National crisis: Why Kenyan women can't cook for their men

Houston! We have a problem! This is a national tragedy. Save for the generation of our grannies and mothers, a very big number of modern Kenyan women just can’t cook to save their lives. By cook, we are not talking about boiling an egg or making black tea! We are talking about baking, frying, roasting, grilling and all that jazz.

If you’re reading this and you think it’s verbal diarrhea, obviously, you’re one of these women we are talking about. We attribute the advent of so-called modern and independent woman to the death of the art of cooking. Women have now shunned the kitchen. So dire is the situation that we now have so many men who can cook better than their girlfriends and wives.

strange bedfellows

It’s sad that women and the kitchen (former darlings) have become strange bedfellows. “I don’t have time to cook, I have a full-time job,” they always sneer. What’s more, this lack of passion for food and the kitchen has turned several into ready-meals junkies. Little wonder then that Kenya is overflowing with overweight and obese people. What’s more, most men no longer eat in their homes. Put succinctly, a woman who can’t cook can’t keep a man. Period. It’s an open-and-shut case.

deal breaker

Ability to cook is a variable held in very high esteem across the world. So much that, in most Kenyan communities, the name given to getting married has a cooking or kitchen connotation to it. For instance, among Luhyas, a people who have no time for poetic and romantic phrases, say, “Okhutekha”, which is interchangeably used to mean ‘cooking’ and ‘getting married’.

You can be a CEO or even a president all you want, but you must know how to cook, for crying out loud. To most men, a woman’s inability to cook is a massive deal breaker. It’s more annoying, if you’re one of those bulky single women who can’t cook, yet you’re a heavy feeder who eats as if nobody will ever see you naked! Even more irritating is the fact that there are some so-called modern women, especially corporate types, who think the inability to cook implies sophistication. The cheek of it.

telling her she’s a bad cook

How does a man tell a woman nicely that she is inept in the kitchen? That the food she prepares is no longer nutritionally sound. We can tell you for free, that it is not easy. There are women in our midst who cannot whip up a basic meal for two from scratch without adding a few personal opinions on 21st Century gender realities followed by a lengthy tirade on why singling out some women for sheer incompetence in the kitchen is sexist. There is nothing unusual about women possessing a passion for not cooking. As the Kenyan adage goes, hapa ndiyo digital imetufikisha.

househelps do everything

Why are more women sneering at any suggestion that cooking is primarily the woman’s role in a household? Let’s take care of the obvious. Women work 8am-6pm like every other dude. They get home drained as the next male employee and should not be expected to be playing mke nyumbani to feed an educated husband who should know better.

Besides what are maids for. Women have moved up the corporate ladder, occupying positions of financial power and responsibility, where culinary skills or lack thereof, are inconsequential. Lastly, any man still looking for his mother in a wife learns to scale down his expectations. Things are not what they used to be. Gone are the days when wives used to cook like their mothers. These days they drink like their fathers. Men who were socialised to be waited on by women are visibly struggling with this new gender role play. Particularly those men who describe their wife’s cooking as a tiring culinary experience.

A generation ago, the solution was simple. You sent a message to the in-laws and hinted that all was not well.

tongue-numbing meals

A surrogate wife (read maid) would be sent in quickly to rectify the damage and mend relations before the matters got to the elders. In these digital times, it takes a really confident man to even say, “Do I smell something burning?” Discussing a woman’s cooking skills is a very touchy subject.

There is no easy solution to evading one’s otherwise loving wife’s tongue-numbing meals. The free advice is never helpful. Your boys will tell you to switch to the jipange tariff (be faithful to your options). Your mother recalls the exact words she uttered five years ago when you first brought your wife to the village, “This one doesn’t look like she likes to cook” and how you insisted those were non-issues. “We live in modern times” you said.

In the old days, food represented affection. It was the romantic equivalent of saying, “for the rest of my life, I will feed you”. By partaking that meal every night at home, the man pledged his loyalty by availing the resources needed to sustain the privilege and also show consistent appreciation for his wife’s efforts.

cooking is love made visible

Marriages are not always this tidy but those were the everyday cultural guidelines of gender role play. Nowadays, the roles have been turned on their head, hence the confusion. The fact remains, trying to talk your way out of bad cooking even when it is preceded by good intentions is still unacceptable.

Cooking well does not mean cooking fancy. It means caring about what you are preparing and the people you intend to serve. Which is why many cultures genuinely believe cooking is love made visible. It’s sad that cooking has gone to the dogs. And as they say, we are yet to see the worst because it’s not just about cooking, most so-called modern women are losing basic soft ‘female skills’ such as home making, nurturing children and.keeping a hubby contented.