Food, Gender, Culture

Taking an exploration into the gendered politics of food, this dissertation interrogates the intimate and complex relationship between gender and food consumption, a relationship which at first glance seems to be trivial and frivolous, but is in fact a significant embodied, political, and cultural practice. It argues that food consumption is an important, embodied practice through which masculinities are disciplined and controlled. Furthermore, it is shown that food consumption (re)produces more broadly assumptions about gender as something that is natural, and essential. It argues that what we eat not only (re)produces gendered binaries, but it is also framed by normalizing discourses of class, race, and sexuality that mask over inequalities and render particular identities invisible. Using three focus groups of both vegetarian and non-vegetarian men, I will argue that vegetarian masculinities simultaneously reinforce and destabilize discourses of normative masculinity which are entirely contextual. In doing this, this dissertation offers an original contribution and an exploration into the everyday, embodied practices in which a group of vegetarian men negotiate normative masculinity.  It will consider the political salience of consuming particular foods, in particular places and raise questions about the intersections of food, gender, race, class, and sexuality. Importantly, I hope to open up a space for further discussion around the sexual politics of food, an area that until now has been given modest attention by feminist scholars.

This article analyses the constructions and negotiations of masculine identity in New Nordic Cuisine. It focuses on cookbooks by the leading figures, namely Claus Meyer and René Redzepi. The article argues that Meyer and Redzepi represent different negotiations of Nordic culinary masculinity played out in distinct culinary spaces: respectively the domestic and the professional kitchen. At the same time, both men make great effort to distance their culinary practices not only from a traditional understanding of women’s everyday cooking, but also from the food and gender practices of hypermasculine chefs. Meyer and Redzepi both strike a precarious balance: not becoming too close to “the feminine”, but simultaneously remaining unmistakable from traditional, culinary masculinity.

In this paper, I examine images of sweets—cakes, cookies, and parfaits—in texts by artists Hagio Moto (b. 1949) and Yoshinaga Fumi (b. 1971) in order to trace an unremarkable history of shōjo manga. My analysis suggests that feminist scholars of Japanese girls’ culture have largely avoided emphasizing conventional femininities circulated through many shōjo manga; instead, they focus on a narrative concerning the subversive qualities of the genre due to its rejection of gender and sexual norms. Describing representations of sweetness in terms of desire and disgust, I reflect upon possibilities for feminist perspectives that simultaneously allow for both pleasure and critique with the everyday consumption of shōjo manga.

In this course we seek to co-explore the cultural byways of food, and situate food at center of many core aspects of being human. Thus we will consider food in light of practicing things such as gender, class, labour, nation, state, and industry.

The article examines masculinity constructions in European food television in the 21 st century. It is informed by poststructural gender theory and it understands "doing food" and "doing masculinity" as two mutually constituting practices. The analyses identify four new tendencies in the construction of masculinity in cooking shows at the beginning of the 21st century: 1) Rechefisation; 2) The TV chef as a moral entrepreneur; 3) The TV chef and the revitalization of the national myth; 4) Cooking as masculine escapism. The article concludes that the innovation of the masculine identity that could be read into The Naked Chef (1999-2001) has not continued. Rather, the genre has become a platform for the revitalization of traditional masculinity discourses.

The styling and online circulation of food photography has become a phenomenon endemic to social media. In this article, I explore this digital “food porn” within the feminized space of food blogs and contextualize it within a postfeminist culture rife with contradictions about women’s bodies, consumption, and sexuality. Drawing on postfeminist and feminist corporeal theory, I historicize the longstanding associations between food and the female body, eating and sex. I then analyze digital “food porn” as a form of women’s media production that draws on conventional representations of the female body in pornography, fashion, and popular culture. It is these qualities that distinguish digital “food porn” from “food porn” on other media platforms, and allow it to offer useful insights into the postfeminist subject’s construction of digital femininity. I maintain that digital “food porn” can be read as a playful, pleasurable, and entrepreneurial response to postfeminist contradictions.

In this course we seek to co-explore the cultural byways of food, and situate food at center of many core aspects of being human. Thus we will consider food in light of practicing things such as gender, class, labour, nation, state, and industry.

