Man With a Pan (11 page)

I woke with a start in the middle of the night. I had been dreaming about crows, potatoes, and a recently departed aunt whom I shall call Yashoda. She had died of complications stemming from diabetes. I lay in bed, watching the slowly rotating blades of a ceiling fan, and remembered the many times I had gone over to my aunt’s apartment when I was a child growing up in India. Before serving me delicious meals, Yashoda would lovingly place steamed rice and vegetable dishes on the ledge outside her kitchen window for the hordes of crows and sparrows perched there expectantly. It was a regular ritual, and the birds ate their lunch with what I can only describe as a sense of entitlement. Yashoda believed she was feeding her ancestors, who visited her kitchen window in the guise of birds. We never discussed the ritual; she thought it needed no explanation, and I did not foresee my rationalist objections gaining any traction. Besides, I wasn’t there to talk about religion; I was there to eat.

In the next room that night, my infant daughter turned over in her sleep. I was in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles from my aunt’s third-floor apartment in India. I felt a twinge of sadness, for my lost childhood and my lost aunt, but also for my daughter, who would never meet her great-aunt, never watch the ritual feeding of birds that I had witnessed, and never eat Yashoda’s delicious meals. I remembered something the poet A. K. Ramanujam once wrote. There would always be a part of him, Ramanujam said in a poem addressed to his wife, that would be sealed off from her, and a part of her that would be sealed off from him. They could share every intimacy except their experiences as children: “Really, what keeps us apart at the end of years is unshared childhood.”

As I lay in bed that night, I realized that our children are even further removed than our spouses from our own childhoods. My daughter might see Yashoda’s photograph and hear my stories about her, but Yashoda would never be real for her in the way she was to me.

I resolved that night to bring to life for my own daughter the most vivid memory I had of Yashoda, to re-create a dish my aunt had made for me dozens of times and serve it to her. It was a simple dish that Yashoda called “smashed potatoes,” which may have been an accurate description of it, or perhaps my aunt had simply mangled “mashed potatoes.” (Yashoda was exacting and inspired when it came to cooking, but she was merely inspired when it came to speaking English.) This dish was not the mashed potatoes that millions of Americans know as a staple of cafeterias but something Yashoda had invented herself. The problem was that I had never asked her how she made it, and she had never—as far as I knew—written down a recipe.

Over the next several days, I tried making the dish. I knew it was simple because Yashoda could whip it up in a matter of minutes. But apart from the fact that the dish involved cooked potatoes that were then peeled and mashed, I realized I knew little about the Indian spices Yashoda had used to bring the dish alive. Through trial and error, I deduced that the dish required black mustard seeds and white lentils sautéed in hot oil. I knew the dish was garnished with chopped cilantro right at the end. But every variation I made failed to impress; my tongue remembered how the dish tasted, and it told me that my concoctions did not measure up to Yashoda’s creation.

Allow me to conduct a small thought experiment.

Imagine you are at a fine French restaurant. The lighting is right, the decor perfect, and the food delicious. You have an enjoyable conversation over dinner. Perhaps it is one of those really important occasions in life: You are proposing marriage to someone, or someone is proposing marriage to you. Glasses clink. There are kisses, tears, and smiles. The other dinner patrons at the restaurant break into applause. Some are misty eyed. The chef comes to your table in person, bearing a special dessert, compliments of the house. Someone takes a photograph that is destined to sit on your mantelpiece for the next several years.

If you visualized all that, now imagine you are the parent of a preschooler and your child is over at a friend’s house on a lunchtime playdate. The parents mill around, slightly bored. Lunch is served. It’s delicious, but the kids barely notice. You compliment your host on a great meal. Someone takes a photograph and the photo ends up attached to your refrigerator with a magnet.

Here’s the question: When you look at the two photographs, what does the chef in the French restaurant look like? And what does the parent of your daughter’s friend—the person who whipped up that fabulous lunch—look like? I’ll tell you what happens when I run these scenarios in my own mind: the restaurant chef is a man, and the cook at the playdate is the mother, not the father, of your daughter’s friend.

Both cooks were good, both meals wonderful. The original scenarios made no mention of the gender of the dinner and lunch chefs. Why did my hidden brain—a term I devised to describe a range of unconscious mental factors that influence people in their daily lives without their awareness—supply me with a picture of a man in one case and a woman in the other?

The researchers Pirita Pyykkönen, Jukka Hyönä, and Roger P. G. van Gompel recently devised a similar experiment. They fitted volunteers with an eye-tracking device that followed how the subjects’ eyeballs moved over a page of type. They then presented the volunteers with photos of a man and a woman. Pyykkönen and the others found that when sentences triggered gender stereotypes, the eyeballs of the volunteers would flick over to the picture of either the man or the woman. If the sentence was about babysitters, for example, the volunteers would look at the photo of the woman. If the sentence was about electricians, the volunteers would look at the man.

In another experiment, Susan A. Duffy and Jessica A. Keir found that when sentences violated the gender stereotypes held by the hidden brain, volunteers were slower to read them compared to when the sentences conformed to unconscious biases. When a sentence read, “The babysitter told himself to pick up some milk from the grocery store on the way home,” the eyeballs of the volunteers slowed down or stopped at the word
himself.
They darted back to the word
babysitter
as if to confirm that the sentence was really talking about a man who looked after small children.

