Who Benefits When Mom Packs Lunch Every Day?

When school lunch is an ideological tool.

Photo: Unsplash+

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a white feminist active in the late 1800s and early 1900s, proposed an idea that still sounds revolutionary today: kitchenless apartments located in semi-communal urban buildings designed for the needs of working mothers. Cooking and dining spaces would be shared, with gardens on the roof, and professional nurses and teachers running childcare centers on site for children too young to be in school.¹

If you are a mother of young children, especially if you were parenting young children during the first year of the pandemic, you have probably talked to your mom friends about the commune you've been meaning to start together. It always starts off half-jokingly, but the more you talk about it, the more appealing and logical it starts to sound. What if you only had to cook one night a week, or even zero nights a week, yet got to eat a home-cooked meal every night? What if everyone split up chores in their entirety and you never had to do laundry again? What if parenting wasn't such a lonely business, everyone locked away in their homes, alone with a preschooler wailing, "I JUST WANT TO BE A FISHY!" as you pull them from the bath and ponder your life's choices?²

I know, I know. The grass is always greener in the communal front yard. But parents — and particularly mothers — in countries that prize individualism over collectivism do bear unique burdens when it comes to feeding their families. After I published last week's essay, I heard that one paragraph in particular resonated for some:

There is a sadness to our insatiable need for "experts" to tell us what to eat and how to live. To me it reveals a hollowness that in other cultures is filled with the solid reassurance of a cultural cuisine whose shared practices provide norms and rules that can't be dislodged by any old TikTok influencer or doctor who wants to write a bestselling book. Without that solid center, we are lost; we just want someone to tell us what to do in 10 simple steps.

Without a shared cultural cuisine and its accompanying rules and norms, there is a lot of freedom. Family dinner can be shared platters of food, or separate adult and toddler meals, or microwaved pancakes. We can eat it at the table, in front of the TV, or at different times entirely. But within this freedom is a hidden cost: we have to choose what the rules and norms will be at our tables, what nutrition standards we want to meet, what an acceptable meal looks like, and how to define a successful family mealtime. With no shortage of options, opinions, and judgements out there, it is exhausting. All of this, before you even start cooking.

Not that the existence of shared culinary rules means less of a burden on mothers. In "Japanese Mothers and Obentōs: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus,"³ anthropologist Anne Allison breaks down the role of the preschool lunchbox (obento) in Japan, and argues that these adorable, intricately constructed meals for three- and four-year-olds are a type of ideological state apparatus (ISA), a method of eliciting behavior that benefits the state, by reinforcing ideas that eventually become accepted as one's own. School itself is an ISA, as are sports and literature, and we can see the power of ISAs in the current frantic conservative fight to regulate what schools can and cannot teach, what books children can and cannot read, and who can play what sports based on their assigned sex at birth. Conservatives wouldn't care as much about transgender school sports players, or Critical Race Theory in schools, if ISAs weren't such powerfully normalizing forces. 

But back to obento.

How can sandwiches shaped like silly monsters serve as an ideological tool? In Japan, even more so than in the US, household roles are gendered, with women almost always taking on all household duties related to childcare and cooking. According to Allison, obento "socialize children and mothers into the gendered roles and subjectivities they are expected to assume in a political order desired and directed by the state."

A mother is expected to churn out a creative, visually appealing, appropriately portioned, and tasty lunch box for her child each day, and her child is supposed to eat it in its entirety. The teacher keeps an eye on consumption and if they don't finish, it reflects poorly on the mother. This arrangement trains both mothers and children for their future roles in Japanese society, with children training for the obedience and behavioral constraints of being students, and mothers training for the exhausting, selfless labor required to raise successful students.

The state accrues benefits from this arrangement. With children depending on the labor women devote to their mothering to such a degree, and women being pressured as well as pleasurized in such routine maternal productions as making the obento…a gendered division of labor is firmly set in place. Labor from males, socialized to be compliant and hard-working, is more extractable when they have wives to rely on for almost all domestic and familial management. And females become a source of cheap labor, as they are increasingly forced to enter the labor market to pay domestic costs (including those vast debts incurred in educating children) yet are increasingly constrained to low-paying part-time jobs because of the domestic duties they must always bear almost totally as mothers….

