Cwiertka - How Cooking Became a Hobby (2)

The author expressed his central theme at the very beginning of the essay. The whole essay follows the history period as its clue, and described Japanese social changes during the Meiji, Edo, and Showa Period. The Japanese government at that time carries out series propagation through whole country in order to achieve political and social stabilization. And it makes the “urban middle class” been involved deeply.

There is an ideology of ikka danran in the early-and mid-Meiji period. For example, in the September 1892 edition of the magazine Katei Zasshi the conditions for a happy family were illustrated as follows: 1. man and woman love each other; 2. their relationship is monogamous; 3. the family is nuclear; 4. the man is salaried worker; 5. the woman is a housewife. This is the beginning of changes; it also is the beginning of cooking changes. The following ideologies such as “The woman is the key of the home”, “The wise woman build her house”, and “The matters of house are under control of the wife” make deeper influence on cooking.

After social influence, the Japanese food culture became change. Culinary skills and sophisticated family dish became more and more common. “Culinary literature preoccupied with western food culture became popular in Japan in the second half of the 19th century. If you pay little more attention on that time magazine, you will found the introduction of cooking became more detailed. The most popular magazines develop a layout about cooking. Finally, it marks the cooking became a hobby in Japan. The whole essay reveals the impact of politics on policy, but also that the policy on food culture.

Cwiertka - How Cooking Became a Hobby

This reading was very interesting for me to read because I consider cooking a hobby of mine. When I was a child my dad and I would cook dinner every Saturday night. We would pick something from a cook book and make it together it was away for us to bund. So once I started reading the article I grew very interested as to how cooking became such a popular pass time for so many people around the world.

The reading examines the changes in the food ways in Japanese culture. The reading focused on the middle class because lower class wouldn’t have the resources to go for other reasoning then for survival and they also didn’t have time for leisure activities. Upper class would have maybe had the cooking done for them or wouldn’t have viewed cooking as something to do as a pass time. The women were the ones who stayed home and cooked and cleaned while the men went out and worked. The females job was to be a " good wife/ mother". Western ideas start changing the idea of the role food plays. The role food played in Western society would be away to bring everyone together, it was a way of strengthening family ties. In the Japanese culture it was seen as something that needed to be done, for special occasions food would be ordered ( almost like it made the occasion more important or gave it a sense of different for example here we may say today is a pizza day and it means something different then if we had a "normal" meal.) Japanese cooking was for the most part rice and beef dishes. During this time there was a rise in cook books and magazines that had easy, healthy, different recipes. There was a change in the everyday duties of a housewife. Women started spending their leisure time cooking and creating new foods and food ways for their families. Creating the happy atmosphere within the family was an excuse for housewives to devote more time to cooking. Cooking was now treated as a sources of pleasure and not as a "job". "Food lost its religious meaning and gradually acquired an important role as a source of pleasure for the body and the soul." we see cooking as a hobby all around us in out everyday life such as TV, books and magazines and even if the change in food ways didn’t occur we probably wouldn’t even have this class. Cooking is viewed in a new way that makes it more fun and accept for any person or culture to cook and enjoy it.