海外文化:男性下厨成新潮流

Men are spending more and more time in the kitchen encouraged by celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, according to a report from Oxford University.

The effect of the celebrity role models, who have given cookery a more macho image, has combined with a more general drive towards sexual equality, to mean men now spend more than twice the amount of time preparing meals than they did in 1961.

According to research by Prof Jonatahn Gershuny, who runs the Centre for Time Research at Oxford, men now spend more than half an hour a day cooking, up from just 12 minutes a day in 1961.

Prof Gershuny said: "The man in the kitchen is part of a much wider social trend. There has been 40 years of gender equality, but there is another 40 years probably to come."

Women, who a generation ago spent a fraction under two hours a day cooking, now spend just one hour and seven minutes – a dramatic fall, but they still spend far more time at the hob than men.

Some commentators have dubbed the emergence of men in aprons as "Gastrosexuals", who have been inspired to pick up a spatula by the success of Ramsay, Oliver as well as other male celebrity chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Marco Pierre White and Keith Floyd.

"I was married in 1974. When my father came to visit me a few weeks later I was wearing an apron when I opened the door. He laughed," said Prof Gershuny

"That would never happen now."

The report, commissioned by frozen food company Birds Eye, also makes clear that the family meal is limping on in far better health than some have suggested, thanks in part to a resurgence in cooking from scratch by some consumers.

Two-thirds of adults claim that they come together to share at least three times a week, even if it is not necessarily around a kitchen or dining room table.

Anne Murphy, general manager at Birds Eye, said: "The evening meal is still clearly central to family life and with some saying family time is on the increase and the appearance of a more frugal consumer, we think the return to traditionalism will continue as a trend.”

However, Prof Gershuny pointed out that the family meal was now rarely eaten by all of its members around a table – with many "family meals" in fact taken on the sofa in the sitting room, and shared by disparate members of the family.

"The family meal has changed very substantially, and few of us eat – as I did when I was a child – at least two meals a day together as a family. But it has survived in a different format."