“Boredom Is Quite Out of the Picture”: Women’s Natural Foods Cookbooks and Social Change

Abstract

One does not usually think about cookbooks when reflecting on social change and women in the 1970s. Instead, other images spring to mind, including women burning their bras, picketing outside of Playboy Clubs, protesting at beauty pageants, or speaking out in consciousness-raising groups. Cookbooks fall to make an appearance among these images of activism. One does not Imagine second-wave feminists coming home, exhausted after a long day of picketing or protesting, putting on their aprons, and pulling out The Betty Crocker Cookbook to peruse before preparing the evening meal. If anything, one Imagines them being more Interested in throwing such a book in the trashcan, since such works have been dismissed as playing a part in keeping women in the kitchen. Despite this stereotype, cookbooks played a significant role in women’s activism, especially in the natural foods movement. Natural foods cookbooks written by women did more than provide recipes to bake a loaf of bread; they provided recipes to change society. Focusing on these books, this chapter examines how women used them to promote social change. In particular, the chapter focuses on two of the most influential—Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) and Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwyn Godfrey’s Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery & Nutrition (1976)—which were tremendously popular in the 1970s, showing up on bookshelves across the United States.

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