The spirited discussions around evolving gender roles and dynamics, caste relations, wage labour and domestic work, and changing consumption patterns driven by the internet and social media, have done little to destabilise ghar ka khaana as an article of faith in contemporary Indian societies. The sentimentality around fresh, made-from-scratch meals cuts across social and economic boundaries and continues to have immense cachet. Representation of cooking in Indian cinemas transcends its sustenance role. It is a moral universe where a woman’s worth is measured in perfectly made chapatis or evenly cooked rice. The camera’s gaze has remained stubbornly fixed on women’s culinary labour as the ultimate expression of feminine attributes of love and care.
Hindi films have portrayed cooking competence as the fundamental measure of acceptable womanhood. Tamil cinema consistently depicts the ‘perfect wife’ through elaborate cooking montages, where female protagonists’ redemption arcs invariably include mastering traditional recipes. Bengali cinema’s ‘kitchen politics’ sequences – where mothers-in-law supervise daughters-in-law’s cooking – reveal how female surveillance enforces culinary patriarchy. Telugu commercial films regularly feature elaborate scenes where heroines prove their worth by feeding male protagonists, who sit in judgment of both food and the cook.
The ghar ka khaana mandate is not simply about nutrition but also control. When women embrace convenience – for instance, using microwave ovens for cooking – they are not merely making a meal choice but committing a cultural transgression that invites judgment, guilt and accusations of maternal or spousal negligence. Cinema does not just reflect reality – it prescribes it, creating impossible standards that millions of women are expected to pursue, regardless of the personal cost.
What’s rarely depicted? The sheer exhaustion behind these meals. The repetitive labour. Malayalam films like The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) and its recent Hindi remake, Mrs., may critique this burden, but they are exceptions proving the rule. By foregrounding tedious labour, they make visible the invisible infrastructure upon which family harmony rests. Where mainstream films sanitise domestic spaces and idealise familial relations, films like The Great Indian Kitchen and Mrs. make use of one of the lesser-used storytelling tropes – repetition – to foreground the endless cycle of discrimination and servitude.
Social media has weaponised home cooking into a competitive performance art. Sure, some of it makes visible lost or marginalised culinary heritage, but much of it unambiguously aligns with the engagement-driven influencer culture. In the sprawling online food content subcultures, it has become difficult to distinguish the currents of culture, commerce, and politics. Is cooking each meal fresh from scratch an innocent celebration of tradition? Or is it reflective of the hustle to carve out, now and then, a lucrative content niche? Or, does it foreshadow the conservative tradwives subculture – the idolisation of the 1950s housewife untainted by the women’s liberation movement – gaining ground in the US?
Cooking is merely the visible tip of a vast, submerged iceberg of domestic labour. The “What I Feed My Family” genre of social media content establishes unattainable benchmarks while carefully concealing the economic and caste privilege that makes such elaborate meal preparation possible. The meal appears on the table as if by magic, but behind each dish lies an exhausting exercise of planning, cooking and cleaning, sometimes entirely by those who neither get adequate compensation nor respect.
When we demand fresh meals three times daily, we are not just asking for food, we are extracting unpaid labour central to society’s smooth functioning and the economy’s wheels without appearing on any balance sheet. This reproductive labour – cooking, cleaning, childcare – remains conspicuously absent from macroeconomic calculations while enabling every measurable economic activity. What is even less acknowledged is how this scaffolding is held together by the labour of the society’s most vulnerable and discriminated.
One may argue that the representation of food in the media, especially its obsession with fresh and made-from-scratch cooking, represents a resistance to commercial food systems. After all, we all do our best to fortify our communities and families from the harms that emanate from the rampant commercialism of our food systems. But the sentimentality attached to the “good life” fantasy, of which freshly made food is a centrepiece, could be nourishing and strengthening in the short term. It is eventually obstructive.
The inordinate focus, say, on the grinding of grains, the kneading of the dough, and the baking of bread turns meals into emotional artefacts. These emotional artefacts eventually come to embody a cluster of promises for us: an intimate knowledge of what sustains us, authenticity in an artificial world, and sovereignty over consumption. Yet these promises remain tantalisingly unattainable for most, creating what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant terms the “impasse” – a suspended present where aspiration never quite materialises into lived reality.
The homemade aesthetic tries to create a community around common fantasies. The fresh chapati becomes not just food but a character in our collective drama of resistance against modernity, where everything is processed. Yet this simultaneously masks structural conditions – the privilege of time, space and resources needed to participate in this world of aesthetics. The cruel optimism, per Berlant, lies precisely here: in promising liberation through labour-intensive domestic work while creating new regimes of discipline. The very aesthetic that positions itself against commercialisation becomes another form of affective labour demanded of people already stretched thin by precarity. What appears as resistance actually reinforces the fantasy that individual consumption choices rather than collective action will save us. Perhaps the cruellest optimism of all.
The way to ethical eating does not start from our kitchens. It starts in the policymaking circles, farms, factories and markets. To primarily think of ethical eating as a private matter transforms resistance into yet another domestic burden. The woman who works full-time is also expected to source local produce, read labels, avoid plastic packaging, etc. The system brilliantly defuses opposition by exhausting its most likely agitators.
Ethical eating does not require individual heroics. It needs collective infrastructure. Community food cooperatives, for instance, may build collective power while distributing labour across individual households. Imagine an average middle-class housing society in Mumbai with hundreds of apartments and hundreds of kitchens. Imagine also that some of the key resources and responsibilities of these hundred apartments and kitchens are pooled. Imagine, now that we are at it, cooking collectives that can transform the isolated labour that goes into a hundred discrete meal preparation and cooking into a communal practice. Imagine, even as we navigate the various social faultlines and run into the walls of reality, what this transformation can do for hundreds of, what sociologists Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung call, second shifts.
Advocating for policy change can accomplish more than a lifetime of anxious label-reading. If we care about what we put into our bodies and those we love, it should not be difficult to care about the conditions in which our food is produced and the people who sustain it. The more we keep our distance from issues of production – pesticides, antibiotics, labour practices, discrimination, wages – the more vulnerable we become as consumers as these issues escalate unchecked.
An ethical food system cannot be built on feminine sacrifice at individual stovetops but on a reimagined idea of community and infrastructure that distributes both work and rewards. We need our films and the broader media culture to tell stories that engage with this imagination. The revolution will not be home-pickled.
Paromita Ghosh is a Mumbai-based media professional working across linear and streaming platform.
