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Yes, teach your boy child how to cook

Author, Stella Riunga Rop. 

What you need to know:

  • Before you start thinking about expensive USAID-funded programmes for boy child empowerment, I would like to tell you about a very simple avenue for boy child empowerment that will not cost millions of shillings. The secret is this: teach the boy child to cook. There! Ridiculously simple, isn’t it?

Ahem! Fellow women, Father’s Day is next Sunday. You know these men always like to complain that the only things we gift them are socks, handkerchiefs and bills (ha ha!). This time around, let’s gift them something that they would actually like and make use of. On behalf of all the fathers with drawers overflowing with socks, thank you so much!

But, before fathers were fathers, they were boys. And there has been a lot of talk about boy child empowerment. I agree, 100 per cent. I am all for it because empowering the boy child is improving our future. 

Before you start thinking about expensive USAID-funded programmes for boy child empowerment, I would like to tell you about a very simple avenue for boy child empowerment that will not cost millions of shillings. The secret is this: teach the boy child to cook. There! Ridiculously simple, isn’t it?

Let me explain. Cooking, first of all, is a life skill. There is no magic in a woman’s breasts or waist that makes her know how to cook (don’t we all know some very terrible female cooks?!)–it is a taught and learned skill.

If a girl can learn how to cook, then so can a boy. I am thinking about this for the sake of the hungry, malnourished bachelors out there thinking “I really need a wife so I can have someone to cook for me.” 

This is the kind of primitive thinking that leads one to marry the next available skirt-wearing creature, without proper assessment and evaluation, and often with disastrous results.

Teach your boy child how to cook, and he will not be approaching marriage from a point of desperation and hunger, as if he were a starving lion out in the wilderness. Teach your boy child how to cook and he will have a happier marriage, because his future wife will appreciate having someone that can feed the family just as well as she can. 

Teach your boy child how to cook and he will not be consuming cholesterol by the kilogramme in unhygienic restaurants. Yes, teach your boy child how to cook!