
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 20, 1993                   TAG: 9309180114
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

OF MICROWAVES, SEXISM AND HOMEMADE SPAGHETTI

I was very much surprised, as we used to say in Radford, to wake from this really great series of nightmares to find this colorful book on the kitchen table.

It was titled: "For Men Only: Mastering the Microwave."

And I wondered why people who are in enough trouble already because of their nightmares have to put up with sexist trash like that. I don't know how the book got there. I don't want to know.

The title says that men are too dumb to use microwaves. You ever heard of a book called: "For Women Only: Mastering the Chainsaw?" You bet your last packet of Pop Secret you haven't.

Sure. The only things I know how to prepare in the microwave are popcorn and baked potatoes. And, sure, that's because there are these buttons on the front that say "Popcorn" and "Baked Potato."

But any failings I have with regard to the use of the microwave are individual and personal and are not properly attributed to the male sex in general.

The authors are aggressive. They expect me to know how many watts my oven has. Like any good American I lost the owner's manual instantly. I suspect it's been recycled into a milk carton by now.

Progress in this country demands too much of us, my fellow Americans. There was a time when you know where you stood with watts. If you wanted to change a light bulb, you just looked at it and the wattage was printed right on it.

I wouldn't want to return to the Great Depression, but you didn't have to worry about technology. You sometimes worried about starving, but that is a rather non-technical worry.

If you had a wooden icebox and a kitchen range that was coal-fired, you could laugh at anybody who wanted to know about watts. All you did was put this card in the window to tell the man how many pounds of ice you wanted and fire up the stove to cook the pinto beans.

Just for the record here, my old man was a passable short-order cook, and the spaghetti he made at home gained him a modest fame in the Middle Shenandoah Valley.

I think that ownership of a microwave might have broken his spirit.

But let's forget sexism here and look at two of the recipes in this book.

One tells you how to make lasagna using, among other ingredients, chicken and fennell seeds.

I want to be on record here as saying I would rather be dragged behind my own Cherokee than eat lasagna made of chicken and fennell seeds. I say this in total ignorance of what a fennell seed is.

I also say that I will never touch a praline made according to a George Bush recipe as long as there is breath in my body.

by CNB