There were many irritating things about the food movement of the 2010s, a movement to which there has now been a backlash and a backlash to the backlash. There was the projection of Berkeley grocery options onto the rest of a very large country with different growing seasons and available ingredients. ‘Eat seasonally’ is fun advice in California but a joke in for example the Northeast, when you’re left with a turnip. There was the xenophobia inherent in the insistence that you should avoid, as if poisonous, any ingredients you weren’t familiar with. All that stuff about what your great-grandmother considered food.
But the worst of all was the way the movement presented itself as a post-feminist corrective. The men of this movement were unimpressed with their mothers’ home cooking. Their mothers either went out to work and failed to produce nightly culinary masterpieces when they got home, or they had the time and money but also existed in an era when even wealthy Americans ate hyperprocessed garbage from the supermarket. Like, mom, haven’t you even heard of Chez Panisse?
It is a running joke on My Family that the mom is a terrible cook. So too on Midsomer Murders (the first-Barnaby eps) and doubtless other shows I’m not thinking of at the moment. But Susan on My Family really comes in for it. Night after night, serving inedible muck to her long-suffering family. Every (?) ep has the scene where they’re around the table, moaning about what she’s served, or looking for surreptitious ways to discard it (never as clever as Jerry with the mutton however; if you know you know).
The show not merely plays the awfulness of the food for laughs, but takes the side of everyone but poor Susan, who is depicted as cruelly inflicting something upon her supposed loved ones, for sport. It’s presented as though she has made a choice to serve them “shellfish satay” and other monstrosities instead of crowd-pleasers that she could just as easily whip up.
The show is weird about the fact that Susan, like husband Ben, has a job. This isn’t mentioned in the first episode? couple of episodes? and there are even some cracks about how she spends his money. But then it’s established that actually she works as a London tour guide. It is clearly a job-job, with bosses and demands, and not some kind of volunteer position.
But Ben is a dentist, and the show has decided that he is, as he refers to himself (this was the early 2000s, not 1950s) head of the household. The spendthrift kids are spending his money. He’s the one beaten down by life. So hard for him to be the provider. Except, she is working as well, no? At a job that sounds exhausting. And then she comes home and makes dinner.
The issue here is less Ben, who maybe at least works longer hours or something, is maybe doing other household stuff offscreen, than their adult son Nick, whose laziness is another punchline. Why (she asks, as if a television show from the early 2000s is going to answer) can’t Nick cook dinner? It’s even established that Nick is a good cook. Why is Susan cooking after a day at work while Nick after a day of lying around is not?
The show is ambiguous about whether Susan thinks highly of her own cooking. She’s generally sort of proud of a creation, but will then be seen tasting it and wincing.
But what does it even mean to call her a bad cook? If you cook every night, for a family of five, maybe you get sick of cooking. Maybe frugality or just an inability to go grocery-shopping every day means some of the meals involve ingredients you happened to have around and that don’t go together as nicely as one might hope.
I cannot fully relate to Susan’s cooking woes because my meals are judged by very young children, whose likes and dislikes on any given night I can’t take personally. But I do relate to the way dinner has to happen every night, every single one, and some nights is either phoned in or somehow off, and how you can even want to laugh a bit about it yourself, but then you feel like you’re joining in the anti-Susan’s-cooking bandwagon, albeit at your own expense.
Of course Nick’s the better cook. He rarely cooks! There’s no obligation when he does.
I think about how One Foot in the Grave ended in 2000, and there was never any such strangeness about Margaret Meldrew’s flower shop job being less real than the security guard one from which Victor was early-retired. And the only time anyone’s cooking gets complaints along these lines (I’m not counting the freak food mishap episodes) is once, where Victor has purchased a seafood cookbook and makes “squid in Stilton sauce” and other horrors. Is the lack of housewife-mockery about their not having kids? Their being working class, emphasis on the working?
Or is it just the better show? Not better as in sending a feminist message (what a bizarre thing to take away from One Foot in the Grave, a message of any kind), but in the absence of corny cliché.
In some pathetic way I think "bad cook" was some kind of substitute for a personality when it came to sitcom writers. There are far more "terrible cook" women than seem plausible (Daphne in Frasier was another one, yet they also somehow expected her to do it, despite being a physical therapist?). A burnt rib roast coming out of the oven is just an easy punchline.
I think the Meldrews were lower middle class, the few knocks against her social aspiration are quite cruel (the episode where they're invited - she thinks - to a dinner party, but it turns out she's been hired as the caterer).