Beyonce was very right about who runs the world. Whoever runs food and whoever runs food runs the world, for how could we be alive in the world without eating? Food is synonymous with life. The woman is positioned at the hearth, the place of warmth and the centre of care and nurture with all its toll on time and labour.
How did women world wide come to be assigned to the task of culinary duties? Can anyone tell? How did women come to be stereotypically tied to cooking to the point of being defined by it that it becomes a taboo for her to fail at it? Hence, it is with a sense of outrage one hears a remark like, “You’re a woman and you don’t know how to cook?” Long before globalization connected the world, women had been connected with the kitchen as naturally as they had been yoked to childbirth and monthly cycles. Imagine the scene at the dawn of creation with a celestial being announcing to the cosmos, “Woman, cooking is thy name!” And from that point, culture took over, going from generation to generation to associate a woman with the kitchen – thus making the kitchen culture an irrepressible one indeed.
Women, without a doubt, are worthy of celebration; if not for anything, for the joy they bring the generations through their life-giving roles as mothers (conceiving, bearing, and nurturing children) and as kitchen authorities. Certainly, the world should say a big thank you to women for the great job they have done over thousands and thousands of years.
Now if the world, the male dominated world at that, has entrusted something as essential as life in the hands of women, it will then not be too much to extend their realm of experience. It is, therefore, time to entrust the benefits of the wider experience of leadership and work opportunities to women beyond the hearth. So, before we raise a finger, a voice, a temper, or the manhood in rape against a woman, any woman at all, we should think of how intimately and intricately our lives are intertwined with hers: we pass through her birth canal, suckle at her breasts, and eat from her pot. Yet it is so much pain and shame to think of the injustice, wickedness, and discrimination against her.
Back to the kitchen and who owns it. We have already seen by the evidence all around us that women can! Today’s world is seeing more women enhance their career and fulfill their dreams and aspirations in a world of opportunities. There are more women can do in the various fields of endeavours, in politics, administration, medicine, academics, business, architecture, navy, and what have you. Women are doing well in virtually every important sector of life. And the bliss of it is that this counters the myth that women’s education ends in the kitchen. Thank God.
We appreciate women for giving us life and food. We appreciate them for all the hundreds of thousands of recipes. And importantly, we congratulate them on the victory so far gained in their struggle against gender inequality and abuse.
Happy International Women’s Day.