It seems to me you can’t go more than five minutes with the TV set this year without seeing somebody eat something absolutely awful. Or somebody, usually a woman, getting ready to serve something to eat that is absolutely awful. I wonder if we have passed through some kind of cultural watershed here.
The big thing on television used to be headache. Every five minutes they would stop the entertainment, and on would come somebody with a headache, and then—bingo!—the headache would be miraculously cured. For twenty years at least, headache was the king of television.
I haven’t clocked a typical evening on the tube this year, but my impression—and with television, impressions are all that count—my impression is that the preparation and eating of absolutely awful food is beating headache by at least two to one. Not surprisingly, upset stomach and indigestion are also doing very well. My observations suggest that indigestion is neck-and-neck with headache while upset stomach is closing fast on hard-to-remove stains, in terms of time on tube.
I said that the food on television was absolutely awful, and that’s not fair, of course, because I haven’t eaten any of it, and don’t plan to as long as I have the strength to resist force-feeding. The point is that the idea of this TV food—the concept—is absolutely awful. Food should be grown, but this food being sold on the tube has not been grown; it has been manufactured.
It is hard to understand the men who eat this food, because they are always smiling after the first mouthful, or nuzzling their wives after finishing the thing off. There is one mildly rebellious male who, upon being served some factory-made chicken, asks whatever happened to real chicken.
He is quickly put in his place by chortling harridans who tell him the factory chicken is not only better than real chicken, but also much easier to cook. There are threatening overtones to this encounter which are reminiscent of Strindberg’s man-woman hate scenes, but the male turns out to be a sniveler. He eats the phony chicken happily instead of throwing it at the television camera and announcing that he will get some real chicken and cook it himself.
What the feminists call sexism is superficially preserved in all these commercials, since they always cast the woman in the cook’s role and make the husband the breadwinner home from his labor to play stern judge of the wife’s cooking. This is only superficial, however. What is really going on here is something much trickier.
The point about this television food is that it requires no skill, little time and not much work to put it on the table. A typical teledrama, for instance, concerns two wives unboxing a spaghetti dinner. Both dinners come in boxes. Wife One opens her box and finds nothing but spaghetti. She is in trouble because she will have to add meat. Not Wife Two. Her spaghetti dinner (the sponsor’s, naturally) comes with meat boxed in. Everything in one box.
She nips off camera for a second and—presto!—reappears with a steaming spaghetti dinner with meat. Wife One looks surly and defeated, and with good reason, for she will now have to go to the food locker and open another box—of factory-made hamburger, perhaps. Wife Two had to open only one box to make dinner. Poor Wife One has suffered the drudgery of opening two.
So while the commercials seem to cast women in the cook’s role, in fact they do not. How can the women be cooks when there is no cooking going on?
Most of what passes for cooking with this television food is nothing but opening, thawing and heating. The real message of the factory-food commercials is not that woman’s place is in the kitchen. It is that if a woman has a benighted husband who believes such archaic claptrap, she can fake the cooking effortlessly, thanks to factory-made food, have idle hours in which to do as she pleases and then reduce the poor dolt to eye-rolling delight in her skill in opening a box.
Can any woman long be happy with such a man? Not likely.
These food commercials could bring back the headache.