Is Michael Pollan anti-feminist?

Full disclosure: I’ve never read any of Michael Pollan’s books, so I pretty much judge him only by his media coverage. Part of the reason that I don’t want to read any of his books is that I get irritated at pop-analysis of issues that have major, complex systemic roots (like why people eat what they do), and whose only observable results seem to involve an uptick in the smugness quotient of the people who read them.

And, as I’ve complained before, people who earn millions off of guilt-tripping working class and poor people about buying irradiated apples from California at Walmart just kind of chap my ass. It’s within the realm of possibility that there’s someone in America who eats Hamburger Helper because he honestly believes it’s the best-tasting stuff on the planet, but most of us go there because it’s cheap.

I absolutely agree with Pollan that meals made with whole ingredients are both cheaper and healthier than a preservative-loaded meal in a box. My problem is Pollan’s explanation for why Americans have steadily moved toward eating more McD’s and less scratch cooking: It’s all the fault of the feminists.

Beginning in the early 60s, Pollan wrote in the New York Times Magazine last year, feminist activists “taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” Well, yeah, because for some women, it was. It wasn’t the act of cooking that was oppressive – it was the fact that women weren’t allowed many other options.

(And can I reiterate that feminism didn’t magically drag millions of women into the workplace where they had never been before? My grandmother worked in the 50s, as did many women whose families needed the income.)

It should go without saying that Pollan is radically simplifying here. Let’s pretend that, instead of scapegoating Betty Friedan, Pollan had randomly picked any of the dozens of other paradigm shifts that took place mid-century, and then correlated that with the rise of factory food. Cheaper cars. Microwave ovens. White flight to the suburbs (meaning longer commutes). The space program (yay for Tang!). Declining real income, necessitating two-income households. Increases in federal agricultural subsidies. (See what I meant about complex systemic issues?) Unless Pollan presents some evidence that Friedan invented TV dinners, I’m not buying it.

Here’s what feminism IS responsible for, though: removing the stigma around men who do traditionally female things… like cook.

To be fair, the “form of oppression” thing is just one sentence in a much longer piece. And the book review that’s currently got him in hot blog water, Pollan largely quotes that book’s author. So he’s hardly Rush Limbaugh out here. Maybe he’s just naïve about the gut reaction some of us have whenever we hear someone waxing romantic about the days when marital rape wasn’t illegal.

I’m trying to go by Jay Smooth rules here (what you said vs. what you are)… So, Michael Pollan: I’m sure that you’re a lovely person and you have deep respect for all of the people in your life and for women in general. I don’t think you’re sexist, anti-woman or anti-feminist. But saying that the fight to dismantle patriarchy is responsible for the level of corn syrup in my ketchup – that kind of is.