Food and Femininity

Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857855565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica a livello agricolo

Over the space of a few generations, women's relationship with food has changed dramatically. Yet – despite significant advances in gender equality – food and femininity remain closely connected in the public imagination as well as the emotional lives of women. While women encounter food-related pressures and pleasures as individuals, the social challenge to perform food femininities remains: as the nurturing mother, the talented home cook, the conscientious consumer, the svelte and health-savvy eater. In Food and Femininity, Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston explore these complex and often emotionally-charged tensions to demonstrate that food is essential to the understanding of femininity today. Drawing on extensive qualitative research in Toronto, they present the voices of over 100 food-oriented men and women from a range of race and class backgrounds. Their research reveals gendered expectations to purchase, prepare, and enjoy food within the context of time crunches, budget restrictions, political commitments, and the pressure to manage health and body weight. The book analyses how women navigate multiple aspects of foodwork for themselves and others, from planning meals, grocery shopping, and feeding children, to navigating conflicting preferences, nutritional and ethical advice, and the often-inequitable division of household labour. What emerges is a world in which women's choices continue to be closely scrutinized – a world where 'failing' at food is still perceived as a failure of femininity. A compelling rethink of contemporary femininity, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the sociology of food, gender studies and consumer culture.

Chapter 1

Caring about food

We live in mercurial times when it comes to food. Consumers are swamped with information telling them to care more about what they eat—to “connect” with local farmers, to teach children where food comes from, and to stave off obesity by substituting “real food” for processed junk. While some people are accused of not caring enough about what is on their plate, others are regarded as food-obsessed—they read about it, blog about it, and watch countless hours of food television. While there are certainly people who see food simply as “fuel,” a large number of North Americans view food as key to their daily rituals, personal identities, and body projects.¹ Indeed, when we held focus groups and interviews discussing the role of food in people’s lives, we heard many passionate stories of caring about food. Consider the following five food stories shared by Kerri, Marissa, Shannon, Alyssa, and Carmen.

Kerri insists that food shopping is not really a chore, as long as she has time to enjoy it. A white occupational therapist in her mid-thirties, she delights in the opportunity to peruse the aisles, read labels, and select fresh produce. In fact, she and her friend Brenda sometimes meet for midnight “dates” at a 24-hour grocery store, so they can “float around” and “really take your time.” Turning to her partner, Brad, Kerri says, “it’s different than going with you.” When Brad rolls his eyes, Kerri laughs, adding, “you’d be clippin’ on my heels.” Indeed, Brad articulates a very different ideal shopping experience: “Nothing pleases me more than being able to go in and out . . . know what I want, get it, nail it, check out and be in the car within fifteen minutes.” Kerri laughs and says, “[he] gives me a little lecture before we go. ‘We’re just getting this.’” By contrast, Kerri approaches food shopping as a reflexive process. “I like to peruse the aisles. I like to read the labels. I like to think about stuff I’ve been learning about, and reading about, and researching,” she explains. “But I would say that when I’m with you,” she turns to Brad, “I don’t look at them. I’m looking at more price when we’re together.”

Marissa makes clear that food is about much more than fuel. The 43-year-old, black project management consultant views food as the foundation for not only our personal well-being but also the well-being of our society and planet. For this reason Marissa describes ongoing efforts to “educate” her husband about the health and ethical issues related to food choices, particularly when it comes to eating meat. “At first he was just like, well, animals are there to be eaten,” she says, describing how she tried to help her husband understand the relationship between human health and industrial livestock: “animals that are anxious all the time can’t release any good thing in their bodies.” Similarly, when her husband expressed disdain for the term “organic,” Marissa responded, “let’s not use the word organic in this house. Let’s talk about slow grown.” When asked if her husband currently expresses skepticism regarding her food beliefs, she says “mild, but he likes to keep me happy because that keeps him happy.” Marissa laughs and continues: “But again, I think about the ethics to some extent, but him, not at all.”

