A bit o' consternation uproar going on in food blog land. Seems like the mission statement for NYTimes columnists is now to just write whatever damn thing pops into your head. So Amanda Hesser dropped an op-ed over the weekend about how Michelle Obama should stop telling people that she doesn't like cooking. She goes on at some length but her point seems to be that Michelle Obama, as First Lady, has a duty to set an example for the country about how great it is to cook your own food at home. The fact that there might be, I dunno, more important things to do as First Lady doesn't seem to have occurred to Hesser. Actually, a lot of things seem not to have occurred to Hesser.
Most of those were summed up nicely in this Eat Me Daily post on the topic. (Shorter EMD: Hesser tells Michelle Obama to get back in the kitchen). But I'll add that I don't recall anyone asking Laura Bush to start cooking meals at the White House. Is that just because she was better at playing the game and having a ready supply of recipes to give to the press pretending they were hers. And the bit from Hesser's piece that most annoyed me was her saying that if Michelle Obama spent time in the kitchen she'd probably learn to enjoy cooking. How arrogant. I love to cook but I would never suggest that everyone should. I'll leave it to others to examine the "pretend you like it for the good of the country; eventually you'll get used it" argument.
more rambling below the cut
I do kinda feel bad for Ed Levine at Serious Eats, who posted about the Hesser article today. It's a food story in the media, so right up the SE street. But where EMD called the Hesser piece "clever, link-baity, yet infuriating" his description was the much more positive "interesting, thoughtful and insidiously provocative." No surprise, he caught some hell in the comments. Not only had Eat Me Daily already gotten there but their post links to an earlier Gastropoda rant. Also, there's apparently been a long discussion going on at Jezebel (linked in the comments on the SE post). There's a lot of ways to describe the original Hesser op-ed but thoughtful is not one I'd choose. I'd like to think that any decent writer who spent some time thinking about that column (and I have no idea if Hesser's under any sort of deadline pressure) would notice the large large large amount of assumptions in there about women and cooking and roles and responsibilities and maybe put it thru rewrite one more time. Or just put it thru the paper shredder.
weak sauce
Foodie fights are funny.