Home and Family
Who's Doing the Cooking in Your House?
By Ruth Haag

“What’s for dinner?” the happy children ask. “Chili,” replies the mother. One child is very happy; the other says, “Yuck, chili again?”

Most of us still live in households where the food preparation responsibilities are not equally distributed.

Several years ago, I began writing books in my spare time. The family decided that maybe they would help with meals. First, they tried to cook together, and it didn’t work very well. It is hard for three people to agree on most anything.

Next, they each tried to take one night to cook. That worked much better. Suddenly, we had the Indian food night, the vegetarian night, and the grilled ham and cheese night.

To make it work well, we had to lay some ground rules, as follows:

• Meals have to be balanced, having things like vegetables, fruit, bread and meat, all in the same meal.
• There has to be something that each person in the family is willing to eat in each meal.
• No one can make the others cook as they do. Family members must be allowed to pick their meals and cook their way.

Suddenly, everyone in the family was willing to eat less complex meals that took less time to prepare. It is so easy to ask for a torte for your birthday cake, until you have tried your hand at one.

Once you gain responsibility for something like cooking, you also suddenly realize how difficult it is to do, and you tend to criticize others less.

On the down side, we discovered that no one in the family had really ever learned to cook. They were having a real struggle reading cookbooks.

Thus, my next project was to write a cookbook series, designed for people who didn’t know what they were doing.

I have suggested to other families that they try this meal-splitting method. Some have tried it. All principal meal-preparers report that the meals that the other members of the family create are much less elaborate than those that they asked for in the past. Instead of pork roast and mashed potatoes, people are suddenly happy with hot dogs and canned soup.

It is fun to share the task, and fun to eat different foods. Try it.