Ladies, heads up: To be 'wifey material', you must know to cook

Methinks ‘wife material’ is euphemism for ‘woman who knows and likes to cook’. The rest of the qualities relationship experts, sexologists, and clueless know-it-alls gossip about in chamas constitute noise, or better yet, hogwash. Forget the ‘men-think-about-sex-all-the-time’ urban legend. Get it from me, men think about food more than they do sex.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Ladies, if you are a joke in the kitchen, my dear, you are toast. Dislike for cooking and lousy cooking have seen women get rejected, jilted in love, beaten and even killed! Some men have killed their wives over food. To men, there is a very thin line between hunger and anger.

Just the other day, a male colleague whined to me for close to one hour about the bad ugali he ate at a five star-hotel. He claimed the sukuma wiki and fatty chicken wings on his plate had set his taste buds on fire. But unfortunately, when he dug into the ugali, hoping to cut a sizable chunk, knead it into a bolus, scoop the fatty sukuma wiki and shovel it into his mouth, the piece of ugali shattered into debris, leaving him cursing in agony. You should have seen his face as he narrated this. He said he was so worked up that, were this a banana republic where people get away with murder, he would have shot the chef dead had he had a gun.

Over Christmas last year, news that a man in Kakamega had killed his wife because she served him beef stew instead of chicken sent tongues wagging. Men the world over are known to be overly sensitive about food.

Take, for instance, in Florida, US. One Desmond Brownlee, not long ago strangled his wife because she ate his fried chicken leftovers without his permission. She ate his chicken and when the sulky man, in a fit of self righteous rage, decided to cook more chicken, she taunted and criticised his cooking style.

Still in the US, in Kentucky, one lunatic by the name Stanley Neace was recently so pissed off with how badly his wife had prepared his breakfast eggs that he killed her, a step daughter and three other neighbours. It was reported that the miscreant went on rampage with a short gun, and in his pyjamas, chased around his wife and shot her and their neighbours whose house she had run to hide. He then killed himself.

And in India, a scoundrel by the name Kamlya Waghmare killed his wife for refusing to cook lunch. Waghmare killed her following a tiff they had earlier. A tiff that had seen her go on strike, consequently ‘withdrawing labour’, which included, among others, cooking. Still in the same country, a man recently killed his wife when he found out that the vegetables she served him did not have tomatoes. He slammed her head against the wall!

In Pakistan, a husband by the name Noor Hussain cancelled his wife’s Christmas for cooking the wrong dinner. She cooked lentils (minji) instead of goat stew, which he was craving. He caned her to death. What I’m trying to say is, there is a special bond between men and food.