I have just eaten what may be the world’s most expensive tomato. It comes from a little region of Philadelphia better known for sports culture than horticulture and was cultivated by yours truly. I spent only a few dollars on the plant, but then I had to buy a tomato cage and a few companion plants to keep it company. Then I had to spend an ungodly amount of time watering it and hacking away at weeds. In short: I put a huge amount of emotional investment into that tomato. Was it worth it? Absolutely not. I should have just gone to Aldi.
Of course, the tomato growing wasn’t really about saving money, it was about saving my sanity. Earlier this year, my wife and I got a plot at our local community garden; buoyed up by this development, I decided to ward off existential angst by throwing myself into tradwife-adjacent hobbies such as gardening and baking. I don’t know if it’s possible to be a gay tradwife but, after Googling the subject, I did find a magazine piece entitled The Curious Case of the Bisexual Tradwife. Alas, I can’t tell you much more about the phenomenon because there was a paywall. There are a lot of walls to pay in this life and this one did not make the cut.
While bisexual tradwives may be on the rise, my sourdough isn’t. I acquired some sourdough starter at a community garden fermentation and pickling workshop and, channelling my inner tradwife, I fed it religiously for a couple of weeks before I forgot about it and it died a pungent death. Nary a loaf was baked; the closest I got was buying some bread flour in the supermarket.
My interest in growing my own seems to have perished, too. Gardening is not the relaxing hobby it’s made out to be; it’s extremely hard work. I would go to the allotment feeling perky and return exhausted, covered in dirt and mosquito bites with bits of twig stuck in my hair. After I neglected my duties for a couple of weeks due to a heatwave, the weeds took over and I received an official violation warning from the garden’s Plot Monitoring Committee. If you get two warnings you get kicked out, and now I, a diligent rule-follower, live in fear of the dreaded second one.
Anyway, good on the tradwives for making domestic drudgery and hard labour into an aspirational aesthetic, but I think I’ll pass. Forget touching grass, it’s back to doomscrolling on the couch.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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