FOOD MATTER: To cook or not

"...Again I learnt how to cook during the Biafran War while at home in a village with no electricity, no running water and no gas cookers. Making garri meant harvesting, peeling, grating, drying and frying the cassava and that applied to yam, corn and palm oil..." Amma Ogan

It was rumoured of Margaret Thatcher that after ruling over Lords and Commons during the day, she went home and cooked and washed her dishes. The rumour earned her just that extra degree of awe, and the presumption of a dignified super-competence. The imagery was culturally consoling; a woman who understood her place, made nobler by the fact that this was the prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Men could perhaps forgive her tight-lipped overbearing rule of them in the workplace as long as she went home and washed dishes.

There are of course those who cook to earn money. In 2009, if one wakes up early enough and wanders not too far out of one's house, one will see women, precariously arranging the setting for the preparation of selling food on the roadside. No electricity, no running water, no gas cookers, but in a few hours, at about 6 or 7 am, people will start to occupy wooden benches around the cooking pot, for a quick bowl of rice and stew, or a plate of beans; breakfast on the hoof.

There is nothing easy or fun about this vocation or Ms. Ogan's portrayal of cooking during the Biafran war (there is in fact something tragic about women cooking under these same conditions thirty years later in peace-time). It is back breaking, relentless, posturally inconvenient work. It is charcoal smoke in the eyes, calloused burnt hands and no thanks given work. It is literal chains to the allegorical sink...what some women would give for a glorious sink!

When women tell me they hate to cook, I don't scoff because I understand. If one cooks day in day out, the likelihood is that one is probably not very glamorously sweating over the hob. One's nails are probably not French manicured. One probably smells a little of food all the time instead of Coco Chanel's Chance. One might be just a little overweight. One might be sporting a piece of smelly garlic in one's hair. But there are also the unfair connotations that outsiders ascribe to one. If you are cooking all the time, by simple deduction, "you can't also be interested in a serious career" You can't also be that type of elevated housewife who gets a fat allowance and spends all day at the spa. You are the worst sort of housewife, the lowest rung of doormathood in a bou-bou waddling about the house; a functional androgynous robot.

I know many women who stuff their children with Indomie noodles when their ₦60,000 a month cook steward takes his day-off, and order pizzas and Chicken Republic for lunch and dinner. They work long hours in an office and come home justifiably exhausted. They don't have Margaret Thatcher's resilience. They don't live in Margaret Thatcher's country of many conveniences. And anyway, that myth of men's unfailing sexual devotion to frumpy women who can cook food that can wake the dead...has died.

Better to be drop dead gorgeous and successful at one's career than renowned in the backwater of one's kitchen and home. Better the accolades of one's peers than the demanding unacknowledged integrity of home-cooked meals.

These women are of course a very minute percentage of Nigerians.

That aside, the decision to cook or not to cook has become particularly pertinent because mothers are being urged back into the kitchen to cook for their families, to care whether what goes into a three year old's mouth will keep him healthy for the remaining 67 years; if it will affect his cognitive skills or his neurological developmentor whether or not he will have cancer by the time he is 10. No guesses why mothers are not responding with enthusiasm.

Where my husband comes from, men are not allowed any functionality in the kitchen. It demeans their status as "men", and it is a woman's duty to cook for her husband...daily, or at least to proactively oversee his meals. Women in Cross River state cook for long hours every day, and many are so used to doing it, there is no question of complaining. It is a way of life. That is what Amma's picture brings to mind; no day-offs or time off, or petulant choice in the necessity of nurturing other people.

There is the daily monotonous rotundity of it, the unglamorous self-effacing nature of the role and the consequent invisibility of the person performing it. .I love to cook but I am also with the rebellious on this one; with those who would like a little appreciation for how hard it is to put a pot on a fire and produce something edible every day...Sometimes when Rachmaninoff is not playing on my iPod, I won't cook. So there! Anyone who does not like it can go and suck on a lemon.