Bring Back Home Economics. No, Really.
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Admit it: You’re throwing out a lot of food
You know the drill. You read a goop recipe that calls for miso. You buy miso, make the recipe and it’s fantastic. Then the miso lingers in your fridge for months until it becomes a tub of penicillin. You throw it out.
You feel guilty. You promise yourself that next time you’ll find several recipes that call for miso and not waste a thing. But those recipes call for other ingredients you’ll never use: cilantro, almond flour, you name it. You throw that stuff out too.
You go to Costco. You buy 12 cans of garbanzo beans and tell yourself you’ll make homemade hummus, vegetable curries, and use them in salads. You also leave with a fuzzy blue dog bed, a body pillow, a crocheted sweater, 6 pairs of socks and a three pack of sports bras that don’t fit anyway. You spend $300.
I’ve spent years trying to avoid these pitfalls, and harboring a shameful secret: I want to take a home economics class. I wish I could have taken one in junior high school, high school, and even college. I’m ashamed to admit it because my second-wave feminist mother and my first-wave feminist grandmother would both pass out if they knew.
The elegant irony here is that somehow my mother, who dressed me green ERA garb, took me on all the marches and told me that over her dead body would I take home ec or become a cheerleader, also knew how to whip up something called Phil’s Diner’s Stew — which costs about $2.50 to make, lasted a week, and was delicious. But somehow this skill was not something she thought I needed.
Mom was well meaning but perhaps confused, operating under the loose theory that if learned to cook, sew or otherwise “run a household” I would somehow end up somebody’s housewife, a wolftrap of womanhood second-wave feminism was desperately trying to unlock. Home Ec was a painful reminder that female and male labor was different, and maybe always would be.
And yet. I had a passion for how to nest, organize, cook. I wasn’t into easy bake ovens or playing house, but I read the Little House on the Prairie books for the details about eating biscuits with leftover bacon grease. I read Island of the Blue Dolphins focused on how the main character, young and alone, learned to spearfish.
As I got older, there were few Home Ec heroes, so I became an avid follower of Martha Stewart — which didn’t quite fit, because Martha’s jam was not “how to make leftovers last a week” but rather “here is a burlap ribbon on a mason jar.” Don’t get me wrong — I like a burlap crafting as much as anyone, but I craved some simple instructions on how how to feed myself and pay my bills without going into debt. You know, how to live.
And yet I couldn’t admit I needed help. I didn’t want to disappoint my mother, and I thought this was just something you figured out — and for some reason, no one else was talking about how hard it all was. I finally hit bottom when in my twenties I tried to make risotto by cooking rice with a can of Campbell’s soup. (Pro-tip: this doesn’t work). Then I served it to my father.
I’ll never forget the look on his face: a mixed bag of confusion that included but was not limited to 1) how much money he had just paid for my liberal arts education 2) whether he or my mother had really forgotten to teach me how to cook and what else they might have forgotten to teach me and 3) unadulterated sadness.
My father got over the risotto incident, years passed and I got slightly better at cooking. But I kept my secret about wanting to be taught, to be handed a textbook, notes or even just some scribbled notes on how to run a household. I bought old church cookbooks on eBay, thinking they might have some secrets written in the margins. (They don’t). I wanted a fairy grandmother show up and teach me how to grocery shop and how to cook rice without a recipe.
When I was 39, with a mishmash collection of cookbooks, stacks of Real Simple and Sunset magazines, I started dating Matthew, a history professor. After months of surprisingly good sex and good conversation, I finally admitted my shameful desire to take a Home Ec class while we laid in bed discussing whether to spend money on going out to breakfast. Matthew stroked my hair and said “you know, Home Economics used to be a major in college.”
Mind blown. After interrogating him about this, Matthew sent me the below promotional link to encourage women to go study home economics. The video is, of course, of its time (1955) and clear propaganda designed to keep women at home. And yet I was thrilled:
I was thrilled, patriarchal propaganda or not, because it confirmed everything I suspected, namely that adulting is hard. Running a household — whether with a spouse and children or alone — is complex, and not intuitive. We need help. We need to be taught.
Do I think women and women alone should learn how to sew curtains as this promo video suggests? Of course not. But do I think that everyone should be taught as part of their formal education how to shop for groceries and make them last a week, when to turn down the thermostat, how to maintain a car and how to manage their finances? Yes.
Based on a superficial google, Home Economics no longer appears to be a major and instead appears to have been replaced with something called “family sciences.” I thought about taking a deep dive into figuring out whether these classes were different in name only, but I was roasting cauliflower for a week of meals and was too tired to investigate further.
But no matter what the name is — this needs to be taught. Let’s bring Home Economics/Family Sciences/How to Adult back to formal education, for all who want to learn it. Let’s stop pretending that this is not one of the central skill sets for a productive life. Let’s stop pretending it’s intuitive or can be learned by following instagram influencers.
And not to Mom: send me that recipe for Phil Diner’s stew already.
