At the corner of Bloor Street West and Avenue Rd in Toronto, there’s a stately old building that used to belong to U of T. I can’t quite remember what the stone-etched sign says, but it’s something like “Department of Household and Domestic Science.” Back in the day, women attending college to get their MRS. degree would head here to learn how to cook, clean and raise children. Today, it’s a Club Monaco outlet, selling readymade clothes to busy people who fit cooking, cleaning and child-rearing in between making money and doing important things.

A week or so ago, Michael Pollan published a New York Times magazine piece on food celebrity called “No One Cooks Here Anymore.” Pollan is a personal favourite, both as a food writer and biology journalist. But, like many other women, I wasn’t thrilled with how, in the cooking piece, he linked feminism to the decline of cooking and therefore, the increase in poor health and obesity. Or rather, I didn’t mind that. What I did mind was how Pollan idealized the kitchen, suggesting that women (and men, which he said numerous times) should return to cooking because it’s an essential quality that makes us human. It’s not, he said, like those other dreary chores we’ve thankfully abandoned because of feminism—for example, sewing.

It is a shame that women saw cooking as drudgery, but in holding it above other domestic tasks, Pollan refuses to see just why we did. His oversimplification obscures the fact that cooking three meals a day for four (or six, or ten) people was just part of the housekeeping package—women were also planning the meals and buying the groceries, doing everyone’s laundry and cleaning the toilets, plus rearing the kiddies and providing elder and healthcare. Then we were supposed to put on lipstick and suppress any of our own issues before hubby came home from the “real” world. To idealize cooking and ignore the rest of it is to again devalue the big, exhausting whole of domesticity, which is exactly why women sprinted out of the house in the first place.

The loss of all Domestic Sciences has left us worse off. We need to figure out a way to bring ‘em back. Take sewing, Pollan’s example. Mass-produced clothing is often made under heinous labour conditions, then comes home with us in plastic bags that find their way out to the ocean. Real sewing (classified and priced as an essential, not a hobby) could go a long way in fixing that—to paraphrase Pollan from the piece, have as big a wardrobe you like, as long as you make it yourself. As for cleaning, using the non-toxic stuff indeed requires more effort and time; I fit it in, cause for me that’s far better than using brand name products with potentially poisonous outgases. Childcare is a vast, unwieldy topic—suffice it to say I was shocked to see a City of Toronto brochure given to my new mom friend with “tips” like “Don’t leave your baby alone in the bath.” Losing centuries of domestic knowledge has actually put us in danger.

I was born a feminist, and I do find it sad that definitions of “equality” so often devalue the home. What’s always been needed is a way to properly value domestic work, in the same way all that money- and stuff-making is valued out in the public sphere. (First step: men contributing a fair and equal share.) Ten thousand years ago (in the 1980s), New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring began advocating that tasks like child-rearing be included in countries’ GDP, a provocative idea that’s still fascinating today.

Of course, no one does that. Instead, we eat processed foods, wear pesticide-soaked clothes made by Third World children, and make ourselves sick trying to clean things. Attending to our essentials is a chore to finish as fast as possible, so that we can run out and do something that matters. Home-cooked meals are important, but getting everyone back in the kitchen is just a start.