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<title> Men are taking over the kitchens, finally. </title>
As a woman I think that one of the more positive trends in society today is the new interest men are taking in cooking. Only a decade or two ago, a man in the kitchen would have been an unthinkable sight. The only time you would see them even go near anything that looked like food preparing was when summer came and it was time to barbecue, which of course was a man's job. And as you watch old Swedish movies with a bachelor you can be sure that six out of seven days he would go to the local restaurant to have his dinner, and on the seventh day he would break open a can of beans to heat up on his miniature stove. But today if there is ever a need for a gourmet meal it is usually dad who brings out the cookbook.
So what brings on this change? Has cooking suddenly become more fun? Well in a way it has, manufactures of major kitchen appliances like stoves, refrigerators and such has caught on to this trend and they have started making kitchen appliances that attracts men. Usually lots of chrome is used, and the look is more that of a restaurant kitchen than of a country style kitchen which women tend to be more drawn towards. Even the kitchen tools look like something out of a science fiction movie. Not only because of the material they are made out of but also that you sometimes need to be a technical engineer to figure out what they do. Also smaller kitchen appliances are coming in abundance, little electric machines that you easily can make bread, freshly pressed juice and even your own ice-cream in, makes cooking seem like building your own radio transmitter.
Another reason is perhaps all the different types of food you can find at your local grocer today, food from all over the world. In about thirty minutes or so you can have made an exotic chicken dish from Pakistan which surely makes cooking more interesting than the usual flipping of pancakes or frying of "falukorv". So without to much effort you can look like a gourmet chef.
But the main reason for this new found interest is of course the obvious one, women are no longer staying at home taking care of house and family. Women have their own careers that are just as important as the men's and more and more of the domestic duties are now being shared by a couple on the basis who comes home first or has the most time available. Although it is still more common that women are the ones who stay home with the children, at least a longer time then men do, but they usually do not stay home as long as they used to. And the old idea that being home with the children is not hard work, and that one should be able not only to take care of the infant but also clean and cook and still have lots of energy to cater to your husband when he came home from a tiring day at work, is long gone I think this is a trend that is here to stay and maybe even increase since it is no longer mothers who are teaching their daughters how to be a good wife, but instead children of both sexes are allowed to be little helpers in the kitchen both to their fathers and mothers. I also think this is making men more independent, where they before came straight from the comforts of their mothers to that of their wives. Now they can easily take care of themselves and the thought of a single father taking care of a child is not at all preposterous as it would have been forty years ago. I suppose now all we have to do is to convince them of the joy of doing the laundry and the dishes.
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