In a radical departure from previous ethnographies of food, this book asks how and why food is pivotal to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not-normal. It does so by describing the production, consumption, distribution, and disposal of ‘normal Bengali food’ in middle-class households that employ cooks from poor classes, and in Bengali restaurants, in contemporary Calcutta (India) and Dhaka (Bangladesh). In a rare comparative foray into Bengali Hindu and Muslim food-ways on both sides of the border, the book includes addas (‘idle-talk’) and interviews with both men and women. It initiates a dialogue that links issues of agency, place, hospitality, and ownership with a new field that places food as an ‘artefact’ at the centre of its inquiry. It invites the reader throughout to approach food afresh, as the key that unlocks the complexities of what is mundane yet profound — the everyday.

The book thus analyses the constant and fraught negotiations that feed into definitions of normality, class and identity through networks of human and non-human interactions – persons, places, and things - in the deeply intimate yet intensely public domain of food. Food transactions here provide a window into shifting configurations of trust, power, and conflict integral to social relationships, shaped by events such as the 1943–44 Bengal famine, the 1947 partition of India, and the 1971 Bangladesh War.

Table of Contents:

List of Photographs

Foreword by Marilyn Strathern

Preface and Acknowledgements

Note on Language, Translation, and Transliteration of Bengali Words

1. Food as Agency: Introducing Normality

2. The Actants of a Normal Foodscape

3. 'Like Everyday’: Creating Normality

4. The Everyday Normal Sacred Kitchen

5. Of Seducing and Respectable, Hospitable and Stingy Foods: Subjectivities of Normal Food

6. Cha (tea), Gan (song), aar (and) Adda (‘idle’/’care-less’ talk): Making and Consuming Normal Food Identities

7. Normal Food and Ownership

8. Postprandial Ruminations

Bibliography

Index

Este texto aborda la cuestión de los TCA como construcción social en España. Se empieza con un análisis de su aparición
en prensa y con la presentación de los datos de su prevalencia. Los datos muestran que esta última es mayor en mujeres jóvenes, adolescentes y niñas. La prensa, por su parte, muestra una atribución de los TCA a la moda y la persecución de la esbeltez, y evidencia cierta respuesta social y política en forma de medidas de prevención y tratamiento. En una segunda sección del artículo, el autor propone un esquema interpretativo de los TCA que los considera fundamentalmente un problema de socialización en un contexto en el que la medicalización y la mercantilización se han institucionalizado como bases estructurales que inciden en la normativización de la relación del sujeto con su propio cuerpo, y con la posible participación del sujeto mismo.
Palabras clave: TCA, prensa, socialización, medicalización, mercantilización, identidad y alteridad.

Abstract: This paper addresses the issue of eating disorders as a
social construction in Spain. It begins with an analysis of their
occurrence in press and the presentation of data on its prevalence. The data show that the latter is higher in young women, adolescents and girls. The press, meanwhile, shows an allocation of TCA to fashion and the pursuit of thinness, and evidence certain social and political response in the form of preventive measures and treatment. In a second section of the article, the author proposes an interpretive scheme that considers the TCA fundamentally a problem of socialization in a context in which the medicalization and commodification are institutionalized as affecting structural basis of standardization of the subject’s relationship with her own body, and with the possible participation of the subject itself.
Keywords: TCA press, socialization, medicalization, commodification, identity and otherness.

