S9 Ep2: Meal Machine (Kitchens Revisited)

Hi, this is Lucy, host of Lecker. I'm taking the month off in August from releasing new episodes on the podcast and I thought it might be a nice time to revisit some old episodes and so I present I represent to you kitchens. Kitchens is a six-part series looking at the past present potential future of the kitchen. It came out on Lecker in 2021 and I figured that there was a chance that people who'd started listening to the podcast more recently might not have gone back that far in the feed, especially now the podcast is part of Heritage Radio Network. It's really exciting. So this month I am re-uploading the six episodes to the feed that make up kitchens throughout the month of August. I hope you enjoyed listening or maybe even redesigning. I've often felt conflicted about my own relationship with the kitchen. I really, really love cooking. I can spend hours in the kitchen by myself losing myself in familiar processes movements or ingredients or in the first concentration of trying new things, new recipes and understandably this love only really had the opportunity to blossom when I moved out of shared flats and started living with my then boyfriend now husband Rory. For the first time in my life the kitchen felt like mine but there's a whole load of other baggage that comes along with this. It feels like if you're a person who loves cooking then when you're in a relationship you end up being the person who does the meal planning, master minding the clearing up, managing the responsibility of using everything in the veg box if you get one very stressful. I've just never been sure about all that. It really makes being in the kitchen feel beautiful and weighted, particularly as a woman in a relationship with a man. Living with a partner for the first time is always going to be a process of adjustment and negotiation and I really would honestly say that Rory and I have a pretty egalitarian approach to housework and it's taken some work and we've had some back and forth and some disagreements but I yeah I really think we've got there in some sense but it just the whole thing makes me feel a bit uneasy particularly our roles in the kitchen. Like do I love cooking because I love it or is it that I get the satisfaction that society bestows on you when you do something that's expected of you. When I was younger, the kind of house management aspect of living with people just didn't occur to me like I was just never that person in a house share. Like don't get me wrong, I would wash up after myself, I'm not an animal and I would do other things sporadically or when asked by someone. But when Rory and I moved in together, it suddenly felt like this really significant thing like it felt deeply important to me that the flat was nice and it was almost like there was this vacuum of who was in charge of getting the work sorted so that it was nice. Like it wasn't just about the work being done like you can always ask someone to do something like but it was having to ask that bothered me and I felt like I was the one doing the asking. I felt like I noticed this more than Rory did. Like why, why, why was that? I'm somebody who's not tidy by nature. I have to work really hard to force myself to you know be neat. So why did this suddenly bother me so much when I moved in with a man? You go in the back door. It's a really small kitchen, it's tiny. It's like a tiny little box. Gas hob. So you have the stove. Worktop. Counter. Sync. A small fridge. Underneath the dining board was the gas fridge. If more than one person's in there everyone's sorts to get a bit flustered. That's the general vibe. This is Kitchen's a podcast series by Lecker about the most important room in the home. I'm Lucy Deerlove. I left out any element of human emotion and emotion intelligence and what people need from Kitchen's. This kitchen is not it's not suitable for me. It doesn't enable me to cook. Kitchen's a more clones of each other than living rooms or bedrooms are. Why is that? Episode two. Mill machine. So it's a galley kitchen with a big bay window at one end. We've got like tool units on the left hand side which is a kind of state agent now. I also got that to say integrated fridge freezer. This is the first time I've ever had an integrated and that was a big moment for me. I was like that's really posh. And then another tool unit which is where I've shoved my bin and a microwave again because I quite like not having to have a microwave on show because that's really ugly. Michael and I have been friends since we met in first over uni. And one of the funny things about old friendships when you get into your 30s is seeing the contrast between how we live then and how we live now. And then on the inside of this cupboard I've got a big blackboard calendar chart thing which I designed myself which I'm quite pleased with. And it's basically like a this is quite a mum thing that I've done isn't it? I guess you could say that's quite because my mum always had a calendar in the kitchen that had you know everyone's schedule for the week what the kids are doing etc. I mean this doesn't have that. It just says when we're getting our jams but eventually. Every single weekend which breads are coming to stay. Yeah when friends from London are coming to stay