Healing Space | How and when cooking can be injurious to mom's health

Pressure placed by society, imaging, public health messaging, courts and advertising standards also imposes on the mental health of women, when the focus should instead be on healthy meals, prepared fresh, in hygienic environments with balanced nutrients, no matter who is preparing them. (Illustration by Suneesh K)

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

Kerala High Court earlier this month, while delivering a judgment on a pornography case no less, observed that kids need to come home to meals cooked by parents and to avoid food delivered by Swiggy and Zomato. Let’s examine how much of this is a truism, or has more to do with conditioning than truth.

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Despite demographic changes and shifts in cooking patterns, mothers are considered the primary providers of food in the home, and make the food-related choices including grocery shopping, variety or nutritional value and portion size of the food per individual in the home. Research also shows that cooking daily meals causes mothers to feel stressed out (Bowen, Elliott, & Brenton, 2014; Robson, Crosby, & Stark, 2016) and is also often the cause of sub-optimal health in mothers themselves, especially in countries like India.

Often, the choice to eat out is made to reduce the stress on the mother and is an important part of the decision-making process around food choices. There are a number of constraints that influence these decisions. These range from intrapersonal and interpersonal to structural. These include psychological factors, such as stress, depression, anxiety, fatigue or illness, loneliness, companionship, time and economic or financial barriers.

Typically, in India, mothers who cook do so with little support, and even when working full-time must wake up earlier than the rest of the family, and sleep later in prep work, and take on the entire responsibility of the kitchen. In Mumbai, for instance, it is not uncommon to see women in commuter train shelling beans or cleaning the spinach in preparation for dinner or the next day’s meals, the assumption being that despite a full day’s work, it is her sole responsibility to see to the meals. This falls under the category of women’s unpaid labour, and economically has been found to lead to the ‘time poverty’ that prevents women’s participation in paid labour as well as in educational, social and political activity. Essentially, it keeps women from participating fully in social life. Add to this exposure to biomass fuel, fumes from woodsmoke, heat, and an impact on posture caused by hunching over the stove or rolling rotis and for a large mass of women, cooking is a burden that needs to be lightened. In modern kitchens, instant foods, ready to cook foods, pre-prepped meats and vegetables, such as pre-peeled or pre-chopped onions, garlic, gravies and sauces have helped to a large extent, but continue to keep the burden firmly with women.

This constitutes what is known as an invisible mental load on women for which they are rarely acknowledged. While a father may step in once in a while, the burden of knowing what’s in the fridge, what groceries need to be bought, pre-soaked, and what is suitable, or maintaining likes and dislikes, nutrition and viability, falls to women to maintain.

In the paper 'The Joy of Cooking?' (Sage August 22, 2014), researchers Sarah Bowen et al consider the perspective that food officials and public health policy experts paint an ideal image of the balanced diet, all of which requires such an invisible mental load and burden of unpaid labour to be shouldered by women. “The message that good parents—and in particular, good mothers—cook for their families dovetails with increasingly intensive and unrealistic standards of 'good' mothering,” they point out. However, it is unrealistic. Women who hold down jobs and manage the kitchen are also not always greeted with enthusiastic gratitude. They are often taken for granted, they receive complaints, a list of preferences and end up burnt out and fatigued. Families that live below a certain standard income level also cannot put the picture-perfect meal on the table day after day, they point out. Especially in India, often this means that the woman of the family goes without or with smaller portions, or a watered-down version of daily meals to achieve that unrealistic target.

The pressure placed by society, imaging, public health messaging, courts and advertising standards also imposes on the mental health of women in this way when the focus should instead be on healthy meals, prepared fresh, in hygienic environments with balanced nutrients, no matter who is preparing it. Whether it is a cook, a grandparent, a father, brother, or store-bought or restaurant-ordered, ready-to-cook or instant microwaveable, the nutritional content of the meal and that it is prepared with love and without stress is more important than who makes the meal. Modern food processing technology has evolved to the extent that frozen vegetables sometimes are able to preserve nutrients far more efficiently than the seemingly fresh vegetable supply chain. Quick protein additions like eggs and bananas can up the nutrient density of the meal. Pre-prepped meals stored and put away with the family working together reduces the stress of meals. And fathers can cook as well as and sometimes better than mothers. The cost, time and resources that go into a meal are the family’s and society’s concern and not the mother’s burden alone. And the mother has as much need for nutritional value and a peaceful meal as the rest of the family does.

Normalize the focus on the best value for the meal itself and not food and cooking as a commentary on a woman and her wifely duties or motherly skill and dedication.

How to share cooking responsibilities

- Make a weekly menu and grocery shop together.

- Make meal prep a weekly fun activity with assigned chores and ‘signature’ dishes.

- Always involves kids of all genders in cooking work. Assign portion and nutrient sizes per family member as per their needs.

- Take all the short cuts available to you as long as they are healthy.

- Don’t eat with guilt and stress. A meal should be enjoyed even if ordered in.