Barbecue season is here. Across the country, gardens have become arenas of ritualised male performance. Aprons, often sloganed, and occasionally offensive, are tied. Tongs are brandished and flames coaxed into life. For a few brief, smoky hours, the nation’s dads take charge of the cooking. It’s great, but also revealing.
This week I asked my class a simple question: who runs the barbecue at home? Every single hand went up for “dad”. Then a second question: how many of those same dads cook regularly during the rest of the week? About a tenth of the hands remained raised.
It’s the great culinary contradiction of modern Britain. Though the UK has among the world’s smaller cooking gender gaps according to Gallup, women cook on average 0.6 more meals per household each week – that’s compared to 0.3 in Spain and 0.8 in France and Ireland. Over the years, that adds up to thousands of hours which women spend in the kitchen and men don’t.
Men who happily preside over a grill like minor deities vanish when the task involves a hob or a saucepan. Why can’t they do it on a rainy Tuesday night in Stoke?
Part of it is theatre. The barbecue is cooking as performance – it comes with props and an audience. You can stand around, drink in hand, offering commentary, while occasionally turning meat. It is less about feeding people than about being seen to do so.
Contrast that with the quiet, repetitive slog of everyday cooking: planning meals, chopping vegetables and washing up. There is no applause for getting dinner on the table five nights a week.
So, is it laziness? It is easier to opt out of the mundane and step in for the occasional headline act. But that alone cannot explain something so consistent. Weaponised incompetence plays its part. That’s the carefully honed ability to be just bad enough at a task that someone else takes it off your hands. Burn a few meals or leave a dish dirty and you will be excused from responsibility. It is a tactic as old as domestic life itself.
And it’s learned behaviour. Generations of boys grow up in households where cooking is coded as female work. Generations of girls absorb the opposite message. We flatter ourselves that this has changed more than it has.
Yes, we have celebrity chefs – men like Gordon Ramsay – who dominate television and bookshops. But they are chefs, not cooks, and represent aspiration, not routine. Watching someone plate a Michelin-level dish does not teach you to make a midweek stir-fry. So, we continue to raise young male princes: boys who can master a gaming console or a sports drill, but are not routinely asked to get a handle on the basics of cooking.
The weekend barbecue is an illusion of equality. Look! The men are cooking! Then, as the charcoal cools, real life returns. If we are serious about changing this, it will only happen through expectation and the unglamorous insistence that cooking is not a performance, but a life-skill. Men do not need to become chefs, they need to become cooks. It’s less about talent than responsibility.
So, enjoy these summer barbecue weekends; those charred burgers and the declaration that “this one’s perfect”. But when Monday comes, the real test begins: switching on the hob with no audience to be seen.
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