“I’ve always loved to cook,” says Shannon. “To me, that’s my therapy, my getaway.” Yet, despite her love of cooking, food is a major stress in Shannon’s life. A white single mother living on social assistance, she must devote immense time and energy in an effort to nourish her daughter on their very limited income. “I coupon big time,” she explains. “I am definitely a spend-time-with-the-flyers-on-Thursday-night girl.” Shannon has developed a range of strategies for making food last, but there are issues beyond her control that leave her frustrated. “It’s sad that the stuff that takes more chemicals to produce is costing less than stuff that doesn’t,” she says. Shannon is concerned about the health and environmental impact of pesticides, hormones and antibiotics, as well as the “carbon footprint” of imported food. However, prioritizing local and organic products is not an option for her; instead, she must focus on meeting her daughter’s basic nutritional needs. Shannon sighs: “Yes, there are better options out there and I would love to choose them, but I can’t afford to cover them.” She scoffs at public figures who declare their quest to live below the poverty line for a week. “You need to get these politicians to walk into a food bank and see how degrading that feels,” she says. “It pushes us to make decisions we don’t want to make.”

Alyssa admits that, as an actor, she has to watch what she eats. Even still, she refuses to allow career pressures take the fun out of eating. “I don’t want to miss out on really enjoying food because I have to stay small for being in theatre,” she explains. The white 22-year-old has tried plenty of diets over the years and describes the Weight Watchers experience as “all these slaps on the wrist.” By contrast, Alyssa says her current vegan diet facilitates pleasurable eating even as it allows her to maintain the body size she desires as an actor. She is delighted to have found an approach to healthy eating that means “I don’t have to make sacrifices,’cause I love food so much!” Alyssa rejects her father’s accusation that she has become body-obsessed and insists that she eats healthily by choice. “[My dad] is like, ‘you think too much about what you put in your body,’” she says. “And it’s like, Dad, do you not understand that I put things in my body that I want?”

Seated around Carmen and Peter’s dining room table, the week’s meal plan is visible on the wall. “All the planning is like having another part-time job,” says Carmen (33, Chinese-Canadian), as she reflects upon the place of foodwork amid their hectic work schedules and caring for a 16-month-old son. While Peter is game to run from store to store gathering ingredients, the planning work is Carmen’s territory. “I write up the list and then I send Peter on various missions,” she explains. “But I also super micromanage everything.” This goes for cooking, too. The couple describes how Carmen will plan and prep a meal and then email Peter detailed cooking instructions to begin when he gets home. “So he is kind of doing the cooking, but it is more like the assembling,” she explains, adding, “We call it cooking through avatar.” While this system generally serves them well, they have encountered a few road bumps. Carmen says, “I came home one time and there were instructions for a cauliflower soup. And he had poured out the water that the cauliflower had cooked in!” As their friends gasp, Peter says sheepishly, “It was the worst soup of all time.” As Carmen continues, it is clear that the memory of this failed cooking project is getting her worked up all over again. “I went ballistic!” she says, her friends laughing. “It was insane, the level of my rage.”

Kerri, Marissa, Shannon, Alyssa, and Carmen all care deeply about food. We heard their impassioned food stories when we held focus groups to explore the role of food in people’s lives. At the outset of this research, we were not focused on gender. At a time when consumers are flooded with food advice—Buy local! Cook from scratch! Teach your child where food comes from!—we wanted to understand how people manage these wide-ranging food ideals in their everyday lives. We know from previous scholarship that food is closely connected to identity, joy, love, and struggle (e.g., de Solier 2013; Lupton 1996; Probyn 2000). Australian cultural studies scholar Deborah Lupton aptly describes food and eating as “intensely emotional experiences that are intertwined with embodied sensations and strong feelings . . . They are central to individuals’ subjectivity and their sense of distinction from others” (1996: 36). We saw those themes in our focus groups, but what we had not fully anticipated was the striking significance of gender within these discussions. Food and gender have a long, interwoven history, of course, and we had explored themes of gender in our previous work on foodies (Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann 2010). However, we were surprised by the continuity with previous decades of feminist struggle in the stories we heard—a discovery that ultimately motivated us to write this book. Gender was not just a side in these food discussions—it felt like the main dish.

