Michel Roux Jr, depressingly familiar sexism

[CultureSucksDownWords]

Was just browsing news headlines and found this delightful article where Michel Roux Jr blames working mothers for not teaching their children how to cook:

www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/613155/MasterChef-the-Professionals-Michel-Roux-Jr-Kitchen-Impossible-Channel-4

I should be used to this kind of crap by now but this just pissed me right off. Chef-ing is such a male dominated profession, yet home cooking is the responsibility of women? What a twat.

Clearly it's all women's fault. Also clearly only high-profile (male) chef can teach children how to eat properly.

What about working fathers not teaching their children to cook? That would be a far more pertinent question, on several levels!

I just read that article too Michel. Clearly, the fact that DH does all the cooking in our house will mean DD will be unable to cook anything healthy for herself or her future family as the skills haven't been passed on to her by her bad mother .

Bit insulting to DH and other men like him too.

OP not Michel

In his defence, he said that it's been 2 generations since mothers taught their children to cook. Well, 50 years ago, it really would have been mothers who did all the cooking in the home, not the fathers. He has said that it was his own mother who did all the cooking in his family (in a domestic sense) and he learned to cook first from helping his mother and grandmother in the kichen. I do wish he had been clearer though that it's now longer longer just a mother's responsibility to cook and feed everyone, and pass on those cooking skills to their children. The headline is the usual depressing sensationalist rubbish.

It wouldn't take too much brain power, surely, to think that parents need to teach their children to cook. Quite why working mothers get blamed for not teaching their children to cook, when there are also working fathers who've neglected this too.

I read that article too and rolled my eyes to the sky. Another privileged wealthy man telling the common folk they have fucked up by having to work to afford the ridiculous price of housing in this country. Fuck off and then fuck off some more.

I'm willing to bet that Michel Roux Jr didn't actually slam working mothers at all and was taken out of context. It's shitty journalism of the Express that turns it into a sexist message.

Has anyone read the actual article in the Radio Times that I think this was taken from? I'd like to know whether he's been quoted or whether it's the Express paraphrasing him.

I expected better of him!

Isn't his daughter a chef in one of his restaurants (so he is teaching her)?

To be fair, we haven't read the whole interview and it's in this journalist's interests to make the story as sensationalist as possible... or it's a non-story!

The only bit of quote I can see that refers to women is: "There have been at least two generations of mothers no longer cooking at home and no longer passing on their basic cooking knowledge. That is part of the problem,"

For all we know he may have gone on to say that now times have moved on and families often have both (or opposite) parents going out to work then it needs to be up to both parents to teach their children about food.

Of course he may just be sexist! But it seems an unfair leap to just take the Express's word for it without reading the full Radio Times interview.

Ah, big cross-post!

I read the article in the Guardian and still got the bit about the mothers failing to teach their children to cook. So if it has been taken out of context by the Express it is not just them.

True, but it's hardly uncommon for different newspapers to all jump on the same story. And him sounding sexist is the only way that it is a story, so there wouldn't exactly be another angle to report.

Well I don't know about the Express focus, but the Guardian focussed principally on his point about the glorification of TV chefs - the bit about mothers seemed to be mentioned in passing:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/20/michel-roux-jr-hits-out-glorification-of-celebrity-tv-chefs

Actually, I just read the Express version - the two papers even differ on what working mothers failure to cook is responsible for - the Express says its why we are behind the French in culinary skills and the Guardian blames it for our food-related health issues.

So, as usual, the message is that working mothers are always to blame, even if they can't decide what exactly we are to blame for.

Why choose? Blame working mothers for everything!

Uuugh this is depressing and enfuriating. But note the cultural background of M Roux. I live in France, where the translation of "housewife" is still a current term to use for a SAHM. And the term for reception age school translates as "maternal school". I could go on...