Why Is Making Dinner So Hard?
Illustration by Goce Ilievski.
By Meg St-Esprit
“I am the only one who plans and cooks in our house, and I want to cry sometimes.”
In Milwaukee, Erica James* is fed up with the never-ending task of feeding her family. With two full-time jobs and a kid with various food allergies and restrictions, the task often sends her otherwise-egalitarian marriage into a tailspin. “I ask my husband to help me pick meals to cook and I get, ‘I don’t care, whatever is fine with me.’ He then complains about the amount of chicken we eat.” She knows they’re in a rut; dinner is often some variation of chicken, rice, and a veggie because it requires no thought and planning, but without much help, she’s uninspired to try more. “Dinner is slowly killing me.”
James is not alone. A 2020 Gallup poll found that, regardless of employment status, women are saddled with the majority of the dinner preparation and grocery shopping in U.S. homes. The gaps are huge — 51% prepare dinner more often, 45% grocery shop more often, and 42% wash dishes more often than their male partners. Around 30% of couples split these tasks evenly, while only a small portion of men tackle these tasks more often than their wives. A survey done by Hello Fresh in the U.K. talked to 2,000 couples about their biggest dinner battles. The most common blowups were over what to eat, when to eat, and the mess that meal prep causes.
Part of the reason dinner is such a flashpoint is because it’s more than one task. “There is a certain relentlessness to dinner,” says Gemma Hartley. “It’s compounded by the cultural pressures that dinner should be a ‘family meal’ and a ‘balanced’ one at that.” Hartley is the author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women and the Way Forward. She says making dinner is much more involved than it might seem. “Dinner goes far beyond simply getting a meal on the table. The mental load required in the planning, budgeting, shopping, prepping, cleaning, delegating, and cooking makes dinner a far more complicated and exhausting task than you might assume.”
“For some couples, having one person do the shopping and another the cooking may work,” adds Lisa Selin Davis, author of Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead. In her home, her husband is the cook, though she recognizes this is statistically unusual. They’ve tried to have kids get involved in meal planning, which she says works only part of the time.
Even when the preparation tasks are divided and both parents are working full time, mothers can still feel burdened by the expectation that they will prepare the meal. “As far as we've come in terms of what's expected of or allowed for women — expanding opportunities for working outside the home — we still default to domesticity as the women's domain. Chefs tend to be men, but home cooks tend to be women,” says Davis.
It’s clear putting food on the table can feel like an endless, thankless chore. Part of that is because food is often connected to emotions and sentimentality. This can make dinner feel more fraught than, say, folding laundry. “It’s interesting,” says Eloísa Pérez-Lozano, a mom of two kids under six in Houston and a community outreach coordinator for a local college. “I almost feel like I shouldn’t have insecurities because cooking doesn’t hold a special meaning for me as it does for others, but I still feel the sting of not being ‘enough’ in that regard because my sisters-in-law enjoy it and are good at it.”
In Pérez-Lozano’s husband’s family, food — especially some Mexican recipes that she finds intimidating — is tied to love. “I have to remind myself that everyone has their strengths, and mine has never been cooking.” She says she’s “quiet quit” making dinner. She has a stable of meals in rotation that their two young kids will eat, but that’s it. If her husband wants something beyond that, he can buy the ingredients and they will figure out a way to make it together. Sharing the task meets both of their needs: his love language of food, and her desire to not be the one to plan and execute a complicated meal.
“There are many other aspects of being a wife and mother than I am great at, and I figure that my husband is setting a good example by pitching in with the cooking from time to time,” Pérez-Lozano adds. “It’s showing our kids it's not just something women do. Just like how I try to do yard work from time to time so that my son and daughter both see that their gender does not have to limit them to doing certain things around the house.” While she can’t always quell her own emotional insecurities over dinner, she hopes to break the cycle in the next generation.
Davis says this approach is healthy — if he likes those particular meals and can prepare them, lean into that strength. Her own husband does most of the cooking because he finds joy in the task she does not. “The magical formula is to figure out what people like to do and are good at, and if they take it over, don't nag or critique them,” she says. “Allow them to develop their own skill at whatever it is they're in charge of. That's the hardest part.”
For some, the answer to the dinner debate is to let go of expectations. Though she’s a professional psychologist who helps families and kids find routines and systems that make life more manageable, Emily King says the wheels often fall off in her own home when it comes to this topic. “I know all kinds of things as a child psychologist, but that doesn’t mean I do them,” she laughs. “I am also a human being with a stressed and overwhelmed nervous system and I forget all the things that I know when I am stressed.”
Where it does make a difference, she says, is having spent her 20-year career observing patterns of stress in families. “I can more easily be like, ‘Okay, this doesn’t matter.’” It’s not about the big meal for King’s family, it’s about spending time eating together consistently. That might mean takeout or meal kits like Hello Fresh for the adults and “kid food” for their children when they were younger. “This dinner thing is so common of an issue because in America we often have two working parents.” Time becomes a priority, so she says to think about where you really want to spend that time.
In her family right now, King says meals are going somewhat smoothly. “They’ve been worse, and they’ve been better in the past.” The family has chosen to forgo some evening school events to sit down together, even if it’s over convenience food or takeout. By choosing to prioritize togetherness and routine over the expectation of a certain type of meal, they’ve found their groove with dinner.
Hartley says letting go of expectations in this way is healthy, and is what has worked in her family, too. Even after penning an entire book on the topic, she says she doesn’t have it figured out either, but she’s learned to be okay with that. “I waffle between intense bouts of meal planning with my partner, purchasing online meal kits, and desperately ordering UberEats when my dinner plans fail or feel like too much work.”
Ultimately, the key is to stop letting cultural expectations tether our self-worth to meals, concludes Hartley. “It takes a lot more conscious effort to balance the load of dinner and all its mental load components when you're raised in a culture that associates good womanhood with a seemingly effortless — but very effortful — meal on the table.”