My husband, Chris, has a saying; or, rather, I think he has an amalgam of aphorisms garnered from working in software: What can be measured gets optimized, and costs shift to the things that are hardest to measure. This came up last night, as I was making dinner and he was in the kitchen helping to prep some cardoons, and we were talking, as one does, about The Online Discourse. We often are talking about that, because we are sort of Online People, but specifically this time we were discussing the online discourse about invisible labor in the home and a question one Very Online Man asked, “what invisible labor do men do in the home?”1
Chris mentioned to me that at his job, he has been working on a project that had a lot of hidden aspects, a lot of unknown unknowns going in, and it’s been frustrating him how long it’s taken to finish, as he’s encountered new and unexpected problems. Even when these problems are not themselves hard problems, there have just been a lot of them and it has been difficult to make noticeable progress, some feeling that he’s not been doing anything measurable or visible, things that his team can see and understand and appreciate. His manager encouraged him to explain some of this at a meeting, to make his invisible labor visible to his team.
Invisible labor can occur in any job, but the topic comes up a lot in The Online Discourse with reference to the work that wives and mothers do that goes unnoticed. One thing that makes it hard to talk about is that talking about it, in any terms, is always seen as a complaint. My husband can be encouraged by his supervisor to make his invisible work visible by talking about it, but it’s a bit touch and go if your job is primarily being a wife and mother. Are you ungrateful for your children, for your husband, for your beautiful house and life? Aren’t you worried your children will feel unloved because you joked that if you died tomorrow, no one would ever fill the hand soap dispensers again and the town might succumb to a cholera epidemic?
It’s extra touchy for me talking about it, because when Chris and I met, it was in the context that I was asking him to co-author my next book with me. Then the startup he was working for ran out of funding so he was “funemployed” and I said, well, hey let’s start a business together, and we did. I already had two kids that I was homeschooling full-time, so I was overwhelmingly busy, but our business was a going concern for several years before I wanted to quit. Because our relationship started off as a work relationship, I have had some feelings about quitting to be, well, mostly a wife and mother, albeit one who is working on another book — finally one that isn’t about computer programming!
I was worried that it would cause a lot of friction in our relationship, from having less shared purpose (that turned out not to be the case, although we did have to redefine to some extent what that shared purpose was) and I was worried he wouldn’t respect me the way he once had. And I do think we went through that for a little while, because it turned out that he didn’t really understand what all else I was doing and continue to do. I was doing a lot of invisible labor, and for a while every attempt I made to make it visible, to explain its purposes, made Chris feel like he was under some kind of attack. My complaint, though, was never that he doesn’t do enough (he does) or that I am unhappy with my lot in my life (I’m not). But you can’t appreciate work you don’t see or understand, and you can’t appreciate or perhaps respect a person when you don’t have any idea what they are doing and why it is important.
It’s a bit funny that he didn’t notice, because when we were both working at our business full-time (although he was working more hours at that than I was most of the time, because of the children), he was doing the best he could to split household work (except the children) equitably with me. He was trying really hard not to let it all fall on my shoulders. And meal planning was one of the things that we used to do together, that he hated and gradually stopped doing with me, so then it fell to me.
I’ve said before that Chris doesn’t care about food the way I do, so that was part of why he disliked this chore. But also, before we met, he’d been living that bachelor life for several years. He did often cook for himself, but he tended to cook the same thing all the time. When you live alone and only have yourself to feed, and especially when you have a lot of other things going on, meal planning isn’t really a chore. You might cook often, but it’s not a big deal to go out or to cook the same meal repeatedly for however many days or to eat leftover chili for a week or whatever or to let yourself be hungry because there was only a carton of yogurt and you don’t feel like cooking or going out. So the whole idea of meal planning was new to him, and I think for a while it seemed unnecessary.
Well. Is it necessary?2
If you have to cook for more than yourself, then the answer is always yes. You have to plan what to cook, whether you do it a week in advance or a month in advance or you do it on the fly when you walk into the kitchen at 5:00 p.m. to start cooking. At the very least, the questions that have to be considered are
What foods do we have? Do any of them have to be used up immediately or sooner than others?
