Caring About Food

Abstract

This article draws on interviews with “foodies”—people with a passion for eating and learning about food—to explore questions of gender and foodie culture. The analysis suggests that while this culture is by no means gender-neutral, foodies are enacting gender in ways that warrant closer inspection. This article puts forward new empirical findings about gender and food and employs the concept of “doing gender” to explore how masculinities and femininities are negotiated in foodie culture. Our focus on doing gender generates two insights into gender and food work. First, we find that doing gender has different implications for men and women within foodie culture. Alongside evidence that foodies are contesting particular gendered relations within the food world, we explore how broader gender inequities persist. Second, we contend that opportunities for doing gender in foodie culture cannot be considered apart from class privilege.

Feeding the extended family: gender, generation, and socioeconomic disadvantage in food provision to children

“…There was supposedly no sugar and no TV at Mark's place, and this is relationally understood as a contrast to Kimberley's own, nutritionally worse, home, where Logan "can have macaroni and cheese and hot dogs." Describing herself as a "horrible cook," exemplified by typically "easy" and quick dishes (Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann 2010;Mellor, Blake, and Crane 2010;Neuman, Gottzén, and Fjellström 2017b;Parsons 2016), Kimberley framed Logan's father as her culinarily skilled counterpart. His hummus making was but one example, but Kimberley's general story was about a single unemployed dad who assumed responsibility for feeding his son and taught him how to cook, at times by making food together (cf.…”

Food Allergies and the Hygienic Sublime

“…Alongside this process, the popularity of cultural icons such as Martha Stewart has helped to cement the association between order and white femininity more specifically (Bentley, 2001). What is more, domestic work such as food preparation continues to drive the responsibilization of many women in the United States today, creating good caretakers through enticing engagements with, for example, foodie culture (Parr, 2002;Cairns, Johnston, & Baumann, 2010). Cooking nutritious, pathogen-free, aesthetically pleasing food remains a central pillar of the domestic expectations for the homemakers and caretakers in food allergy families in the United States.…”

“…In the process, it intensified mothers' moral duty to do housework and further naturalized the idea that a woman's place in the world was primarily as a caretaker. Contemporary food icons, such as Martha Stewart (Bentley, 2001), and trends like "foodie culture" (Cairns, Johnston, & Baumann, 2010) and the ubiquitous Starbucks pumpkin spice latte (Powell & Engelhardt, 2015), continue to draw some of their cachet from the associations with white femininity that attach to them in part as a consequence of longer histories of home hygiene.…”

Om mat og menn

“…I tillegg kommer menn som har bodd alene, eller har hatt et arbeid som har gjort det nødvendig å oppholde seg lenge borte fra hjemmet (Swenson, 2009;Harris og Giuffre 2015 Litteraturen peker på at kvinner gjerne forstår sin matlaging som en hverdagspraksis rettet mot andre, og som en del av det å skape og opprettholde et hjem. Menns praksiser beskrives derimot som selvorientert, og innrammet som fritid, kreativitet, eller rett og slett instrumentell vomfyll (Adler 1981;Gorman-Murray 2008;Swenson 2009;Cairns, Johnston og Baumann 2010). Szabo og Koch (2018) peker imidlertid på flere studier som viser en pågående endring i Skandinavia, Canada, Japan, Storbritannia og Australia, hvor matlaging i stadig sterkere grad framstår som en attraktiv maskulin kvalitet.…”