Gender is perhaps the first thing that gets attached to us as human beings: friends ask new mothers and fathers, “Is it a boy or a girl?” As we grow up, we notice that roles are gendered. Bankers and electricians tend to be men; babysitters and nurses tend to be women. By the time children are three, as I reported in my book,
The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives,
they are already well on their way to categorizing professional activities by gender. When my own daughter was three, she refused to let me play the role of nurse whenever we played “doctor.” She could conceive of girls and women being doctors, but she could not conceive that a boy or a man could be a nurse. When I pressed her on how she had arrived at that notion, she explained, with calm logic, that she had never seen a picture book where a man played the role of a nurse. Without anyone intending it, my daughter had picked up a sexist stereotype before she could tie her own shoelaces.

These unconscious stereotypes stay in our hidden brains well into adolescence and adulthood. The thing that changes between the time you are three and the time you are thirty is not the unconscious associations in your brain but your conscious brain’s ability to mask those associations. While these associations seem trivial, and noticing them might reek to some people of political correctness, they turn out to have pervasive effects on the way people think about the world. They affect how managers judge job candidates, and explain why some people gain entrée into elite professions while others find themselves blocked. They also explain why people get paid differently for doing the same kinds of work. Christine Alksnis at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada tested how volunteers perceived the value of men’s and women’s work in different professions: she found that volunteers believed men who were magazine editors ought to be better paid than women magazine editors, and that store clerks working in “masculine” jobs such as at hardware stores ought to make more money than clerks working in “feminine” jobs such as the china and crystal section of a department store.

One of the most commonly held gender-related stereotypes across the world is that cooking is a feminine activity. This anthology of essays by men who cook confirms the prevalence of the stereotype. Stories about men who cook are novel to us in ways that stories about women who cook are not.

What is striking about the thought experiment I painted for you is that, like the editors and the clerks in the experiment by Christine Alksnis in Canada, the cooks in both scenarios were doing identical things. One was not a babysitter and the other an electrician. Both were talented cooks. Why do we think of the restaurant chef as being a man, but believe the person who made lunch at our child’s friend’s home is a woman? Here is what I think is happening in the hidden brain: These scenarios activate not one but two unconscious stereotypes. The first is that cooking is women’s work. The second is that professional activity is men’s work. We think of the friend’s parent who cooks the wonderful lunch as being female because this work is being done within the household; we think of the restaurant chef as being a man because, even though cooking is generally a feminine activity,
professional
cooking is a male business. For generations, women have been denied access to professions whose skill set is identical to the work they have been expected to do at home. For generations, men who violate stereotypical behavior by cooking for their families have been seen as, among other things, effeminate.

Such stereotypes are dumb in an age when so many men cook for their families and the number of women in the workforce will soon rival the number of men. (They are also factually wrong and ethically repugnant.) But the hidden brain isn’t interested in nuances, facts, or fairness. It is a dumb system designed to help us quickly jump to conclusions. At the end of this essay, I’ll attach a short test you can take to figure out what gender stereotypes lurk in your own hidden brain.

The point of my thought experiment is simply this: while men who cook might be perceived as novel or cute, they are actually engaging in political activity that is every bit as serious as that of the suffragettes who marched to win women the right to vote, or the civil rights protestors who marched to win equal rights for racial minorities. If you’re a man who abhors sexism, take up the spatula. The dumb stereotypes in our hidden brains are formed by innumerable associations—from movies, books, and daily life—that tell us that people who cook in homes are women, and people who cook in restaurants are men. The only way to erase these nasty ideas from our unconscious minds is to provide our minds, and the minds of our children, with images that counter the stereotypes. As Mahatma Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world.

After my trial-and-error experiments to re-create Yashoda’s “smashed potatoes” flopped, I called relatives spread throughout the world to see if any of them remembered the dish. I hadn’t spoken to some distant cousins in years. It must have sounded strange to them to hear from a long-lost cousin about a dish my aunt had last made for me more than two decades ago. The search produced nothing. I scoured the Internet for ideas. Nothing again.

Yashoda would have been amused to learn I was going to such lengths to re-create something she had probably whipped up just for me. She was a fabulous cook with a vast repertoire. Now a parent my-self, I saw the love and indulgence it must have taken for her to make the same basic dish over and over for a small boy who would not be tempted by her more extravagant dishes.

My sister in Chicago finally solved the riddle for me. I called her one evening and asked if she remembered the dish Yashoda had made. I figured there must have been times my sister and I went over to Yashoda’s house together for lunch. My sister’s memory of the dish was hazy—it was not one of her favorites—but she has a better culinary mind than mine. She told me I was probably missing a simple but crucial ingredient: lime juice.

That night, I made Yashoda’s “smashed potatoes” dish for my own daughter. She liked it. I realized, with pleasure, that I had found my own way to honor a lost ancestor.

Epilogue

I recently gave a talk to a group of high school students at a magnet program in the southern United States. I asked them to take a psychological test that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and that I describe at length in
The Hidden Brain.
I was curious whether fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds would have the same unconscious beliefs about men and women, and the home and workplace, as older groups of people to whom I had given the test. Sadly, they did. The students took seventy-two seconds to complete a task that asked them to link men with professional activity and women with domestic activity, but one hundred seconds to complete a task that asked them to link men with domestic activity and women with professional activity. This test also appeared in a
Washington Post
article I wrote called “See No Bias,” which was published in 2005.