exactly and like when the price are and stuff like that. Michael recently bought a house with his husband Ben a shared ownership place in St Leonard's about five minutes from the sea. This is the first time they've ever lived together without any flatmates. And it's a new build so the kitchen is a complete blank slate. And the house in general feels like a blank slate for Michael to keep house exactly how he wants. Oh I'm a great fruit tree. See in the bay there's a great fruit tree. And again you know I feel like I'm active like toss it up but like this is it we have the space to put a tree in the bay window. I mean that's just something that like when I was growing up like in the kitchen was just so like over all the space at every corner of it. I had some sort of storage unit or something that was barely space to move and yet I had the luxury to have a tree which is very nice. It's not like it's a reasonably sized tree. Oh yeah sorry it's not like a ceiling. It's not grounded. It's good grow though. Yeah it good it's going to. It's good to grow. But I like that as well that's why I wanted a tree in the kitchen as well so hopefully it will last you know we can have it in like 10-20 years. Although this is the first kitchen that Michael's really properly had the run of. The kitchen has been his domain in pretty much every house he's ever lived in. That's just the natural role he takes and he's known the way he wants to run this domain from a very young age. We lived together in our early 20s in East London and while it's fair to say that neither of us had our shit together in many ways. Michael knew how he wanted to live. Whereas I barely remembered to pick up a vacuum because it just never occurred to me. And then yeah so on the other side of the galley kitchen is the sink and a washing machine. Again like just having a door and washing machine like when I was a kid like never had that so that's really nice that you don't have to like could you look at the kitchen it's not. It doesn't look like there's any appliances here. No exactly there's not like big functional appliances. Why do you think that appeals to you. I think just the neatness is really silly but yeah it's neat and tidy. I don't look at it in a city with work because I don't know the washing machines there. I don't love doing washing. I can open the cover, do the washing and close the cover and then it's done and I'm not thinking about it. Well I think I think a lot of it came from my mum and the fact that she was always very kind of proud of her her spaces and and the kitchen was certainly like her space in the home. And you know whilst you know they didn't have a fancy kitchen or anything like that and it was a little housing association house that like it was two adults and three kids shared. I think because there wasn't much space you had to kind of take pride in it to maintain the order right because otherwise it's just chaos. So yeah she would always take a lot of pride in it and keep make sure that it was super clean and yeah massively instilled that in me as well. When I was younger like I was I became pretty aware pretty quickly that the kitchen was a safe space as it were. It was where my mum was most the time and I felt a natural kind of affinity with her and her closeness that, you know, I'm closer to my dad too but it was just in terms of like being young and thinking about my own identity, she was the more natural person that I would have those discussions with and the kitchen was the space for that, you know, my dad would, was out work and would come home and then would be sitting in the lounge which was separate, it wasn't open plan and watching telly and then that would be his space because he's relaxing in and we would be, well my mum would be cooking and I would be helping her and stuff and so I think that's kind of where it started with me. When I ask people about their kitchens, as I have done many times over the past few months, you know, I've been asking people about the way they like to organise them and how they like to live generally and how they feel about it and so often mums come up as a natural point of reference. You know, Michael's saying he opens the cupboard and there's a calendar painted on the back of the cupboard with all their schedule and that's a mum thing. Like I just think that's so telling. Obviously not everyone grays up with a mother in the home and not everyone has a mother that behaves in this way. Still, so often the woman of the house is an inextricably linked with the kitchen and that role isn't just about being a great cook. The academic Emily Contwap published a great book recently called Diners, Dudes and Diets and in it she looks at how men's cooking has evolved over the 20th and 21st century. She looks at how the boundaries of masculinity have flexed to incorporate notions of engaged fatherhood. But they still uphold the traditional connection between food, care work and femininity. She talks about how more men these days are actively partaking in domestic duties like food shopping and cooking but these domestic practices continue to be coded as feminine and women still do them more often. And on top of that, lots of food media frames men's cooking as a hobby or a leisure activity, maybe even a refined skill or talent. But