Sometimes I Want to be a Housewife

A couple of weeks ago, I bought Bringing it to the Table, an anthology of essays about farming and food by Wendell Berry. After studying the cover of the book (above) for a few minutes, I thought, This image would have probably offended me at one time. The antiquated picture depicts a woman in an ankle-length dress and apron coming from the kitchen to serve a table of men in overalls. Why was it that the women had to serve the men? is what the defensive feminist inside me, typically subdued, would have sneered.

In a way, such a comment wouldn't be out of character. In the memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author/farmer Barbara Kingsolver empathizes with today's generation of independent women who, after years of fighting to get out of the kitchen and into the workplace, would loathe day after day of nothing but housework.

But just a few months of farming has illuminated the reality of common life before grocery stores, a reality that actually makes this image, for me, somewhat idyllic.

My love for cooking brought me to the farm. I used to feel stifled in the kitchen because I didn't have this or enough of that when I was trying to follow a recipe, but on the farm, I have plenty of almost any vegetable or herb I could want. What I don't have enough of now is time or energy. Cook? After nine or even ten hours of physical labor? Start making dinner right after work, eat at 8:00, then go to bed? Meh. For the first couple of months at the farm, I favored peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or even pre-made cans of soup over energy-intensive fresh vegetables. Even Jen, the partner of our farm's owner and a professional chef, told me, "Yeah, Anton and I use so little of what we grow on the farm. It's ridiculous."

I often fantasize about Dylan leaving for the fields in the morning while I stay at home, set for a day of cooking hearty and healthy dinners or staging food for winter (preserving summer's bounty definitely has not found a spot in the weekly routine). I would have time to play with recipes and make everything--butter, yogurt, pasta and bread even--from scratch. I would let little of the produce left over from market go to waste and can, freeze, or dry as much as possible. I find myself romanticizing the housewives-in-aprons, who undoubtedly filled a crucial role in days past.

One of the paradoxes of the modern small farm is that it is not nearly profitable enough to allow time for kitchen work. I'm sure some small farm families manage the old-fashioned style of living in which the husband farms while the wife does housework, but they probably constitute a tiny minority of an already minute percentage of small family farms. The more common scenario rather: Both partners toil in the fields all day to produce enough for market or one partner has a job off the farm, leaving the house empty for the day. Perhaps there's enough time for a quick dinner, but quick food often partially relies on store-bought food.

Surely, this isn't the worst aspect of modernity known to the world, and I'm hesitant to excessively sentimentalize traditional ways of living. But part of me wishes that I didn't have to feel grateful for the existence of grocery stores.