HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 92

women's rights. In practice, though, she realized that renewed emphasis on women's place in the kit-
chen smacked of old-fashioned patriarchy and ran the risk of creating yet another burden women must
bear.
Carol Flinders, coauthor of the popular Laurel's Kitchen , for her part, understood this tension but
didn't appear worried. For Flinders, kitchens were women's “most effective front for social change.”
“I'm not saying that women shouldn't take jobs,” she claimed in the introduction to Laurel's Kitchen ,
just that the place “where [women's] efforts will count the most is not in business or professions … but
in the home and community.” 29 These were “the most effective front[s] for social change.” But the fact
that Flinders didn't apply the same logic to men was telling: for Flinders, women, not men, made social
change from the kitchen outward because women were naturally and innately positioned to make the
world whole through caring labor. 30 In Laurel's Kitchen bread making exemplified a feminine ethic of
care, and learning to make bread served as a, if not the , crucial rite of passage into that ideal. Reconnect-
ing with women's innate goodness and transformative potential required reconnecting with the innate
goodness of whole grain, something that had been lost when machines began making bread.
At the same time, Flinders clearly saw how closely her feminine ideal allied her with generations of
constrictive patriarchic tradition. Her solution to this conundrum was to imagine a bygone era of em-
powered domesticity that could be revived in the modern world. Laurel's Kitchen unfolds around the
character of Flinders's coauthor Laurel Robertson, a friend with “natural wisdom” who dedicated her-
self single-mindedly to caring for her hearth and family. Robertson epitomized Flinders's feminine ideal.
She was a woman who didn't betray her innate value as a mother or true place in the political life of her
community by seeking a place in men's unnatural, externally focused world.
It would have been hard to read Laurel's Kitchen as anything but conservative, written as it was in
the era of Gloria Steinem, Equal Rights Amendment battles, expanding definitions of family, and the
first sparks of the gay rights movement. And yet Flinders's picture of the content, hearth-centered life
available to women was so beautifully drawn, so sensual and full of love, that it couldn't help but ap-
peal, even to many feminists.
Thirty years later, the same tension still haunts the alternative food movement. In 2010, New York
Times columnist Peggy Orenstein identified the newest incarnation of this recurring conundrum as “the
femivore's dilemma.” Femivores, she observed, were “highly educated women who left the workforce
to care for kith and kin,” and then carved out a space of meaning and agency in the home by devoting
themselves to politically conscious food provision. In this way, femivores redefined “traditional” do-
mestic labor—cooking from scratch, canning, gardening, raising chickens, and even shopping—as an
arena of “self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment”—the very principles that, according to
Orenstein, had led women to the workforce in the first place. 31
Orenstein's article sparked a predictable debate. Many critics focused on a contradiction that even
Orenstein acknowledged: the “tomato-canning feminists' ” realm of self-sufficiency and autonomy as-
sumed an income-earning spouse somewhere just outside the picture frame. How could “autonomy” be
premised on financial dependence? As Orenstein wrote, “If a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken
wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage.” 32 Other critics dug into the more hidden assump-
tions of Orenstein's piece: while feminists might disagree on whether femivore life was a cage or not, it
was most definitely gilded. To suffer the femivore's dilemma one must be relatively affluent. Like “the
omnivore's dilemma,” the femivore's dilemma emerges out of the highly privileged position of having
almost limitless life options, something that most women—and men—in contemporary America don't
experience.