She sets up the act of cooking to be a simple activity that is expected of women, and can be relatively simple to complete. Then she shows the other side of cooking as this wonderful art and creative act where people are creating wonderful things from ordinary objects, showing that the perception of every day activities is not always true.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
The art of cooking
The thing that I most took away from the piece that Giard wrote was the way that she described the act of cooking. She took an activity that many see as mundane and just another every day ritual, and used elegant phrases to describe it as the skillful act that it can be. Phrases like "...the vocation of cooking and manipulating ordinary things make one use intelligence, a subtle intelligence full of nuances and and stokes of genius..."(322) and "These are multifaceted activities that people consider very simple or even a little stupid, except in the rare cases where they are carried out with a certain degree of excellence, with extreme refinement."(322).
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Joey,
ReplyDeleteI agree that Giard used elevated language to decribe the act of cooking, however she goes on to suggest that this "subtle intelligence full of nuances" is simply "ordinary intelligence", ultimately downplaying a woman's needed skill or knowledge in order to perform cooking (322).
And when she elaborates on the "extreme refinement" of cooking, as in the case of tops chefs, she reinforces gender inequalities by making it clear that these chefs always seem to be men. Somehow men are celebrated for learning the art of cooking in ways that women are not. For women, knowing how to cook is considered a societal expectation and is seen as simply "ordinary intelligence" and nothing more (322).
I agree with you on this. Giard is quite enjoying cooking and that's why she use some beautiful words to describe how wonderful cooking can be. But in reality cooking really is merely an simple act repeated for women every day.
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