| | | My high school chemistry teacher really liked to talk about things that weren't chemistry, like how we should all major in STEM fields when we got to college or else risk being failures for the rest of our lives; the fact that things had gotten "so politically correct lately"; and, most important, how much he loved drinking beer and watching NASCAR in his garage, which was the one spot in his house where he felt like he could really be a man. I had mostly forgotten about this (and every single thing I actually learned about chemistry, except that there are ionic bonds and covalent bonds) until I read Kaitlyn Tiffany's piece this week on the rise and fall of the man cave — rooms where men can do manly things like watch football and drink beer and be men. It turns out that the man cave, much like literally everything else, was invented so we would buy stuff. It also turns out that most man caves aren't tastefully decorated oases; they're actually pretty sad. One of the caves Kaitlyn wrote about featured a bar made of "two garbage cans flipped over and a piece of plywood on top of them." All of which, honestly, made me a little sad for my high school chemistry teacher and his NASCAR den. —Gaby Del Valle, reporter for The Goods | | | |
| My dad's man cave was built in 2009 and hosted, I think, three poker nights before it hosted my 16th birthday party, necessitating the removal of all the alcohol, including the beer tap. It's in the barn next to our house and quite stylish! Rough-cut wood paneling he put up himself and a poker table with glam dark-red felt. It is also covered with cobwebs and full of deflated soccer balls, as well as whatever else my sisters and I threw in there to avoid having to put it in a place that made sense. A favorite comment among people who have nothing interesting to say to my dad is, "Four girls?! I'd say you're outnumbered!" Then his mom moved in with us, and they were like, "Another girl?!" (She's 91.) I guess maybe this is why he felt like he ought to build a man cave — to have something to say that would quell everyone's utter panic about the hormonal terrorism he was experiencing every single day. But as it turned out, he loves us, so he doesn't need it and doesn't use it. We are all really cool and fun to hang out with, especially now that some of us are old enough to drink. Anyway, my dad is not alone. Man caves boomed in mid- to late aughts, one of those strange suburban spaces that everyone has a glancing familiarity with even if they've never been inside one. They were in Super Bowl commercials and sitcoms and The Sopranos, and they were all pretty much the same idea: Rooms that were shrines to television, sports, guitars, semi-nude women, and microwavable finger foods. Rooms full of rude or depressing signs that say things like "Beer: because your friends just aren't that interesting!" or "Beer: helping ugly people have sex since 1862!" Beer: it's what's for dinner! But is it still? And are man caves still the best and only place for a heterosexual man to get away from his many women? |
| There is a crisis in American kitchens. But what exactly that crisis is depends on whom you ask. If you turn to food media, the problem is we aren't cooking enough. Everyone eats takeout. Kids are eating junk. But there are solutions, food pundits say. "Don't eat anything your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," advises Michael Pollan. It's easier than ever to cook and eat well, with our modern refrigerators and our modern plumbing and our modern stoves, argues farmer and author Joel Salatin, and if, with all those advantages, we still can't cook and eat right, then we deserve what we get. The message is, yes, there's a problem, but we can fix it, which is to say, you can fix it. You just have to try harder, shop smarter, cook better. But sociologists Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott say it's not that simple. In their new book, Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It, they make the case that "the solutions to our collective cooking pressures won't be found in individual kitchens." Over the course of five years, the authors interviewed more than 150 low- and middle-income mothers and a handful of grandmothers, in and around Raleigh, North Carolina, all primary caregivers of young children. Ultimately, they focused on nine. It's not that foodie doctrine is wrong, exactly — home-cooked meals are great, we should eat more vegetables, it is nice when families eat together — but rather that the prescriptions of (mostly white, mostly male) public food intellectuals stop making sense when confronted with real life. The mothers and grandmothers in the book do take food seriously. Across income levels, they care about how they feed their families, and across income levels, they feel like they're failing. Which they are, in a way, because the task is impossible. A societal problem requires a societal fix. I called Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott to discuss how we got here, what we can do about it, and why "getting back to the kitchen" isn't the answer. |
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