Why Food Is so Entwined With Ideas of Female Worth and Perfection

Or why I was so upset that I ruined dinner last weekend

Bland.

That was one word for it. Watery. That’s another.

I’d cooked an old favourite; baked orzo pasta with leeks, feta, lemon and rosemary. One of those dishes that is usually more than the sum of its parts. Simple but in the best way possible.

That night, it was worse than the sum of its parts.

I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but I threw a small fit. I refused to eat it (later reneging when hunger got the better of me). I was angry. I thought I’d ruined the evening.

But it was just one badly cooked dinner. It was just one ordinary Sunday night, the only plans being TV and bed. And the leeks, whilst undercooked, were hardly going to kill me. The same went for the overcooked pasta.

Some might shrug this off as just one of those things. Why couldn’t I?

To answer that, you have to talk about the thousands of women who came before me, down my bloodline and into my small kitchen.

Most importantly, you have to understand how gender roles still play out in the kitchen. How they have taught me — and millions of other women — that my worth is bound to the kitchen. How trying to be a perfect domestic goddess dogged my formative adult years.

And you’ll see I’m not alone in feeling like this. Food and female identity often go hand in hand, whether we consider ourselves “foodies” or not.

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It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that women still take on the bulk of cooking in heterosexual relationships — around twice the amount. Whilst the gap was narrowing by the late 2010s, evidence suggests it is widening again.

“Women belong in the kitchen” is such a well-known phrase that in 2021, Burger King used it to promote a cooking scholarship for female employees — on International Women’s Day, no less.

The campaign did not go down well. But it does show how deeply linked female identity and food can be.

And they have been linked for generations. Think about the Italian nonna stereotype — the benevolent woman spending her life cooking for her family. Think about personal essay after personal essay out there, waxing lyrical about mothers and grandmothers cooking in childhood kitchens. Women whose identities are intrinsically linked to how they act in that domestic space.

It’s not just the online discourse. According to Sherrie A. Inness, author of Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture, both literature and media’s portrayal of women in the kitchen has its part to play too:

Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture, takes us on a gastronomical journey exploring the ideas related to representation of women and cooking in the American society. The book argues that popular culinary literature provided a recipe for women’s and men’s behavior. She also sheds light on the representation of women through media, which casts doubts on a woman’s femininity if she is not interested in cooking or cooking related tasks.

It’s hard to extract women from that realm, even when they should be known for more.

In 2014, the Indian magazine The Week wrote an article about a powerful and charismatic congresswoman. Most of the article talked about her political acumen and great public speaking skills, but it ended like this:

And then, there is the perfect homemaker Priyanka. “Birthday parties of her kids are the old-fashioned kind. She bakes herself. Her cakes are legendary,” said an invitee. Her lunchboxes are a delightful spread that the team at the foundation looks forward to.

This impressive woman also had to be perfect in the kitchen. Or, as author Vrinda Varma wrote in her essay Is Food Really a Woman’s Thing:

The paragraph came almost as a rejoinder to her public image, that even such a successful woman as herself has not severed ties with her kitchen. The paragraph seems to suggest that her success in the public sphere would have been with a lacuna had it not matched her success in the domestic realm of the kitchen.

This is one of the most interesting parts of food and female identity — that it goes hand in hand with perfection. That congresswoman wasn’t just a dab hand in the kitchen, she was legendary.

The best of the best.

A domestic goddess.

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During my formative adult years of the early 2000s, the idea of the domestic goddess had truly entered the mainstream thanks to women like Nigella Lawson, standing on the shoulders of women who came before her like Martha Stewart.

I adore Nigella Lawson. What I do not adore is the term “domestic goddess” because it evokes ideas of perfection.

Unattainable perfection.

Interestingly, Goddesses were never perfect. Demeter, the Roman Goddess of food and agriculture, for instance, threatened humanity with starvation and oblivion after the abduction of her daughter.

The OG earth-bound domestic goddesses were not perfect either — Nigella and Martha both have their demons. But that didn’t mean we mere mortals didn’t try to attain perfection through domestic goddess status.

Why does it make us so uncomfortable that Martha Stewart wasn't nice?

One 2017 HuffPost article sums up the 2000s domestic goddess trope perfectly:

They are the perfect hostesses, always warmly welcoming company into their pristine houses, ensuring that guests are never without a drink in their hand, expertly juggling and timing each course to come out at the right time and always — ALWAYS — with a smile on their face.

Interestingly, this isn’t just a 2000s phenomenon. Just take the works of Charles Dickens.

One study explores Dickens’ treatment of women considered “domestic failures” like Dora in David Copperfield and Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend, who were “disciplined into the art of cooking” or “killed off because they refuse to do so” respectively:

(There are) two dominant middle-class Victorian assumptions: first, that women were natural-born housekeepers and second, that domestic labour they performed should be effortless.

“Effortless” is a good word to explain how domestic perfection plays out today on social media — domestic goddesses for a new generation.

Whilst Nigella and Martha had their flaws, the domestic goddesses of 2025 display incredible levels of perfection online. Not only must you cook perfectly, you must do it in flawless makeup and beautiful dresses whilst also being an exemplary wife and mother.

Looking at you, Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman.

It’s performative for sure, as social media so often is, but it also taps into cultural rhetoric many women will recognise.

Food = female identity.

Perfect food = perfect female identity.

It may be exhausting. It may be incredibly unattainable for most women who don’t have the money, time, or inclination to cook perfect creations night after night.

But that doesn’t mean the idea that we should isn’t foisted upon us, or that we haven’t internalised the romanticised embodiment of it in women. Think of our grandmothers. Our mothers. Those domestic goddesses. That perfect-looking social media cooking celebrity.

All of which goes a long way to explain why I was crying over pasta a few nights ago.

No woman is a perfect domestic goddess. Not the woman who bakes food from scratch in designer ballgowns. Not the queen of the tradwives, calmly making homemade mozzarella for her homemade pizzas for her homegrown eight children.

Not your mother. Not your grandmother.

Certainly not me.

Food isn’t perfect either. It’s messy by its very nature. It shape shifts and deteriorates. It sticks to your countertops and splatters across your backsplash.

Food should never have entered the realm of perfection because it doesn’t have to be perfect to fulfil its purpose. To feed your body, nourish you and make you feel satisfied with life.

It certainly should never have become a barometer by which we measure women’s worth.

All of which reminds me to not care so much when the pasta comes out watery and bland. That doesn’t mean I am watery and bland, it just means I was having a bad day in the kitchen.

When it comes to interpreting the cultural relevance of making imperfect food as a woman, that’s as far as it should ever go.