portrayals of women's home cooking remains a quotidian and expected duty as she puts it. So when you think of those food magazines that are quite overtly targeted at women, there's often just a focus on getting food on the table or budget meals for four or you know quick meals, easy meals, meals to make after work. That's very much the focus. You know family occasions and stuff it's I'm in the kitchen with my mum Christmas Day and my sister to be honest. So there is the gender dimension to that. Yeah, we make jokes about it now in a way we wouldn't have then because we didn't have the awareness but you know when my sister's husband comes in he'll make some sort of sexist comment that he he will I will be included in the women. You know what I mean? It's so like ingrained like he's not even reflecting on that. And I'm fine with that in a way like obviously not that he's being sexist but that it's assumed that it's our space and that there has been a positive decision about that. Do you know what I mean? Like my mum it's like it's her space it's her kitchen and she dominates it. And I think I had the same thing and I was aware of that when when yeah I went to uni and met new people and started sharing spaces because you have to negotiate it and maybe it's my personality but I think I kind of naturally became a bit of a like well not really patriarchy but patriarchy. Is there some gender-neutral term for that? Oh. Gay patriarchy figure. Yeah that was a part of just having a that sort of personality that I was aware and then that book conflict sometimes obviously because I always kept the line or whatever and I like to think I'd learn from that. And there was always this aspect of well of like I always live with girls and so I kind of you know sorry six this way expected them to have a level of cleanliness similar to mine because you know that's the that's the stereotype isn't it? The girls are clean and tidy and that's not the reality in my experience. No sorry that of course that's not you know always the case but it yeah I was always the cleanest one and I recognised that you can't you know it's a shared space so you have to kind of meet in the middle in some way and I would willingly do more but I think where I probably struggled was like expressing my frustration so I may not have done that in the best way sometimes. According to the Office of National Statistics in the UK in 2016 women did 60% more of the unpaid work in the home than mended. However this another side to us as a BBC article about division of household labour during the pandemic points out studies over the past few years indicate that couples in same gender relationships tend to divide tasks in the home based on ability preference and time rather than along the lines of traditional gender roles. So in a way statistics that separate women's and men's domestic workload in this way are ignoring anything that falls outside of a heteronormative context. Traditional gender roles are immediately challenged when they're pulled outside of this framing but it doesn't stop people trying to apply them. You know someone who doesn't know is very well if they come into the house they would make certain assumptions based on the fact that you probably even my neighbours the fact that they see me in the kitchen with the tea towel over my shoulder or serving dinner I'm very aware that they will be making assumptions probably about what happens in the bedroom and they're wrong. So you know it's just why it's just yeah it's a load of bullshit. I mean gay relationships also perform gender is, you know, it's inevitable. The weird thing is I don't know how much of this is my personality but I mean I do absolutely everything in in the whole relationship and he will be fuming when he hears this. I mean aside from everything else he has a complete misconception about how much he does. I mean that's quite common thing I think. I mean we all do you know but he yeah I'm absolutely probably doesn't sound it but I'm fine about it. So I genuinely am fine about it because it's not that big a deal like now if I can keep things clean it's not that much work so I really don't mind doing it and because I know that it's for me really all I ask is that he keeps things you know he maintains things and sometimes he doesn't and I you know the house will be spotless and then I walk into a room and that like they'll just be like a dirty pair of pants on the floor and I'm like literally what are you doing you're trolling me aren't you you have to be trolling me and he maintains he's not but but so yeah in a way we are like performing the same gender roles you know I am doing absolutely 100% of the domestic labour and we're doing 0% I mean we subvert it in the sense of it's not like he's going out and only all the money and looking after me I'm also doing I'm just kidding. Do you think one of the reasons you don't mind is because I mean I feel like I for a lot of like the reactions I have when I perceive to have been slighted in some way by might you know by maybe not do I think like because it's caught up with so much baggage of like exactly and we yeah we don't we don't know we're free of that and so I don't I'm not angry in the same way and I like because I have the luxury of not you know that doesn't materialize then into me