I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to discover that there are feminists talking about food. I need to post about the political ramifications of cooking one of these days, but for now, I will signal-boost the following:
photograph by janetmck
- Feminist adventures in food preservation, at Feministing. “Food has historically been a woman’s domain—at least the preparation of it. Part of the feminist revolution was challenging the inequitable division of household labor—including food preparation. Convenience foods, prepared dinners, are all linked to the new reality of multiple working parents. But they aren’t only a result of this—let’s not blame feminists for TV dinners just yet.”
- “Obesity,” health, and the pro-food movement, at Feministe. “There are several reasons why I care so much that the pro-food movement seems to be buying the mainstream line about fat. 1) I don’t think the anti-fat bias here is intentional; it seems just to be an oversight, a skipping of the necessary step of skepticism. Which shouldn’t be that hard: this is a skeptical bunch who jump to debunk, say, Big Ag’s claims that genetically modified foods are good for humanity and Big Food’s use of terms like ‘natural.’”
- The Feminist Food Studies Bookshelf, at The F-Word. “Only in the past 10 years has there emerged a critical look at the centrality of women’s relationship to food practices and the meanings embedded in them. Here’s a few of those works.”
- On fullness, at Shapely Prose. “Now, as it happens I do not react to either muffins or steak in quite the way Jerome describes, nor do I have any wish to be a tender father. But of course those specifics aren’t the point. The point is that this sort of normal, attentive, joyful, purposeful eating is a real and tragic casualty of our cultural quest for thinness. It’s terrible the way mini-mania erodes the self-esteem of all sizes of women, but it’s also terrible that it makes us unable to enjoy food qua food.”