the beach) are incompatible with feeding a family.

The more practical firefighter Josh Lomask says cooking is like building a house. “It’s a manual process. But unlike a house, which might take months to build, cooking takes one night, and that gives me a great sense of satisfaction.” He says what Pollan was trying to say in “Out of the Kitchen,” but somehow the sentiment is less incendiary coming out of a firefighter’s mouth. “With both parents working, there’s been a whole generation of neglect in the kitchen. Guys are going to have to learn what fifties housewives must have all known–how to plan a menu and feed a family week by week.”

Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for the Washington Post and author of The Hidden Brain digs most deeply into the topic of gender roles. Through a short exercise he illustrates the subliminal biases that cause many of us to think of professional cooks as male and home cooks as female. For Vedantam, when Dad walks into the kitchen to cook for his family he becomes an activist, “actually engaging in political activity that is every bit as serious as that of the suffragettes who marched to win women the right to vote, or the civil rights protesters who marched to win equal rights for racial minorities. If you’re a man who abhors sexism, take up the spatula.” (Somewhere a adjunct professor is photocopying this chapter long with Gabrielle Hamilton’s chapter on “where are the women chefs” from Blood, Bones and Butter for her food studies course.) If that’s not convincing enough for you, there is also the opening quote by 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin: “What woman wants, God wants.”

Donohue is hoping the diverse voices in Man with a Pan will inspire readers of both genders to cook more–and he’s not leaving those readers empty-handed. Every contributor also lists a couple of his favorite, time-tested recipes along with a list of his favorite cook books. There are several recipes for “The Best!” roast chicken, along with Tofu Bolognese, Ceviche, Chocolate Mousse, Ghanian Peanut Butter Soup, pickles, Pan-National Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Fish Cakes, and Whole Roast Cow. Okay, maybe that last one is not so useful (though the accompanying chimichurri recipe looks good), but the recipes and cookbook recommendations help Man with a Pan multitask as entertainment, polemic, and a tool book.

On his blog, Stay at Stove Dad, Donohue documents his own efforts to feed his family, wife Sarah Schenck, filmmaker and co-founder of video-based family food website Parent Earth, and their two daughters. Planning home-cooked meals for the family is, as Donohue puts it, like a chess game. “You have to think many moves ahead. Will there be something in the fridge to eat that Wednesday night you have to work late?” he asks. “Good question, one that can only be answered Sunday afternoon when you have the time. I make sure there are pasta sauces, pots of cooked rice, containers of black beans, roasted chickens, and the like always on hand.” Donohue does most of the cooking, but Schenck is usually the one to pick up the children and serve them dinner, putting together the sauces and staples Donohue prepares in advance. With his wife on the front lines with two hungry kids the food had better be good–and it looks like it is.

After reading Man with a Pan, I’m starting to catch a new vision of home cooking, one that involves men exchanging recipes and strategies. In the 1983 film Mr. Mom, Michael Keaton’s character is a recently out-of-work auto industry exec who has switched places with his wife. She’s supporting the family now while he does the housework. At a job interview he enthusiastically exchanges cooking advice with another laid-off worker, a scene that plays like a joke. They’re so into it–ha! When do we ever see men get so passionate about home cooking? I’ll tell you when; here and now, in one-third of our kitchens. For a book about men, Man with a Pan has surprisingly little chest thumping and a glorious amount of pleasure, generosity, and joy.

It feels kind of like the elephant in the room. It’s not that we don’t talk or think about it around here — indeed, we do both, rather frequently. But rarely do we discuss it with others. For some reason, it’s not the kind of subject that is discussed all that openly. Instead, it’s alluded to subtly, in a manner that just confuses me at first, until I remember that this is a little unusual.

“You don’t look like a farmer,” people say when I tell them my profession.

“What do you mean?” I reply, never able to let an issue go,

“Oh, I don’t know,” they reply. “You’re just little. You don’t look like you ride a tractor.”

It still takes me a minute to put it together. (Why do you have to be “big” to ride a tractor? Why do you have to ride a tractor all the time to be a farmer? What does it mean to not “look” like someone who does ride a tractor?) Until I realize, oh, they mean because I am a young woman. At this point, I never know quite what to say. “I ride a tractor sometimes,” or, “Yep, well, I am.” The subject changes. But I am constantly reminded that to be a female farmer is something a little out-of-the-ordinary, to work at a farm site staffed almost entirely by women, even more so. So I decided to express my thoughts about some of the intricacies of women in agriculture.

