Ladies, wife material is about a woman's ability to cook! Period!

Methinks, ‘Wife material’ is euphemism for ‘woman who knows and likes to cook’. The rest of the qualities relationship experts, sexologist, and clueless know-it-alls gossip about in chamas are side shows, better yet hogwash. Forget the ‘men-think-about-sex-all-the-time’ urban legend. Men think about food more than they do sex. 

 The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Ladies, if you are a joke in the kitchen, my dear you are toast. Dislike for cooking and lousy cooking have seen women get rejected, jilted in love, beaten and even killed! Oh yes! Men kill their wives over food. To men, there is a very thin line between hunger and anger.

Just the other day, a male colleague whined to me for close to — I swear — one solid hour about the bad ugali he ate at a five star-hotel. He claimed the sukuma wiki and fatty chicken wings on his plate had set his taste buds on fire.

But unfortunately, when he dug in the ugali, hoping to cut a sizable chunk, knead it into a bolus, scoop the fatty sukuma wiki and shovel it into his mouth, the shenzi piece of ugali shattered into debris, leaving him cursing and agonizing. You would have seen his face as he narrated. He said he was so worked up that, were this a banana republic where people get a way with murder, he would have shot dead the chef had he had a gun.

Last year news that a man in Kakamega had killed his wife because she served him beef stew instead of chicken, send tongues wagging. Killing a wife over a delicacy is not just a Kakamega thing. Men world over, are known to be overly sensitive about food.

Take, for instance, in Florida, US. One Desmond Brownlee, not long ago, chocked and strangled his wife because she ate his fried chicken leftovers without his permission. She ate his chicken and when the sulky man, in a fit of self righteous rage, decided to cook more chicken, she taunted and criticised his cooking style. Picture a man putting his wife on chock-hold (ngeta) in the kitchen, yelling “b!tc#, where are my f@*n left over chicken wings, drumsticks and the gizzard!”

Still in the US, in Kentucky, one lunatic by the name Stanley Neace was recently so pissed off with how badly his wife had prepared his breakfast eggs that he killed her, a step daughter and three other neighbours. It was reported that the miscreant went on rampage with a short gun, and in his pyjamas, chased around his wife and shot her and their neigbours whose house she had run to hide. What’s more, the idiot also killed himself.

And in India, a scoundrel by the name Kamlya Waghmare wasted his wives for refusing to cook lunch. Waghmare murdered her following a tiff they had earlier. A tiff that had seen her go on strike, consequently ‘withdrawing labour’, which included, among others, cooking.

And I suspect she must have also denied him the other ‘special food’. Still in the same country, a man recently killed his wife when he found out that the vegetables she served him did not have tomatoes. He slammed her head against the wall —kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom — to death.

Actually, our Mluhya man is in great company. In Pakistan a husband by the name Noor Hussain cancelled his wife’s Christmas for cooking wrong dinner. She cooked lentils (minji) instead of goat stew which her mzee was craving. He canned her to death. Need I go on? Girls, there is a special bond between men and food. Come between them at your own risk.