First, there was the issue of recruiting participants: when we put out the call for focus group hosts, we encountered many, many more women than men who wanted to talk to us (and their friends) about food. And then there was the content of the conversations. Carmen and Peter’s story of “cooking through avatar” resonates with a trend that we heard repeatedly throughout these discussions: while many men were supportive with grocery shopping and cooking, women typically performed the planning work of researching and guiding family food decisions. When explaining this arrangement, many women told us that they simply care more about food, so it made sense for them to take the lead on things like making grocery lists, planning healthy meals, or teaching children about the environmental implications of their food choices. In fact, some said they cared so much about food that they actually enjoyed a lot of this food labor—or, at the very least, it was so important to their sense of self that they could not imagine not doing it.

Food was an emotional topic for many of the women we spoke to—a source of joy, guilt, hope, and anxiety. It was also a site in which they invested key aspects of their identities—as mothers and caregivers, health- and body-conscious eaters, informed foodies, and socially and environmentally committed citizens. In this research, we deliberately spoke with people who expressed an interest in food and recognize that others have a more casual relationship to their daily diet. We think that these stories of caring about food reflect a broader gender dynamic within a food-obsessed North American landscape, a dynamic that shapes both the standards that women face and the practices by which they struggle to embody them in their everyday lives. Studying food helps us understand contemporary standards for being a good mother, a responsible caregiver, a healthy woman, a discerning consumer, and an ethically mindful shopper—standards that do not always feel easy to achieve, particularly when money and time are tight.

As feminist scholars, we wanted to better understand the gendered dynamics and class inequalities reflected in these food discussions. These discussions were rarely straightforward and contained a blend of continuity and change. We spoke with men who were much more involved in foodwork than their fathers. In addition, many women described allocating tasks to their partners, and few women did all of the shopping, cooking, and clean-up. At the same time, many women felt personally responsible for food tasks in the household and experienced a pressure to handle food in ways that minimized risk and maximized family health. This sense of responsibility generated strong feelings of guilt and shame for women when standards were unmet, as well as pride and joy when foodwork goals were achieved. It was these gendered observations that kept bringing us back to the following question: Why do so many women care so much about food? This question has led us to explore others. Which women get to care about food? Which ways of caring about food are most socially valued? How is the emotional experience of foodwork shaped by access to resources? How do poor women find ways to care through food when their choices at the grocery store are limited?

As we introduce this book, it is important to state that we ourselves care about food—not only in our personal lives but also as feminist scholars. We support struggles toward gender equality and do not believe that this requires women to reject the significance of food in their lives—to throw in the apron, so to speak. We certainly do not want to diminish the history of women’s food labor, knowledge, and love in the kitchen. Although food is deeply personal, we see food as more than a matter of individual taste. Sociologically, food can be viewed as a lens into pressing questions in our contemporary world—questions about the inequalities fostered by corporate-dominated capitalist economies (Goodman et al. 2011; Guthman 2011; Nestle 2007), the struggle to promote well-being amid seemingly pervasive health risks (Lupton 1995; MacKendrick 2010; Murphy 2003; Szasz 2007), the shifting understandings of childhood and family (Beagan et al. 2008; Bugge and Almas 2006; Cairns et al. 2013, 2014; Cook 2009b) and the way toward a more environmentally and socially just future (Carolan 2011; Goodman et al. 2010; Johnston and Cairns 2012; Micheletti 2003). We propose that caring about food provides a starting point for engaging with these struggles, and we seek to contribute to a feminist food studies that builds from women’s food identities and experiences.

Scholars have known for some time that food is a way for women to express their femininity (e.g., Avakian and Haber 2005; Beagan et al. 2008; Bordo 1993; DeVault 1991; Hollows 2003a; Inness 2001b). In the oft-repeated words of feminist food scholar Marjorie DeVault, “by feeding the family, a woman conducts herself as recognizably womanly” (1991: 118). In this book, we investigate the contemporary contours of this relationship. How are food and femininity connected today? Our interest in food includes the unpaid foodwork² that goes on in the home (and sustains capitalist economies), as well as the ways that food is consumed to construct an identity. Food is about getting the daily meal on the table, but it is also about expressing creativity, seeking pleasure, connecting with others, nourishing (and controlling) the body, and enacting politics. Throughout the book, we explore how these food practices are gendered and show how food femininities emerge in the context of intersecting dynamics of race and class privilege. Our research reveals that living up to feminine food standards is profoundly shaped by access to economic and cultural capital. Because food plays into so many aspects of women’s lives, we theorize food femininities as multiple and performative, laborious and emotional, culturally articulated and embedded within material structures. Our goal is to make clear why food and femininity remain intricately connected topics that require open-minded kitchen table discussions as well as critical research.

