Help! There's a New Bitch in My Kitchen

Male food snobs are elbowing women out at the stove
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 15, 2009 1:07 PM CST
Help! There's a New Bitch in My Kitchen
Gordon Ramsay of the shows "Cookalong Live," "Hell's Kitchen" and "Kitchen Nightmares," demonstrates how to make a Baked Alaska dessert in Pasadena, Calif., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009.   (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Over the past 40 years, the amount of time men spend in the kitchen has tripled—and they have turned the once-womanly art of home cooking into a competitive playing field. On TV, “it’s hard to keep up with the itinerant rage-aholics cycling through the Food Network,” writes Hanna Rosin for DoubleX, “as the celebrity chef becomes synonymous with testosterone-fueled asshole.” And at home, there's the rise of the kitchen bitch—and let's just say they're not women.

Rosin’s own husband isn't an extreme food snob, but he is prone to nag over vegetables not chopped finely enough or a pan deglazed incorrectly. And though 1950s housewives “would have wept with joy” at the thought of husbands julienning veggies, Rosin found herself missing her “lost dominion over the kitchen.” Nowadays, she’ll hold her baby with one hand and chop vegetables with the other, just to get a chance at the stove—“I have pushed womankind back at least 30 years,” she writes. “But hey, I’m thrilled to have my kitchen back.”
(More housewives stories.)

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