Motherhood is state ideology, working through children at home and at school and through mother-imprinted labor that a child carries from home to school as with the obento.

I am thinking about school lunches in the US as ideological state apparatus, and what messages they reinforce and make acceptable. One is certainly that the government will provide the bare minimum in terms of social benefits (school-provided lunch), and that if you want more than that bare minimum, you must have the money and privilege to purchase it (packed lunches from home). The goal becomes personally having the resources for the individually-packed lunches from home, not collectively raising the bar on school-provided lunch so that everyone can enjoy an appealing and nourishing lunch.

The other message is to parents, especially mothers. It is that the market will fix all problems, and we can buy our way to a satisfactory status quo. Think Lunchables, snack packs of everything, Uncrustables, basically every Annie’s product. If you don’t have time to prepare a lunch, you can buy all these things! Don’t think about what life might look like if those meals were readily available and free for all students, and the time, money, and mental load it might save you.

Gendered division of labor is more sharply divided in Japan⁴, yet I still feel the gut-punch of truth, thinking about how my unpaid household labor made my husband's job in television possible, in an industry that generates extreme profits, but is particularly unfriendly to families. Or how I work in a field that is overwhelmingly staffed by women, and grossly underpaid. Or how, when my husband kept packing PB&Js in our toddler's daycare lunchboxes after they had sent home a note about a new peanut allergy in the class, his teacher called and emailed me, and only me.

It's so hard for the first instinct to not be: oh, I should have noticed his mistake. I don't think there is a universe in which my husband would have blamed himself for not correcting my mistake. I don't blame him, or myself for this discrepancy. It's the ideology we have been taught; it's the way we have been socialized. Our relationship benefits the state (which collects taxes on the well-compensated work he does, and benefits from my far-less-compensated labor in nonprofit, food systems spaces, doing work that often serves as a band-aid for systemic issues the government is not addressing in a satisfactory way.)

More on how dietetics upholds the patriarchy:

It is incredibly interesting, then, to read

Molly Wizenberg

‘s reflection on the division of household labor in her previous marriage to a man, versus her current marriage to a nonbinary, AFAB spouse:

But in my current marriage, nearly everything about the way we manage household and family labor differs from my first one. Some of this is, no doubt, because Ash and I have more similar values around family, parenting, and our household. A lot of it, though, is that Ash and I were both raised as girls. We were both raised to be tidy, to pay attention to detail, to seek approval, and to prioritize others, even at our own expense. In my experience, there is a vast difference, both emotionally and practically, in having a partner who was socialized female, versus one who was socialized male.

Or maybe it’s something a little more nuanced — that, though Ash is nonbinary, we still feel that we have a same-sex partnership, a relationship in which there isn’t an ‘other’ gender. Neither of us is ‘the man.’ Neither of us is ‘the woman.’ When it comes to the responsibilities of our home and our family, we tend instinctively to divvy them up based on what we are good at, what we prefer, what we have time for — in other words, according to preference and availability. 

I did not expect to have this story

Which sounds a lot like the utopian communal living Charlotte Perkins Gilman dreamed of. Anne Allison ends her paper on a hopeful note, with an observation from a Japanese friend whose own mother packed very simple, non-artistic obento throughout her life, and raised her children in a gender-neutral environment. The friend is now "an exceptionally independent woman," free of the gendered social strictures that constrain so many Japanese mothers. Allison asks, "If motherhood is not only watched and manipulated by the state but made by it into a conduit for ideological indoctrination, could not women subvert the political order by redesigning obento?"

I try to, as I raise two boys, "redesigning obento" by ensuring my household labor is visible, pushing for equal distribution of labor with my husband, and making my children help out. It's a work in progress, but it's something to keep me sane until that commune comes to pass. How about you?

1. Gilman believed in eugenics, so this utopia was meant for white, middle class women only, but we don't have to let that stop us.

2. True story.

3. Allison, A. (1991). Japanese Mothers and Obentōs: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus. Anthropological Quarterly, 64(4), 195–208. You can read a full PDF of the article here.

4. In the US, 80% of mothers say they are the ones who usually grocery shop and cook.