I am a Stepford Mom

Really. According to the hip, arch copy on the orange Vitamin Water bottle, only Valium-soaked Stepford moms cook breakfast.

I have nothing against Vitamin Water; I drank five cases of the stuff during my last six weeks of pregnancy. (That was the amount left over from the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival promotional samples. We would not, of course, PAY for five cases of colored water.) But people who write hip, arch copy on bottles run the danger of making Too Many Assumptions. In this case, and particularly in this economy, it is not a wise move to disrespect women who get up in the morning and pop a pan of biscuits in the oven--or muffins, or waffles, or bacon and eggs. Cooking breakfast from scratch is not hard, it is not time-consuming, and it's a heck of a lot more cost- and nutrition-effective than popping by Dunkin Donuts.

When you bake something yourself, you know what is in it. My biscuits, for example, contain organic whole wheat flour, butter, sea salt, aluminum-free baking powder, and organic milk. They don't contain high fructose corn sweetener, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, superfine white flour, processed dairy by-products, or preservatives.

(Not that 'preservatives' are necessarily a bad thing. I recently purchased a jar of marinated herring prominently labeled "No Preservatives;" the ingredients were herring, onions, vinegar, sugar, salt, spices, black pepper and wine. Somebody needs to brush up on the history of food preservation techniques.)

In the pursuit of feminist equality, we take the disrespect of 'women's work' much, much too far. I don't consider baking to be a symbol of oppression, but rather of freedom. I like to bake; in times of anxiety it calms me down. It's alchemical, and produces a tangible result, unlike the vast majority of what passes itself off as 'work' these days.