I Think We Need to Stop Saying That UPFs 'Liberated Women' - Here's Why.

‘Little has done more than convenience food to liberate women from servitude, freeing them from the time and cognitive effort required to create an endless stream of home-cooked meals from scratch’ writes Anthony Warner, AKA The Angry Chef, in an extract from his book published in Get The Gloss in 2017. ‘Processed convenience food’ he continues ‘has set women free, and every time we criticize convenience choices, we are showing our desire to drag women away from the workplace and back into the kitchen’.

Those of you who have been here for a while will know that I am deeply ambivalent about ultra-processed foods (UPFs). I don’t think these foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’. But I do think the way we talk about them is interesting and warrants some analysis. The general vibe, as with so much in nutrition, is sensationalist and shame-y. 

And in our haste to temper some of the fear mongering around UPFs, we’ve latched onto the idea that these foods played a critical role in liberating women from the kitchen, and ultimately from the home. Without them, we argue, women would have struggled to enter the workforce en masse the way they did in the 60s and 70s. 

When I say ‘we’, I mean liberal, left learning, usually middle-class white people. And when ‘we’ say this, ‘we’ are engaging in a specific kind of revisionist history. One that erases working-class women, poor women, women of colour, and single mothers who have always worked outside the home. Not only does this narrative paper over the cracks of our shared histories, it prevents opportunities for building solidarity going forward. 

To understand why this argument is unhelpful, we have to understand the ‘evolution’ – if we can call it that – of women and work. 

Scholars don’t agree on a specific point in history whereby men began to exert control and domination over women. But by around the time of the Ancient Greeks, through a combination of violence and ideology, women came to understand their place as subservient to men. Men could take part in public life, while women were sequestered away at home, or otherwise pushed to the shadows of society. 

Fast-forward to the middle ages where ‘the division between 'home' and 'workplace' didn’t exist in feudal Europe in the way it began to exist under capitalism’ writes labour journalist Sarah Jaffe in Work Won’t Love You Back. Work was something you did until it was finished, not until you had to ‘clock off’ as with modern wage labour. Jaffe continues: ‘In early medieval cities, women worked as doctors, butchers, teachers, retailers, and smiths. They had gained a degree of freedom.’  

In feudal Europe, ‘womens’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets’ asserts Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch. The commons – public space where anyone could access plants and animals for food and medicine – gave women proximity to resources that lessened their dependence on men for survival. As feudalism gave way to capitalism however, ‘women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.’  The witch-hunts forced women off of communal land and back into the home. This is where we see ‘women’s work’ – that of caring, nurturing, and homemaking – begin to be naturalised as innately feminine, rather than as highly skilled work. Devaluing women’s labour in this way, not only serves men, but the entire capitalist project. Jaffe explains: ‘Theorists as far back as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have pointed out that the family as we know it actually serves to smooth the functioning of capitalism: it reproduces - creates more - workers, without whom capitalism can’t function. This is why we call all of that caring, cooking, and soothing, along with the literal process of bearing children ‘reproductive labour’.’