actually experiencing disadvantage in any like real way in society I have male privilege and that you know it's yeah so it doesn't it doesn't make me angry in the same way obviously I'm surprised it doesn't create more arguments it really doesn't and I don't know if that's because because we live in a yeah a queer relationship where the roles just aren't same now I'm thinking about it I'm getting a bit angry why don't you not do anything it's just ridiculous no it's fine because I think you have to look at the total package it's like he brings other things to the relationships and it's not yeah it's not like transactional I'm doing X therefore you do what like it's just it doesn't work like that and he brings things to the relationship that I could never bring because I don't have the in me and that's yeah to me that's what a successful relationship is we complement each other I've got this conversation with Rory where I'm like he's like if you feel like something in the house needs doing and I'm not pulling my weight then just tell me and I'm like no but that's kind of the point like I'm not the manager yeah we live here together like if something needs doing you should see it yes yeah I think that's where you're game wrong I think we both recognise that someone has to be in charge this is not there's no quality in this household I'm in charge okay yeah exactly if something is doing I will do it largely because it's easier but if I want if I need a direction to do it I will direct him to do it and it will be done yeah okay yeah that's interesting so I mean I don't want to do that because I don't want to manage that no of course not that's not what I want to do no I want to manage the house I want to manage everything Since I spoke to Michael for this episode a few weeks ago, I thought a lot about what he said. I actually reorganised my whole kitchen, partly inspired by the neatness and the order in his. It just felt so satisfying and relaxing in a way. And doing this made me think about whether it would be easier if I just completely took control and totally managed everything that goes on in the kitchen, like I owned that, and I asked Rory to do things when needed to. Like Michael does. Would that be easier? Maybe. But wouldn't it also just be accepting the hand that society's dealt women since it became commonplace for us to work outside of the home? Wouldn't I be just resigning myself to what Arley Hochschilders historically called the second shift? I think part of the issue is the actual built environment of our particular kitchen. It's a small windowless, you-shaped room. It's completely separate from the living room. And it's also just completely devoid of anything related to socialising or leisure. There's no chairs or places for people to hang out. It's hard for more than one person to be in there, really. It's a room where it's hard to forget that the modern fitted kitchen was designed and constructed as a woman's workplace. The fitted kitchen that we're so familiar with today, with its built-in cabinets and work surfaces, was literally constructed around a woman's body. Have you ever measured the height of your work surfaces? I would guess there's a pretty strong chance they're 36 inches from the floor. In an essay for courts called "The Specifications of American Kitchens Are Actually Sexist," Rachel Aunt writes, "Over the last 100 years, Kitchens have grown, walls have fallen, and appliances have multiplied. But the kitchen protagonist, a woman, standardised, has stayed the same. So has the height of the countertops, sink, and oven." As Professor Deborah Saguayan talked about in the first episode of this series, "Kitchens prior to the insuper period looked very different." And it was around this time that engineers and management experts started to turn their attention to the kitchen. The way was arguably paved by Catherine Beecher, who was an American domestic educator, and wrote a book 50 years prior to this period in 1869 called "The American Women's Home." In this book she suggests using a steamship kitchen as a model for designing an efficient kitchen in the home. So this idea of a small narrow confined space with everything that was possibly needed to feed a large amount of people quickly and efficiently. The whole idea was it wouldn't require much movement from the cook, and that was exactly what she was getting at. This is when we first started to encounter the idea of a kitchen as a workplace. After that, around the turn of the century and just after, the housewife turned home economist Christine Frederick started writing newspaper columns and then books about kitchen innovations that were influenced by Taylorism. Taylorism is an industrial management discipline aimed to increase time efficiency in processes. So Taylorism is basically why we have production lines and workflows in factories in the way that we do today. It's the idea of doing things in a certain order and in a certain way in order to speed things up and maximize both productivity and profit. Christine Frederick applied this to kitchen design. She urged women to arrange their kitchens ergonomically by grouping tasks together in areas where you would do that task and also to reduce the size of their kitchens to conserve energy so they weren't running around all