In the next section, we pay homage to past feminist food research and raise new questions about the current moment of food and femininity. After situating our research in historical context, we outline our study and the chapters that follow.

1. Food, femininity, and feminism: A very brief history

Women have [historically] been the caretakers of our stomachs. Men have cooked for aristocrats and kings, but it was women who devoted extraordinary energy to finding, growing, preparing, and serving food to the better part of the human race. (Schenone 2003: xii)

Ideas about food and femininity are not what they used to be. Some women reading this book may not consider themselves “caretakers” of anybody’s stomach but their own. Still, the connection between women and foodwork has a striking degree of historical and cross-cultural consistency, especially in modern times. Sociologists Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs note that “in most societies women continue to carry the responsibility for the mental and manual labor of food provision” (2007: 1). Food and culture scholar Sherrie Inness writes, “Food and its preparation are strongly coded as feminine” (2001b: 1; see also Lupton 1996: 39; Schenone 2003: xii–xiii).³

Throughout much of modern Euro-American history, the idealized woman was one who cooked delicious, nourishing meals for her family, and maintained a smiling face in the midst of this domestic labor. In Colonial America, women’s cooking was a necessity for survival. Writer Emily Matchar describes this as a time of “extreme DIY” where a largely rural population learned to make what they needed to get by (2013: 30). Even though foodwork involved drudgery, survival skills and repetition, historians suggest that Colonial women also saw it as a site of joy, pride, and empowerment, particularly since it was vital for many families’ survival (Schenone 2003: 50–1). With capitalist industrialization, daily necessities gradually moved out of the household and into the industrial realm. With this movement, domestic cookery became less about producing all the daily necessities within the home and opened up a space for culinary distinction for white middle-class families. As men moved into the industrial workforce, a cultural dichotomy emerged where men “worked” outside the home and women stayed inside to “make” the home through domestic labors like cooking.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Victorian women’s domesticity was not just a separate sphere from men’s labor but was put on a pedestal, associated with self-sacrifice and feminine purity. Domestic reformers believed that a shared ideal of feminine domesticity could provide an “antidote” to class difference (Shapiro 2001: 34–5), and teaching cooking was a key way that the “masses” could be “civilized.” Describing the emerging programs to develop “scientific” cooking practices in public school, Shapiro writes that “[a] kind of democratic leveling was believed possible in the school kitchen, where the great rules and responsibilities that lay behind the perfect boiling of an egg were equally pertinent to females of all social classes” (2001: 135–6). Class differences invariably appeared, however, given the necessity for working-class women to labor outside their own home (Stansell 1987). Idealized domestic femininity was clearly most relevant to the middle- and upper-class woman, for whom the “most impressive duty was to make her home a heaven in miniature, herself the angel ready at the end of each day to receive and revive the weary worker” (Shapiro 2001: 14). Great pride was taken in the ability to host delicious meals with mouth-watering desserts, even if those dishes were, in fact, made by the hands of domestic servants (Dorfman 1992: 23; Inness 2001b; Levenstein 1988: 61).

By the twentieth century, an idealized connection between culinary standards and middle-class femininity was firmly established. Recipe books from the 1900s showed women “not only the right way to make tea sandwiches or decorate teacakes but also how to be feminine and ladylike” (Innes 2001b: 53). These recipes for femininity were clearly classed and raced, creating visible symbols of privileged white heterosexual femininity. At the same time, the connections between food and femininity reached beyond upper-middle-class white women, shaping the identities of women with less social power. As Innes (2001a: xi) aptly summarizes,

For women without access to other forms of creative expression, preparing a superior cake or batch of fried chicken has been a way to display their talent in an acceptable venue. But foods and the stereotypes attached to them also have been used to keep women (and men, too) from different races, ethnicities, and social classes in their place.

To be clear, throughout modern Euro-American history, many women have felt locked into foodwork. Historically, women were largely unable to shift the burden of this daily labor to male members of the household, although privileged white women could transfer hands-on labor to a racialized serving class (Glenn 1994). While it...