If I want to make X, do I have all the ingredients I need?
Does everyone like X?
If there are babies in the household, can they eat any portion of it or will they eat something different? Is anyone coming to dinner who maybe can’t eat X?
Will X by itself be enough food for the number of people I have to feed tonight?
If not, what can I make to go with it?
If there will be leftovers, is X still tasty as leftovers and will the people in our house eat it that way?
Logistically, can these things be worked into a meal that we all sit down to eat at the same time? If you live alone and you make yourself a sandwich and eat it and then find that you’re still hungry, you can decide to go make something else or not or grab some chips or whatever; with a family, that logistical question is harder, because often you cannot go grab something else after you realize what you made wasn’t enough. At least, not with kids.3
These questions are purely practical — making sure everyone has enough to eat and trying to minimize food waste; there are many more questions that can be added regarding what you’d really like to cook or eat (or really not like to cook or eat), questions of nutrition, questions of ethics. There are entire books written, blogs, meal planning services, strategies like weekend meal prep or freezer meals, to help with this process. For me, and I think for most people who do this work, it’s harder to do the planning work at 5:00 p.m. after you’ve had a long day at the office or with children or what have you than it is to do it in advance, although it can also be hard to make the time to do it in advance. It’s also easier if you have some set of ingredients you always keep on hand, and some set of meals that your family likes that you can make as often as need be.
While Chris and I used to sit down on Sundays and plan out what we were going to make for dinners during the week, I have not kept up the habit. I have a set of about ten meals that we always like and that I always have the ingredients for. Part of the reason I buy things in bulk and store them in the basement and freezers is so that can be true: I can always make spaghetti or pizza or tacos or gyudon or eggs in purgatory or one of our favorite hearty soups. No one will ever complain about eating those things, and I already know they make enough for a meal for four, and that if we have leftovers, they will get eaten. I have pickles and frozen vegetables that complement those meals stored up as well — indeed, I choose which pickles and vegetables to store based on what meals I know we will eat — and for the most part, these dishes use up the ingredients that we have stored, including the types of meat that we have on hand from our bulk meat purchases. Once or twice a week, I decide to make something different, and maybe once every two weeks, I go nuts and make something more elaborate and unusual.
Often, now, my meal planning labor is reduced to a decision about which of these things, from this list of things I can always make, that I’m making tonight. Most of the labor involved is truly invisible: the real work was discovering (and remembering) over many years which meals reliably make food we like, enough food, and decent leftovers; it was figuring out how to shop in a way that doesn’t drive me crazy and fits with my ethical commitments; it was buying those ingredients ahead of time and storing them properly; it is monitoring the squashes to see if any need to be used up faster than the others, and so forth. It is remembering that my sons are teens now and not toddlers, so the quantity they eat is much more but also much more reliable. It’s not not work — and if you think it’s not, then I urge you to try it for a while and see — but it also can be made easier through routines and predictability. For example, one change we made last year to our squash storage is that we only bought three kinds of squash: butternut, kabocha, and spaghetti squash. I used to buy all the pretty squashes I could find, because they’re so lovely, but it’s so much easier to keep track of how the squashes are doing when there are only the three types.4
When you start thinking about the less immediately practical aspects of meal planning, though, coming up with answers is often harder: how to balance the nutritional needs of the family over the day,5 and how to balance what we want to eat with ethical questions about how we should eat. And I do think about these things. A lot. For me, food is the cornerstone of basically everything; it is the key to my entire philosophy of life, really. Food is about our stewardship of the land and our continued flourishing on earth; food is about our relationships with people, with our families around the table, but also with our larger communities; food is about health, both physical and mental, and it is also about joy.
Chris is a guy who once bought Soylent with some of his Bitcoin (and then didn’t drink it, prompting me to joke that he was now using expired Soylent as a store of value). He didn’t really have a philosophy of food; he just ate, as one does. I used to be, too, and one thing that helps me make myself and my philosophy comprehensible to Chris is that I had to make myself this way, too.