over the place. Frederick even created a chart, pairing work surface height with the height of the woman in the kitchen. A woman who was five foot six, according to this chart, would be most comfortable with work surfaces 31 inches from the floor. Also around this time, the engineer Lillian Gilbreath developed an L-shaped kitchen and she also first came up with the working triangle. The three-sided angular workflow that recommended oven, fridge and sink be arranged at three points, all a couple of steps apart. These are two ideas that still persist today as best practice kitchen design. Lillian Gilbreath had demonstration kitchens to showcase her labour saving designs and innovations and these kitchens were specifically designed for a woman who was five foot seven, which seems kind of arbitrary because the average height of a woman in the US at the time was five foot three. And the thing that happened after this was that as demonstrated here, the work of Frederick and Gilbreath encouraged flexibility and customisation in kitchen design. But in the mid-twentieth century standardisation in manufacturing meant that for whatever reason kitchen companies just picked a measurement and we ended up with this 36 inch height that still exists today. And while some kitchen cabinet manufacturers offer adjustable height cabinets and work surfaces, often this is only within a few inches either side of that 36 inch, which for lots of people isn't any good. The focus on setting up your kitchen in a way that fitted your body specifically as a woman was all in the name of labour saving. The aim was to free women from the household judgery that had dogged them for centuries and was becoming more untenable now that more women were entering the workplace outside of the home. In the book More Work for Mother, a history of both housework and the tools with which housework is done. Ruth Schwarz-Kowen writes about this real contradiction in how advances in technology and industrialisation affected the American home and reduced the total amounts of work necessary to maintain a household. But in doing so, these advances only really reduced work for men, children and domestic servants. Because of how the divisions in household labour historically developed, modern technology has actually arguably created more work, more isolation and increased social expectations for women. Those Rachel aren't in the court's article puts it. Was the new kitchen a realistic response to the existing societal structures that held women in kitchens? Or did it end up reinforcing sexism by pronouncing the kitchen a space made specifically to fit women's bodies? The first kitchen I remember, it's my grandmother's kitchen. It was about seven when siblings and I went to live with her. In the kitchen scene released alongside this series, there's an essay by Gemma Kroffey. My grandmother, she sort of worked from home. She baked cakes to sell. She was business to business. She used to sell the cakes to the ladies who used to go around selling them. So she was very busy lady. She didn't have time to fathom about. Her kitchen was very basic. She had a separate area somewhere for her cakes. This kitchen was just this clear rectangle, a room, a very basic room. There were co-pots and she had a clear stove and lots of pestles and mortise and the cupboard would bake so special because there were so many of us. There was a big house and there were cousins and aunties and I think about 15 of us. The piece that Gemma wrote called Kitchens on the Path took as a starting point this kitchen that she grew up with at her grandmother's house in Accra, Ghana and then travelled forward tracing the path of her life through the kitchen she's lived with since, both in Ghana and in England where she was born and where she moved back to for six full. But this particular kitchen, like many of our earliest memories of the room, was significant but not in the way you might expect. I didn't enjoy being in that kitchen. It was just all about work. And everything had to be pounded or ground or mashed or whatever there was always chopped and there was just always so much work and I didn't want any part of it. I used to avoid being in the kitchen. I used to find excuses not to be anywhere near the kitchen. Would you get into trouble for that? She would worry. She would worry a lot. She used to moan a lot and say you're never going to find a husband. She says you're never going to find a husband if you don't learn how to cook and that used to push me in the other direction because I thought why don't the boys learn, need to learn how to cook. Why do I need to learn how to cook just what's in the kitchen. I don't find a husband find so I used to say I want to be a nun. I was in a Catholic school as well so I want to be a nun so I don't need to learn how to cook because I'm not going to get married so it's fine. You worry that I didn't invite. I was around sometimes. I would do a few things. Sometimes you don't chop, do some chopping or divine improns. I remember she taught me how to do that. There were some jobs that quite liked so I would do little jobs like that but I tried to avoid most of the other jobs. Because she was so determined to reject the social expectations that her grandmother claimed were necessary for her to fulfill. It