This was my choice for the Kitchen Reader bookclub this month. It starts by noting that food and food preparation are strongly coded as feminine, and then examines how this developed over the course of the 20th century, while also looking at the effects of that gendering (e.g. in fostering envy and competition between women) and the way in which food writing also encoded ethnic norms and stereotypes. Much of this was familiar to me, but I hadn't really considered how outdoor cooking such as barbecuing is often more strongly male-gendered. Coincidentally, just after I finished reading this book, I found my son and his friend watching a MythBusters episode that included a male/female contest on exactly that point - and they did declare the myth busted, but the fact that they felt the need to do it shows it's still current.

Inness also briefly mentions her childhood memories of food and cooking, which were primarily associated with her mother. That made me think about how food and cooking worked in my birth family. My mother used to say proudly that she never left prepared meals for my Dad if she had to go away, because he was a grown man and could look after himself - but I clearly remember that the first time she ever went away overnight, with a friend from her gymnastics club, the cooking was left to me at nine years old rather than to my father. When she was in hospital when I was thirteen, I cooked, too, and washed and ironed my father's clothes; she took over the laundry again when she got better, but I did the family cooking from then until I left school, and it caused quite a lot of disruption to my teenage social life. So whatever looking after himself my father did, it actually didn't happen until after I left home. Some of what Inness says about the class implications of fashions for "dainty" foods also resonated with me; a lot of the food preferences of my working-class grandmother could certainly be explained by her (often outdated) perceptions of what the middle-class ate.

I have only a few criticisms of the book. Firstly, I think Inness is guilty of gay erasure in the passages on male cooking, where in discussing men who do carry out the majority of the cooking for their households, she identifies these as "divorced men who live by themselves and men who have no girlfriends or wives" and goes on to say the men in question frequently presume this to be "a temporary state of affairs, lasting only until a woman comes along". Secondly, the book obviously began life as an academic publication, and it shows. It would have been nice to have some illustrations for this popularised version, especially considering how often the text refers to magazines and adverts. 
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This is the Statement of Faith that's used at MCC East London, written by church members:

We believe in God, maker of all things, giver of life.
We believe in Jesus, voice of the voiceless, lover of life.
We believe in the Spirit, comforter, sustainer of life.
We believe in the community of faith and doubt,
called to be at the service of all people.
We believe in the value and dignity of each human being.
We believe that all people are equal before God,
embraced in God's love and welcome in our community.
We proclaim the priesthood of all believers.
We respect the difference of different faith journeys and
seek to offer ourselves to one another and to God,
in maturity, with honesty and integrity.
We look for a time when Liberty, Justice and Equality are made real for all people. Amen.

I love this - the emphasis on social justice, the acknowledgement that doubt has a place in a faith community, the commitment to respect other beliefs.

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We have some going begging, if you want it.

Our older cat, Minardi, has been missing for over a month now. He'd never been away for more than a day or two before, so I've just about adjusted to the idea that he probably isn't coming back; he had a congenital heart defect, and the vet had warned us that he might die suddenly at any time, or else might live to a grand old age without any symptoms at all. Most likely he just died suddenly, and hopefully relatively painlessly, on one of his patrols around the neighbourhood. So it goes.

So, thanks to special offers and my chronic tendency to over-order when I do the online shopping in a hurry, we still have four-and-a-half boxes of his preferred food, Whiskas chunks with gravy for senior cats, which our younger cat won't touch - unless possibly to bury it in the garden - because gravy is icky, apparently. I'm inclined to keep the half-empty box just on the off-chance that Minardi does randomly turn up one day looking for breakfast and acting like nothing happened, but keeping four full boxes seems excessive, and they're slightly in the way. One of them has its lid torn, but all the sachets are intact; the other boxes are unopened. If you have a cat that will eat them, and you live sufficiently local to us that we can get them to you without involving Royal Mail at vast expense, they're yours for the asking.

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For the first time ever, the Church of England has decided to hold a public consultation as part of the process of selecting the next Archbishop of Canterbury - details here. The invitation is pure business-speak ("comment on the challenges and opportunities..."), but after mulling it over during the weekend, I think I've got a handle on how to say what I want to say within that framework, and I've started drafting a response (which will probably not make comfortable reading for either of the Appointments Secretaries - the PM's or the Archbishops' - but I dare say they will cope). If you have views on what kind of Archbishop we need now, and particularly if you are an Anglican from one of the groups that is marginalised within the church, please consider writing one yourself, even if it's just a short e-mail. The deadline is Monday 30th April.

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This was the March selection from the Kitchen Reader bookclub, chosen by Katherine Martinelli. Molly Birnbaum is a journalist who originally wanted to be a chef, but lost her sense of smell following a car crash. She tells the story of how the loss changed her relationship with food, but also her sense of her sexuality and her place in the world in general, and then describes her gradual recovery. By the end of the book, she is able to smell most things again, but finds she now struggles to interpret those smells. I found her descriptions of the changes in her experience interesting; the effects were far more wide-reaching than I would have guessed, even for an aspiring chef. Despite that, I found myself wanting to skip a lot of the passages about food; I think I'm actually starting to get a bit jaded with food memoirs. Fortunately for me, though, there are some different genres coming up in the next few months' choices.

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I have just resigned from the Lib Dems. The initial trigger for this is as described in this post: the Welfare Reform Act has crossed one of my red lines, and I need to hold myself to the same standards I previously advocated to people considering voting Labour. But I want to explain my thinking in a bit more detail. ( Cut for length and politics )

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So, Nick Clegg thinks I have "a messed-up set of priorities" that he "cannot for the life of [him] understand". ( Cut for politics and swearing )

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This was the Kitchen Reader selection for February, chosen by Jules of Stone Soup. It's a mostly-enjoyable memoir of her history with food and the way it has shaped the narrative of her life. I haven't cooked any of the recipes that are included in the book, yet, but they look clear and straightforward; I will probably try the chana masala and some of the salads. In the narrative itself, some of her description of her marriage resonated with me, especially this: "That's how I know we're going to be all right. Because being the person I want to be feels easier when he is around." I've definitely felt that about the strongest of my relationships, and especially about boxcat. I also liked the fact that she mentions poly and gay friends in a very matter-of-fact way; most food books steer away from anything unconventional. That left me all the more surprised, though, when she said about the stress of preparing for her own marriage, "Getting married is not for pansies" - an unfortunate choice of phrase to say the least, and not really consistent with her attitude elsewhere in the book. Perhaps it has different connotations in the US?

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I seem to be making a lot of these AFK posts lately - my head is still spinning from my trip to Germany, but I'm off to Norfolk with my keep fit group this weekend. As always, text will be the best way to reach me while I'm away. Back on Sunday evening.

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I'm about to get on a train with the kids to go to Germany and visit my parents. I might borrow some of their Internet at some point, but it's not the fastest connection, so I won't be reading or commenting very much till Wednesday morning. Text will be the best way to reach me in the meantime.

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