The Golden Rule of Food Groups

            I learned at a very early age that there are two basic food groups:  food you kill and pack home, and everything else.  As a boy, I was also taught that killing food and bringing it home was men’s work.  Once you got it home and skinned, or scaled, or plucked, it became women’s work.  You see, in the Fifties, dealing with food was indisputably women’s work.  And, as long as everyone followed the Golden Rule of Food Groups, married life would be harmonious and balanced.  Anyone who tampered with these rules would suffer a failed marriage, family ridicule, and, according to my Sunday school teacher, sexual ambivalence.  Good women were good cooks.  Good men hunted, wooed and married good women.  It was a simple formula for “gender-role success.” 


            The first thing in countless generations that posed a threat to gender-role success was the backyard grill, or barbeque.  Unlike the kitchen, the backyard charcoal grill was manful.  It involved fire, smoke, slabs of red meat cooked to bloody perfection, --and, of course, beer.  Clearly, this made it men’s work.  Here, a man could put on an apron and toss his meat onto a fiery grill in a most manful fashion while other men looked on in envy and talked about Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali) and other man-shit while the women were in the house preparing what they called side-dishes. 


            I never found out what the women talked about in the kitchen while the men were outside, but in later years I decided that they were probably talking about how they were willing to trade a night of not cooking for all that raw meat smothered in “mystery sauce” that men liked to cover their meat with. 


            Meat, I discovered, was important to men.  By meat, I mean red meat.  Chicken was nothing more than Spam with feathers and, as such, was women’s work.  Fish was for frying and, thus, women’s work (after it had been caught and packed home---see Golden Rule of Food Groups, above).  Of course, the best man-meat was beef steak. “Prime” was what most people believed was the best of all man-meat.  But, with slightly less fat to drip off and catch fire, “Choice” was best for a man’s grill with a hot fire and a cold case of beer. 


            Anyways, I remember once when my father asked me to drive 35 miles to buy Black Angus alfalfa-fed beef steaks 1-1/2 inches thick for our family of four and my parents’ guests (another family of four).  He gave me the keys to our 1956 Buick, a hundred dollar bill, and a cigarette to make me look older if an Idaho State trooper took interest.  I was 14 years old. 


            I had never before seen a hundred dollar bill, much less had one in my possession.  To be entrusted with it along with the key to the family car led me to conclude that meat was probably the most important thing in a man’s life.  Of course, the neighbor lady who wore a bikini all weekend and would later be referred to by my mother as “that chippy slut,” was probably also important to my father.  Even at age 14, it was apparent to me that there must be something terribly sexy about 100 dollars worth of man-meat on a fiery grill.


            As I watched my father prance around the grill like Uncle Jimmy as he made a soufflé, I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that I could well be witnessing the beginning of the end of gender-role success and the Golden Rule of Food Groups.