A Response to Mary Rechner

Yesterday I posted a link to Mary Rechner's article "Why I Hate Food: A Polemic," and today I give you my response.

First of all, I want to affirm that I am the last person to stand up for holier-than-thou, my-suburban-child-can't-touch-any-water-that-hasn't-been-triple-filtered, elitist food behaviors. To me, those attitudes are first cousins to "I can't eat that broccoli; it has a bug on it" and "I prefer to eat at McDonald's because the food looks so safe and predictable." Food anxieties take many illogical forms, and at least the McDonald's gull isn't a snob.

Nonetheless, Rechner's polemic does harm, though she has good intentions and does make points that should resonate with all of us who live in the comfortable purviews of take-it-for-granted America. For instance, "It is of the utmost importance to me," she writes, "to resist the earthy lure of urban homesteading. Why shouldn’t I, a writer, mother, and arts administrator living in 2012 who also does most of the shopping and cooking in my family, take advantage of the relative ease of obtaining healthy food at the supermarket? I refuse to accept the moral imperative of growing my own vegetables, butchering the animals I eat, and making my own jam." I agree: there's no reason why she should feel pressured to do these things, living as she does in Portland, Oregon; managing, as are all of you readers, as am I, our First World dilemmas, which have nothing to do with survival. I am not being ironic. Those of us with electricity and running water, who live in forests that are not overrun with guerrillas ready to casually rape and maim us, who live in cities without open sewers and frequent outbreaks of cholera--we can make these choices. That, perhaps, is one simple, if ugly, definition of civilization.

But Rechner goes on to write, "When I see women with their kids (they usually also have a dog or two) weeding their vegetable gardens and tending their flocks of chickens, I fear they have bought the idea that these many labors are the markers of what it means to be a good mother-wife-woman," and here she steps onto rocky ground. What is she saying? That tending a garden alongside one's children and dogs means that a woman has buckled under to the patriarchy? That agricultural labor is a lesser form of human engagement with the world? 

After reading Rechner's article, my friend Marie told me, "Women writers should stop defining which activities limit us, what we should or should not be doing. What personally limits me, for example, has roots much earlier, and more profound, than how I spend my days (which, frankly, I choose because it saves me from what limits me)." I think Marie is exactly right. Moreover, I think that if Rechner had been watching Robert Frost tend his chickens or Wendell Berry train his draft horses, she would not have jumped to the conclusion that they were using these labors to avoid real self-expression. For both these men, agricultural labor was and is their subject matter. Their artistic work is bound to their physical work.

Rechner writes, "If women are spending all of their time planting gardens, tending chickens, and canning (i.e. living our lives in the most laborious ways possible), how are we ever to catch up as writers, visual artists, composers, and directors?" The fact is that hard physical labor, whether rural or urban, has a long history in the making of art. The issue, as I see it, is not that women are wasting their time by canning tomatoes and scrubbing the tub but that the literature of canning tomatoes and scrubbing the tub does not garner the same respect as, say, Hayden Carruth's literature of the hay field. I daresay that farmer-poet Maxine Kumin might have something to say on this matter--and perhaps she, too, would note that, while I quickly listed the names of three very famous male rural writers, I listed the name of a single woman . . . and that's not because she's the only one in existence. The rest of us don't get much press from anyone, including organizations whose central purpose is to promote women writers.

I think it's also an error to conclude that every single thing an aspiring artist undertakes ought to be in direct service to her art. Says Rechner, "A jar of pickles, however beautiful it appears on the windowsill with the sun shining through it, however thoughtfully and sustainably it was made, however good the pickles taste, is still a jar of pickles." But that jar of pickles is also a link to the history of women's work, and why isn't that a good enough reason to treasure it, to replicate it, to teach the skill to our sons and daughters?

For a decade, I managed the exhibition hall at my town's annual Labor Day fair. Our primary exhibitors were women and children (including boys, I should point out), who had spent the summer together making jam, growing vegetables, and knitting sweaters and then excitedly brought them to the fair, where their goods were arranged on tables as items of beauty and importance. Over the course of the weekend I would have myriad conversations with women of all ages about biscuit recipes and quilting techniques. For many of them, it was the only moment in the year when the work they did privately in their homes was brought into public and venerated. So no, those biscuits weren't art. But yes, those biscuits did matter to our human story.

I could talk about economic reasons for gardening and raising chickens: about how committing herself to these tasks might allow a writer to stay home and write rather than spend all day in an office or a classroom and not write. I could talk about the gardeners I know who are artists: who have the ability to create a landscape that has the visual power of a painting yet also shifts with the seasons, the weather, the time of day. But even in its blunt utilitarian tedium, labor has great value. In my memoir Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, I wrote:

Like a string of beads or a game of cards, a chore has a history. One task follows the next, follows the next. There's pattern and tedium and necessity and skill. You learn exactly how to balance six split logs on your left arm, how to shift your load and flatten your step when you cross a patch of ice, how to tip your armload smoothly into the woodbox. You learn how to talk yourself in and out of laziness. You learn there are some chores you'll never be much good at. You learn you have to do them anyway.

My point, in the memoir, was that writing and labor tap into the same source, require parallel skills and sacrifices and painful self-discoveries, lead us down difficult and unexpected paths. Rechner does me no service by arguing that I should free myself from the shackles of the chores that lie at the root of my vocation. 

And by the way, here's a jar of pickles that is also art. Thank goodness my mom decided to can these beets.

[Photograph by Thomas Birtwistle. For more of Tom's photographs of food, fairs, and rural life, visit thomasbirtwistle.com.]