In America and many other countries to say a woman’s place is in the kitchen is to evoke a spectrum of hostile responses and rightfully so. There’s no need for a women’s lib lecture for you to know where we’ve come from and how far we’ve come.
Yet in some countries the kitchen is also the women’s place of empowerment. It is the place that they provide for their families both physically and emotionally through nourishment.
During my time spent in Honduras I toured home after home where women would proudly bring me into their kitchens and show me what they were preparing for their families that evening. As I walked into each home and treaded across everything from tile floors to dusty dirt floors I saw tables spread with multiple courses and other times pots simply filled with corn and water. I began to notice and document the disparity between these women’s lives that in turn reflected the disparity between socioeconomic classes. Yet, more importantly I gazed into the commonality they shared of family, love and generosity. There I found that the portion on the plate was irrelevant to the content of the heart.