The Shift With Sam Baker

The Shift With Sam Baker

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The Shift With Sam Baker
The Shift With Sam Baker
Can't cook, won't cook

Can't cook, won't cook

Do (lots of) women hate cooking, or do they hate having to cook? No prizes for guessing the answer

sam baker
May 08, 2025
∙ Paid
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The Shift With Sam Baker
The Shift With Sam Baker
Can't cook, won't cook
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I blame pictures like this for my refusal to cook!

I am a pretty terrible cook. I mean, I can cook, sort of, edibly, a handful of failsafe recipes* (Don’t worry, this is not a recipe post. I would not do that to you. Or me. BUT I can follow a recipe, just with, erm, mixed results.)

I figure there are several reasons for this, but I’m pretty sure the main one is growing up in the vicinity of the 1970s. I am of the generation of girls who took one look at anything with a whiff of the domestic and ran, ran like the wind. Being a kid in the 70s, when cooks were women, chefs were men (I say this like it’s changed much) and the buying and preparing of food was very much not on any dad I’d heard of’s to do list, as soon as I became old enough to look around and think, “hang on a minute, I’m not sure I like the look of this”, I noticed there were ‘girl jobs’ and ‘boy jobs’ and, identifying cooking (in the home) as a ‘girl job’, I made a point of getting bad at it.

Yep. I consigned myself to a lifetime of fish fingers, baked beans, ready meals, salad and a lot, a lot, of toast. What was I thinking? Well, I guess, back then, I wasn’t thinking about my stomach. Or my health. I was thinking about equality. (Oh how we laughed.) I was thinking about my rights. I was thinking about the domestic load – not that we called it that back then – and how to dodge it. I was thinking about not wanting any of that thanks all the same. Plus, I was 15. And with my binoculars newly set on the land of womanhood, all I could see was chores, chores, chores.

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