Lamya Baeshen
Al-Madina
In “Clash of Civilizations” episode in Selfie2 serial, a Saudi man married to a Saudi American woman impressed by her charm and beauty, thought of breaking the relationship when she told him openly that she did not know cooking and asked him to cook the food she likes the most.
The man got angry as he took it as a humiliation. He shouted at his wife and her father telling he is a man of the orient and does not know cooking and considered cooking as the duty of woman. But the man sacrificed his honor in lieu of her beauty and backed down from his statement.
On Snapchat I follow activities of a number of Saudi scholarship students who pursue their studies abroad. I found them going to market and purchase vegetables, meat and rice and then they will upload pictures of how they prepare food for them using these ingredients.
Of course, they cut onion and tomato, boil water and fry things. They cook everything not only kabsa. They send video clips of cooking to other friends who follow them on Snapchat. Sometimes they show their joint cooking exercise expressing extreme happiness. While various types of food get ready on the stove, these young men sing and dance, expressing their joy and excitement.
Every mother will be worried about her son who has gone abroad for studies thinking he would die of hunger or his stomach would have got trouble eating hamburgers. But this is not always true. Many boys and girls have learned how to prepare various delicious and hygienic dishes.
Young men often go for desert camps in groups and stay away from homes for days. They show their cooking skills by preparing various types of food.
They also make salads and desserts. There are some young men who do not have any shame in telling others that they can cook well. Some of them have attended courses in well known cooking schools of US and Europe and tell the world that they are professional cooks. Many of them appear on TV channels to display their cooking skills.
The man from the orient, if married to a foreign woman, will not find it difficult to prepare food for his small family, especially when he loves to eat a special type of food which his wife is unable to prepare. He will not face any trouble in helping his wife in cooking any type of food. But when a foreign man is married to an orient woman, things would be quite different.
While staying abroad a Saudi student will be doing all jobs at his home such as cleaning, washing and cooking even if he is married to a Saudi woman. But when he returns to the Kingdom, he asks her to do all those works and relaxes in the sofa claiming he is an orient man and does not know cooking.
In all restaurants of the orient you can see men are the main cooks. Similarly, a majority of laundry workers and sweepers of public facilities are men. But when these men reach their homes, they ask their women to do these jobs as if they are made for it and suit their nature. Many men think that if they support women in cooking it would affect their honor.
When women go out to work, there are people who accuse them of snatching away the jobs of men. At the same time we see men have achieved professional experience in many jobs that are suitable for women. They do business by cooking and make good profits.
Many women do the cooking job inside the four walls of their kitchen as if it is her family duty. That too without any material compensation or receiving any respect.
Some experts would come to assess women’s contribution to a country’s progress and say they did not have any in the progress of humanity and they did not make any valuable achievement even in matters in which she is specialized such as cooking and designing.
Eastern men, mostly, do not cook except in the absence of wives and they explore business opportunities where they transform cooking into a profitable venture.