wasn't until much later that Gemma discovered almost by accident that she actually really loved cooking. I moved to England back to England when I was 17. I lived with my mum's friend at the Guardian for a while and then I lived with my sister. My sister was the university so I lived with her and some of her friends. I wasn't cooking much in those days. I was just like eating I don't know chicken mushroom slices and stuff like that. I could just make it tomato sauce I think so I was a warm big bean or something I was just it's a very basic food so the kitchen didn't matter so much to me and then I went to university myself and I think that's when I started getting interested in food and I don't know if it's coincidence but it was yeah my grandmother died that I started getting interested in food in cooking and learning how to cook. I did a placement year my part of my undergrad and I remember reading the Sunday papers one weekend and David Thompson's book was reviewed and Thai food I think it was quarter. I remember but it was reviewed and it had things like red curry of scallops and I don't know why but I remember this so vividly I just thought this food just sounds so great something just clicked. I didn't do anything about it but I mentioned it to this lovely lady I used to work with called Doris. You know saying oh there were these really nice recipes and Doris said oh there's a Thai supermarket no far from where we work I'll take you there. We went one lunchtime and Doris helped me and we chose lots of ingredients and Doris loved Thai food as well and she's Chinese but she loved Thai food. Anyway she photocopied pages from a book that she had for me and I tried I spent the weekend and I cooked like five or six different things I don't know what came over me but yeah and everybody was like oh you know it's really nice and we really enjoy the food and I thought okay maybe I can't cook at all. I think if Doris hadn't said anything then maybe my life might have taken a very different path. It's really interesting that you had sort of a person who then almost was I guess in a sense like doing what your grandma tried to do and that she tried to teach you to cook but it just felt like the motivations were so different like Doris wanted you to cook because she could see how interested you were in it and the curiosity she wanted to share that passion but like it definitely felt like from the family's point of view that there was like this obligation like did you have to separate those two things for you to be able to enjoy it. Did I have to separate this is separate the obligation and then the love of the cooking did you feel conflicted when you first started to learn to cook? Did I feel no what did I do think I felt conflicted I felt I think what I felt was regret I felt a deep sense of regret a deep sense of you know I deprived myself of something for so long because of the connotations or what I thought like you know everybody needs to eat I think it's important to everybody to learn how to cook and maybe my grandmother went about it the wrong way if she really knew me she would have known that that was the wrong way to try and motivate me. Think shifted a little as they do for many women when Gemma and her husband had children because before my husband and I were both working it was probably a bit more evenly matched in terms of who did what yeah but then when you have kids there's balance of shifts because he went back to work when I had a two-week-old baby he was back a week and you were there all day he used to come home and he'd be like there's a kick but there's no dinner because I would like big a kick because I would think I would do the dessert fest because I love pudding and think I have time but then something will happen and then I'll end up having only a kick and no dinner and so yeah so maybe that's when maybe a bill with no resentments no resentments it's just stronger way but I started to feel like because I had I loved cooking and I had been doing it and my share of the cooking was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and I had a baby and now I was doing all the cooking it was like what have I what kind of hole have I dug myself into I'm not going to be what I'm going to be the cook forever more then it's not yeah not doing it because you want to but yeah to like you have to it's almost like it's this force of the system rather than think from the beginning things are stacked up against women things are stacked up against my viscous if somebody only has two weeks off if they're lucky you know they don't get a chance to really bond with your child so you end up doing a lot of the things you'll end up doing I know people say emotional labor you end up booking their appointments and you know doing you're like the manager exactly the manager of the household and it's very hard to cut once you get into that it's very hard to come out of that role before having this conversation with Gemma naively I'd never thought properly about how the poultry two weeks paternity leave that still the norm in so many UK workplaces really screws people who have children but it's true the majority of the caring work will probably fall to the parent who is most bonded with their child because they've spent more time with them and is most