This is idiotic for a bunch of reasons but here's another: roast beef with spuds and boiled veg, yorkies and gravy seems easy. Comfort food is easy, right? But it's not. Getting this on a table all together, hot, and correctly cooked, is a significant feat of organisation. https://twitter.com/nbc4i/status/1190291331744223232

Beef is the most difficult meat to roast correctly, because the others can all be tolerable if overdone, but beef you have to nail in a narrow range around 65C. For a largish piece, that means getting temps and timing right hours in advance. ...

Spuds are easy, but the timings there are very different and if you only have one oven like most mortals, you need to pitch time/temp according to what the beef is doing. Gravy is also easy but must be3 done after the beef is done and resting, when you are already busy with ...

... yorkies! This is a simply foolish addition to any first-timer, one-off sort of meal. Yorkshire pudding is technical, relying on specific batter/fat/temp combinations and timing that matches the other components. If you get them wrong the whole meal will suck. ...

And the boiled veg is also easy. But because this meal is end-loaded, with lots going on immediately before service (rest/carve the beef, get the spuds and yorkies done, make the gravy) here is what happens: your veg gets boiled to death, or you take them off and they're cold.

So for a casual cook just honestly trying to help his wife or mum or aunty out in the spirit of being a better man, this meal here is a disappointment machine. It looks wonderful in the photo. It accords culturally with notions of "man food".

But that's not enough. Most people who aren't already accomplished cooks will fuck it up and that will tend to dissuade them from trying more humble, sane things, and will entrench the status quo of women cooking. Aim lower, casual men who want to cook! Mac n cheese is fine.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

And here's another thing, unstated in the preceding but I hope implicit: the suggestion that a man who cooks only once a year can just get in the kitchen and whip up this meal is an insult to the women's work of putting much less glorious food on the table, day in and day out.

The notion that a casual cook should be able to rock up and cook this because women's work is easy and men can do anything women can do without much trying is an insult to the generations of women who had to earn their expertise by toil at their stoves. Bollocks to it all.