History and Origins

The first post on this site is dated December 7, 2021. I have a note titled I need a cooking/feeding yourself site that says:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443968

No clue what to call it or how to position it

Bites Repast Fast repast Bread in a jam Nutricient Enduring dining

And this is the content of the Hacker News comment linked above and written by me on July 15, 2019:

Yeah, I hear that "4x as much" figure a lot but few people seem to actually charge that. Instead, what actually happens for most people is that (for example) they are covered under their spouse's healthcare policy, so they don't need to cover the cost of benefits.

Historically, a full-time job with benefits was designed to be held by a married man who was worth that kind of compensation because he gave his all at work, went home, collapsed into a chair and said "Woman, get me a beer!" and "What's for dinner?" Then he slept like the dead.

Research shows women with children typically cannot give their all to a job like that. They get stuck in Pink Collar jobs that preserve time and energy for the "second shift" of cooking dinner, doing housework, etc. They need to be able to get up in the middle of the night if their kid is sick and so forth.

People are marrying later, having fewer kids and so on. I routinely see comments online about the downsides to that, for example how it's impossible to work full-time and cook from scratch to feed yourself properly as a single person. Cooking for one is too time consuming and labor intensive. Home cooking makes the most sense when one person is cooking for an entire family. This leaves a lot of people living on takeout and the like, which amounts to overpriced junk food in most cases.

Employers need to get enough value out of the transaction to make their business viable. They can't pay a living wage with benefits out of the goodness of their hearts. And we no longer de facto expect the wife's labor in taking care of her man to be a hidden part of the deal for ensuring that the employer gets enough value out of the deal.

I think these social changes are major driving factors in the gig economy trend. It puts the onus on the worker to figure out how to accomplish enough to pay their bills at a price that makes sense to the employer.

And part of the answer is that supplementing your income with low paid, small tasks using scraps of time that you previously could not have used to try to make money helps that equation make sense for both parties.

This is a site about feeding yourself well in a changing cultural landscape where full-time moms and homemakers are dying out and it's creating all kinds of problems for a high percentage of the population because our food culture is premised on the assumption that every family has a full-time homemaker devoted to the women's work which includes cooking and cleaning and shopping for groceries, all of which are part of this pattern of eating family style meals because there's substantial cleaning involved in having a full service kitchen at home and using it regularly to produce food that supplies adequate nutrition for all members.

People act like they don't know that this assumption that in a nuclear family of three or more members, one will have a well-paid full-time job with benefits and one will have a full-time unpaid job tending to the care of all members of the family is the foundation of heteronormative culture. That includes the way we design jobs AND their pay and benefits.

Our society doesn't work if you don't have an unpaid full-time homemaker in most households being compensated with room and board and being largely treated as a slave with no real rights who is responsible for making sure everyone else's life works.

She didn't merely buy the groceries and prepare the meals and do all clean up required by cooking and eating. She was typically a walking talking encyclopedia of health and nutrition information for the family, such as food allergies in the children and dietary restrictions required by the medical ailments of the primary breadwinner, her older husband.

My mother and other older women I have known had encyclopedic knowledge of what their husbands could and couldn't eat, how much and how often it was okay to make an exception etc. 

When I lived with my parents during my divorce, my dad had Alzheimer's. My dad couldn't positively ID me as his daughter Doreen and would ask me if I had seen Doreen because he had her mail. So you can assume he certainly didn't know what he could and couldn't eat safely for his long list of medical conditions in old age.

This site is part of a larger body of work trying to reimagine society and come up with an idea of what would work given how everything is clearly falling apart currently. 

And it's clear in my mind that it's all falling apart because women are getting jobs and pursuing careers and far fewer women are devoted homemakers than historically.

That's not really "Because of the women's liberation movement." It's not because women got uppity and decided they greedily wanted more out of life.

The first hormonal birth control product was approved by the FDA in 1960. "Coincidentally," the women's liberation movement dates to the 1960s.

The concept of women's liberation -- that we should be allowed to have careers etc -- follows the invention of a more reliable form of birth control. 

The heteronormative patriarchal nuclear family based culture that dominates the entire PLANET only makes sense in the absence of reliable birth control. It's premised on giving women work they can do to be productive, contributing members of society in a subsistence culture that can't afford to feed people who don't work while they were frequently pregnant and breastfeeding and needing to be constantly available to multiple young children because reliable birth control was not available.

We've had condoms a long time. They were mostly viewed as disease prevention and they aren't as effective at preventing pregnancy as hormonal birth control.

Or as a friend of mine told me "I was conceived because the condom was left on the nightstand. They tried to prevent pregnancy with the THOUGHT of a condom."

ALL birth control methods have a defacto actual effectiveness and a hypothetical "If you use it CORRECTLY and CONSISTENTLY." effectiveness. As a teenager looking to get a sex life, I bought a book with data on that in it and some forms of birth control have a shockingly high failure rate.

This piece lists hormonal birth control as the third most effective birth control method available. All methods more effective than the pill require some form of surgery and the most effective method -- sterilization -- isn't reversible. 

So if you want the option to have children later, hormonal birth control is your overall best option. It also has other benefits, such as making periods regular, and its other benefits are so valuable medically speaking the Catholic Church allows women to get the pill if it's deemed medically necessary.

And it's something women control. These are the people who actually get pregnant and typically have vastly less control over their lives than men and, unlike men, cannot easily walk away from an unintended pregnancy and pretend it's not their problem.

But with the invention of reliable birth control, the math behind everything heteronormative culture is based upon stops working. Being a sexually active adult no longer creates approximately one pregnancy per year and you stop needing ALL of a married woman's time to both tend to multiple children and also keep dad working at breakneck speed to pay the bills.

If you only have one or two children, the current model leaves most women with too little to do for most of their lives. So they start looking for ways to fill that time and paid work is the logical desire to replace their dying role as essential workers holding the economy together prior to the era of paid work.

Until maybe 350 years ago, money wasn't reliably and universally available and most people were spending most of their time working to literally put food on the table. Education and clothes making etc. were fitted into the times not required to try to avoid starvation.

I was born in 1965. The societal chaos we are seeing didn't exist at that time. It's a consequence of the invention of reliable hormonal birth control a few years before I was born.

I didn't start this fire. I can't stop it. No one -- except that nut job Elon Musk -- WANTS to go back to everyone having eight or ten kids and struggling to survive at all.

I just think the piecemeal solutions we are seeing are failing to get us what we need because they are piecemeal.