across their needs on a day to day basis because they're the one who's taken the parental leave to be with them in those early days and although things are changing very very very slowly so often this is still the mother this also has an impact in the value that is placed on women carrying out work in the home in more work for mother ruse Schwartz Cowan writes about how in the interwar period the messaging and narrative around housework in adverts and women's magazines shifted from being perceived as a chore to being viewed as an expression of the housewife's personality and her affection for her family she writes laundering had once been just a task to be finished as quickly as possible now it was an expression of love the new bride could speak her affection by washing tattletail gray out of her husband's shirts feeding the family had once been just part of a day's work now it was a way to communicate deep seated emotions women have more choices now that they did previously they can choose to go out to work after having children they can choose to stay at home but in Gemma's experience these choices have moral judgment aside to them by other people and she also questions whether they're really choices at all they say to you things like why you bored or people say they think like i want to use my brain but i think i'm more interesting now that i don't actually have a paid job and not traveling somewhere every day and i used to fall asleep on the sofa at eight o'clock when i was working but i would never denigrate someone else's choice or i'll tell you the worst experience was i went to a woman of the world festival and there was a panel and this one of the mothers i'm not going to mention you but one of the people on stage was talking about rushing from work to go and pick up her child from school and the child saying you know you're late and blah blah blah she's like oh it's so difficult to get there and you get there and this is where you get and it's because of the slave mothers and they are four by fours with their old kicks and i was just i was yeah it's like why are you pushing whatever inadequacy you feel because you can't do what you want to do or you're trying to do too much onto other people who've made very different choices yeah and i was so upset and i sent an email afterwards And to her credit, she responded and she apologized. And nobody pulled her up on saying, she said, "Slave me this." And nobody pulled her up on it. And I just felt like it was really unnecessary. And I said, "Black woman, I just found that really offensive." Yeah, but she apologized and she said she wouldn't use that again. And to be fair, what she said, it was probably her own insecurities. I just feel like women repeat ourselves against each other sometimes instead of working together so that people will have real choices. Because people don't really have a choice. If child care is, if you have to pay 2000 pounds a month for your children to go to a nursery, plus your transport to work, for a lot of people, you just can't afford that. So you don't really have a choice then, if that's the case. Pleasure and resistance in the kitchen. I've had this phrase rattling around in my head since I saw it in the announcement about Rebecca May Johnson's forthcoming book, described as a feminist repurposing of home cooking. In a world where the home and the kitchen has been traditionally built around women's unpaid labour, maybe it is a radical act of resistance to take pleasure in being in the kitchen. What do you think your grandmother would say if she knew how much she liked cooking now? She would be shocked. I think she would be relieved. I like to think she's somewhere looking down on me. And I think I inherited my love of baking from here. And my mother's a fantastic cook and baker as well. In some ways I feel sad but she didn't, because she was so worried about me. So I'm sad in a way sometimes to think she didn't live long enough to see me, you know, do the things that she never thought I'd do like have children, get married, learn how to cook. [Music] Lacka is written and produced by me, Lucy Deilov. Thank you to my contributors on this episode. Michael Etheridge and Gemma Kroffey. You can read Gemma's essay, "Kitchen's on the Path," which inspired this episode in the print scene released alongside this audio series. Buy a copy now at LackaPodcast.com. Original music was composed for this series by Jeremy Wormsley, with additional music also by Jeremy and by Blue Dot Sessions. Research and production assistance by Nadja Medi. If you've enjoyed what you've heard, please leave a rating and review wherever you're listening, and tell a friend. And if you enjoy Lacka in general and have enjoyed this series so far, please consider becoming a patron of the podcast. You can find out more at patreon.com/LackaPodcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of "Kitchen's." Coming up on the next. On one hand, I'm being told that my place is in the kitchen, on the other I'm being told, I mean I physically can't get in. If you think about a fitted kitchen, you think they're a planned efficiently. They're not, because you have a counter, you have a gap, you have an eye level cupboard, the eye level cupboard. That's not proper storage, and you can't get into it. [MUSIC]