Lately, I hear a lot about female farmers as a “new trend.” According to the 2007 census, one or two out of ten farms is now operated by a woman. However, the “trend” part is hard to track, and seems to me to obscure some history of women who have always been involved in farming. Female farmers have been historically under-reported and under-recognized. The U.S. census records only one operator per farm, the deed holder. As the majority of land is officially owned by men, this renders invisible all female partners who manage farms with their husbands or families. As I learned from this episode of the radio series Making Contact, worldwide, between 65 and 75 percent of all food is grown by women, who own only one percent of the world’s land. Mainly operating as subsistence growers, this food production is often conceptualized as “domestic work,” obscuring recognition of these female farmers worldwide. Still, the visibility of female farmers, at least within the U.S., is growing. For all its limitations, the census has recorded a more than doubling of farms operated by women between 1978 and 2005, from 100,000 to 250,000.

As the country’s farmers age, a new “back to the land” movement, fueled partly by desires to put personal politics into action and an increasing disillusionment with the job market and traditional concept of careerism for young people, is encouraging a new crop of farmers, many of them women. We new farmers often farm under nontraditional arrangements — co-farmers are often platonic managing partners instead of the heterosexual husband-wife team of the past — meaning women are more often recognized as farm owners or principle managers.

Additionally, as farmers age, their land is more often being taken over by wives, daughters, or other female family members. Interestingly, as making a living as a farmer becomes ever more difficult, it becomes women’s work. At a farmer’s market I frequent, one of the farms is a hundred-acre conventional New Jersey farm that sells corn, tomatoes, squash, and tree fruit. The farm is run by two middle-aged sisters who recently took over management of the farm from their 80-year-old father. I was excited to see a farm run by women of a slightly older generation, so I asked them their thoughts. “Most of the time, other farmers treat us okay,” they told me, “although if we do something wrong, it’s, ‘oh those girls.’ We bring along [our brother] to market sometimes; he doesn’t know a thing about farming, but people just want to talk to ‘the man in charge.’” They took over the farm, they told me, because their husbands and brothers had to get “better” jobs that brought in more money. Without the expectation of being primary breadwinners, they were left as the ones who could keep the family farm alive.

In both conversation and personal thought about females and farming, I want to be careful to avoid gender essentialism. I do not want to make generalizations like, “women make good farmers because they like to nurture the earth,” or, “men are better with machines.” Gender expression, I believe, is a complex combination of socialization, culture, and genetics. Not being able to divorce these things from each other, I find it frustrating and counterproductive to base ideas or logic on what men or women are “naturally” like or good at doing.

That said, I acknowledge my shortcomings, like a lack of confidence with machines and power tools. Part of this is completely personal, gender aside; I happen to not be good with power tools, whereas I know many women who are. However, there is a gendered aspect to power-tool-confidence. My sister recently visited me in Philadelphia, and came to work with me on the farm. When I asked her what she wanted to work on, she replied, “anything with power tools,” explaining that she recently volunteered recycling old doors for a green-deconstruction non-profit with a male friend of hers.

When the staff person trained them, he offered a power drill to help, but spoke about it and handed it only to my sister’s male friend. Finally, the friend asked my sister if she, too, would like to use the power drill. My sister did, and had a great time.

My insecurity with machines and tools has several layers. I am not good at them, I suspect, because I was never encouraged to use them, so I never gained comfort or ability through practice. Now, I am afraid to practice because I am not good, and I do not want other people to notice and use their observations of my fumbling to further whatever ingrained ideas they have of women being bad with power tools. It gets rather angsty. I do not want to speak for all female-bodied farmers, but I think many of us feel like we have something to prove. I have to remind myself sometimes that just because I can’t shovel compost as fast or carry a wheelbarrow quite as full of watermelons, doesn’t mean that I am not strong or not a good farmer. We work together. And anyway, we all can handle wheelbarrows that are pretty darn full.

We never intentionally created a female dominated farm here at Henry Got Crops. Most of our applicants for internships and apprentices just happened to be female, and most of those qualified ended up being women. We have three female apprentices, two female interns, and one male intern. (We now have another — a big welcome to Ed, who is newly working with us this fall!) I am glad, though, to be able to offer a positive view of women as strong, hard, workers to the students here at Saul; I want the female students to know that they can be farmers if they want, or anything else they aspire toward. One of our Saul summer interns brought her boyfriend out to work with her one morning. “How did he like it?” I asked her the next day. “I brought him out so he would see how hard I work,” she replied. “He said it was fun, but really hard. He said he couldn’t do this every day.”

I have to admit, I was pretty proud.

Originally published on Beyond Green, h/t to Tom Laskawy