Commentary
There is a version of my life that could have existed, and for a long time it looked like the path I was on. I was a successful restaurateur, financially independent, living a neat and polished life that most people would label as accomplishment. I could have stayed that woman. A single woman with a couple of well-trained pets, a beautiful home in a gated golf-course community, and a thriving business. No obligations, no interruptions, and no sticky hands tugging my shirt while I tried to answer an email.
Society would have applauded that version of me and called it freedom.
The irony is that during that time, I was feeding thousands of people from-scratch food. I knew the value of real ingredients and traditional cooking techniques, yet I did not fully understand the deeper meaning of nourishment. Not just physical nourishment, but the cultural and generational work that happens when families cook and eat together. The work that forms identity.
Today my life looks very different. I have four children and a farm, and nothing about our life is quiet or controlled. Just yesterday my 10-year-old stood next to me making jam from blueberries and blackberries, and then we bottled homemade barbecue sauce. The younger kids ran barefoot around us, coming in and out of the kitchen like little barn swallows, leaving laughter, questions, and a trail of crumbs behind. It was chaotic, imperfect, and slow. Yet in the middle of the noise, I could feel something ancient. Something right.
Moments like that used to be normal. Today they are the exception, and that realization has been stirring something in me. It raises a difficult question that many people avoid because the answer is uncomfortable.
What changed? How did feeding our families become optional, inconvenient, or even burdensome? How did basic human skills become rare?
The more I look back, the more I land on a conclusion that people do not like to talk about. Women leaving the home during the era of second-wave feminism may be one of the primary root causes of America’s health crisis. And not only our health crisis, but a long list of problems I will not unravel in this article.
Before anyone gets upset, let me be clear. First-wave feminism was necessary. The right to vote, to own property, to have legal protection, and to make choices about our lives was essential. That was justice.
Second-wave feminism was different. It did not simply push for equal opportunity. It rewired the meaning of womanhood itself. Women were told that motherhood was optional, that homemaking was oppressive, and that feeding and caring for a family was beneath their potential. The message was that value existed outside the home, not within it.
And then came the promise that every little girl in my generation absorbed whether anyone said it out loud or not: You can have it all.
I often talk about the many little lies we are required to accept in order to function in modern life. But this particular lie is not little. It is enormous. We not only tell it to ourselves, we enforce it on other women. We applaud exhaustion and call it achievement. We normalize overwhelm and call it balance. We pretend the cost is invisible.
The truth is that the consequences are not just carried by women trying to be all things to all people. The consequences have spread across society. We are under-nurtured and under-fed, not only emotionally, but physically. A generation is growing up without real food, without family rhythm, and without the biological and cultural memory that cooking and eating together used to provide.
At the very same time women were being told their value was outside the home, industrial food companies were searching for their next market. After World War II, food manufacturing infrastructure was already in place for wartime rations. When the war ended, corporations needed somewhere to send those products. Working women were the perfect solution.
Convenience food was framed as freedom. Formula was sold as science. Frozen dinners were marketed as progress. Cooking was recast as outdated, unnecessary, or even foolish for any woman who wanted to be taken seriously.
Somewhere in a conference room someone figured out the psychology. If women could be convinced that preparing food for their families was a waste of potential, processed food would become the new normal.
And here we stand two generations later, staring at the consequences. Childhood chronic illness is now expected. Allergies and autoimmune disorders have exploded. People do not know how to cook simple meals. Children do not know where food comes from. And our dependence on corporations to feed us has become so normalized that most people don’t even recognize it as dependency.
We did not just lose nutrition. We lost connection, ritual, rhythm, identity, and agency.
I do not say any of this from a place of perfection. I am still the main financial provider for my family. Many of our meals come from the farm restaurant rather than my home kitchen. We rarely sit down at the same time to eat. I am still unwinding my own conditioning.
But even in the imperfection, I know the solution is not to shame women or to rewind history. The solution is to recognize what was lost and restore what matters. Even small steps matter. Grow something. Cook one real meal a week. Let children stir the pot, even if the mess slows everything down. Choose food from a person instead of a factory. Sit down together, even if it is only once in a while.
Because feeding the people we love has never been insignificant. It has always been one of the most important responsibilities of a family, a culture, and a society.
Perhaps the newest form of liberation is not escaping the work of the home, but reclaiming its meaning.