He did notice that he often didn’t feel really satisfied with what he ate. He would cook, and it would taste, well, fine. But he would still want to nibble on things all the time, only rarely feeling really satiated, and he didn’t know why. Over the past year or so he’s been trying to understand why I care so much about the food, and — respect to him — he’s learned a lot.6 He’s learned that when I plan a meal, I am considering those immediately practical questions but also questions of nutrition and ethics. I am thinking about the different flavors and textures that foods have: salty, spicy, crunchy, comfortingly soft, acidic, bitter, sweet. The most satisfying meals are ones in which you get some balance of different tastes and textures. He never used to understand when I’d be trying to think of what to cook with something else why I would reject certain suggestions as “not going with” each other, because that’s a vague statement; maybe it would mean too many soft, squishy foods at one meal, and we need to add something with crunch, or it might mean the spice profiles don’t complement each other, or that the overall meal would be too sweet (a big problem with winter vegetables, to be honest).
The strange thing is that creating that balance of flavors and textures typically creates the feeling of satiety because it ends up representing nutritional density and completeness even if that isn’t your explicit goal. Salt, heat, fermentation, acids, spices, fats, raw foods (e.g., in salads) contribute different flavors to a meal and make things taste good, but the chemical reactions among these things also adds nutrients and makes nutrients more available to us. A well-planned menu, therefore, is a crucial step in making us healthier and more satisfied.
Good cooking is about much more than whether a particular dish tastes good: it’s about working complementary flavors and textures into a meal to produce that feeling of being satiated and extending that feeling out over the course of day and the course of a week and the course of a lifetime. Knowing how to cook involves much more knowledge than knowing how to follow a recipe. Managing a household involves at least as much knowledge and effort as managing a small business — much more, in my experience.
It’s not really worth linking to, because the discussion is as dumb as you would guess it is. He doesn’t believe “meal planning” is labor at all, invisible or otherwise, and most of the comments are from men who think “mowing the lawn” or “going to work” is “invisible.” Anyway, the obvious (and mostly true, though inflammatory) answer to this question is probably “none.” Men do no invisible labor around the house, because you tend to optimize what can be measured and, because most men are working for pay outside the home (mentally, if not physically), their time tends to be very measurable. You tend to know exactly what their time is worth, how many hours they have at home, etc, and so couples tend to optimize it, shifting costs to where they are hardest to measure, typically the wife’s “more flexible” schedule. That isn’t the same thing as saying men don’t do any labor around the house; obviously, most married men do, it’s just not the kind of daily invisible labor the wives are doing. Men are doing invisible labor at their jobs, and perhaps so are employed women, as the story illustrates.
Seriously, let’s consider the question because one thing that comes up a lot in these discussions about invisible domestic labor is this notion that women are doing labor they don’t need to be doing — according to the men who aren’t doing it, at least.
All of this meal planning talk is really about planning when you have kids. When the kids are at their grandma’s house, for example, even though there are still half of us at home, by the numbers, we eat less than half the food we eat when the kids are home, and we’re much more flexible about how many times per day we eat, how late or early we eat, and so on.
We do still end up with a few outliers — a Hubbard here, a couple of acorns and delicata there — from the CSA and so forth, and we also buy a few pie pumpkins each year for, y’know, pie. I typically process the pie pumpkins in one go and freeze the puree until I need it, though, as they don’t seem to last very well in the basement.
A piece of wisdom from MFK Fisher: Balance the day, not each meal in the day. No one needs to be trying to represent every food group and every mineral at each meal. Often it just leads you to eat too much and may not even lead to the best nutrition anyway. With my children, I’ve always had them eat calcium-rich breakfasts (milk and yogurt) because calcium can interfere with iron absorption; we eat iron-rich meals later in the day. This gives us a balanced day, not every meal balanced between these two important nutrients.
It’s worth saying that he’s bothered to learn about it because he knows it’s important to me, and by paying attention to what’s important to me, he’s discovered that there was so much more to know and consider here than he’d ever realized before. I think in order to understand that, he had to first get over the idea that this was a complaint on my part, rather than me giving him an opportunity to understand me.