Εισαγωγή-Σκοπός: Η συσχέτιση του βάρους σώματος των ηρώων των παιδικών κινουμένων σχεδίων με τις διατροφικές επιλογές και τα ατομικά χαρακτηριστικά τους.
Υλικό-Μέθοδοι: Σε 100 επεισόδια των 10 δημοφιλέστερων παιδικών σειρών της ελληνικής τηλεόρασης εξετάστηκαν 37 κεντρικοί ήρωες. Διερευνήθηκε η πιθανή συσχέτιση ανάμεσα στο βάρος σώματος
(υπέρβαρο/κανονικό/λεπτό), το είδος τροφίμων που καταναλώνουν-βασικά, όπως λαχανικά, φρούτα,
γαλακτοκομικά, ή μη βασικά, όπως αλμυρά σνακ, γλυκά, αναψυκτικά- αλλά και τα ατομικά
χαρακτηριστικά τους, όπως η εξωτερική εμφάνιση, η σωματική δραστηριότητα, η αποδοχή των άλλων.
Αποτελέσματα: Εικοσιένα ήρωες ήταν κανονικού βάρους, 10 ήταν αδύνατοι και έξι υπέρβαροι. Συνολικά, οι ήρωες κατανάλωναν διπλάσιο αριθμό (ν=120) μη βασικών τροφίμων από ό,τι βασικά
(ν=59), ενώ οι υπέρβαροι περισσότερα μη-βασικά τρόφιμα συγκριτικά με τους λεπτούς και κανονικού βάρους συμπρωταγωνιστές. Συσχετίσεις βρέθηκαν μεταξύ του βάρους σώματος των χαρακτήρων και της εξωτερικής τους εμφάνισης (p<0,001), της σωματικής τους δραστηριότητας, αλλά και της αποδοχής τους από τους άλλους (p<0,05), ώστε εννέα από τους 10 λεπτούς χαρακτήρες χαρακτηρίστηκαν όμορφοι, σωματικά δραστήριοι, απολαμβάνοντας την αποδοχή των συμπρωταγωνιστών. Αντιθέτως, κανένας από
τους υπέρβαρους δεν χαρακτηρίστηκε όμορφος, ενώ παρουσιάζονταν λιγότερο δραστήριοι και είχαν ουδέτερη αποδοχή από τους άλλους.
Συμπεράσματα: Η μελέτη αναδεικνύει την προβολή συγκεκριμένων προτύπων διατροφής και σώματος στις παιδικές σειρές. Η κατανάλωση τροφής διαφέρει ανάλογα με το βάρος σώματος των ηρώων ενώ θετικά ατομικά χαρακτηριστικά αφορούν συνήθως αδύνατους ήρωες. Έρευνα περαιτέρω θα πρέπει να
εξετάσει εάν τα προβαλλόμενα πρότυπα έχουν πραγματικό αντίκτυπο στις διατροφικές επιλογές των παιδιών και στην αντίληψη που διαμορφώνουν για την εξωτερική εμφάνιση και το σώμα.

and Keywords This article explores how food and drink in opera convey meaning, define relationships, trigger psychophysical reactions, and denote dramatis and singers' personae. It proposes a basic theoretical foundation of " operatic gastromusicology " by outlining five primary functions of food in opera: social, intimate, denotative, medicinal, and dietary. These five functions are exemplified through the analysis of gastronomic signs in Verdi's Traviata. The opera and its performance history illustrate how the production of this opera reflects the changing culture of food and the body. Luchino Visconti's production in Milan's La Scala in 1955, with Maria Callas as the consumptive protagonist, was in this respect a watershed in the history of opera. The singer's rapid and prodigious weight loss prior to this performance triggered an epochal shift in opera culture toward an unprecedented conflation of the dramatis and singer's persona.

In this article, Courtney Lee Weida explores art practices of ceramics relating to themes of flesh and consumption. Beyond ceramic sculptures of animals and vessels used to store and serve meat, there are subtle themes and symbols of animals and flesh surrounding the clay medium.

This publication is based on the five year Nordic discussion dealing with food and its various roles and meanings in the contemporary society.
The discussion has mainly been carried out amongst five university departments, their lecturers, researchers, visiting scholars and enthusiastic students. The Department of Food, Health and Environment from Gothenbourg University, the Department of Food, Nutrition and Dietetics from University of Uppsala and the Department of Curriculum Research, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University from Copenhagen have been the long standing partners. Akershus University College from Norway participated in the beginning of the project and Tallin University from Estonia joined the group two years ago. The Department of Home Economics and Craft Science at University of Helsinki, Finland has coordinated the project. A careful reader will notice that the names of the participating departments have changed during the project and the swaping of names seems just to continue. These structural changes in each university have made the academic discussion more needed than ever.

An essay is presented on rhetorical strategies used to create relationships between people. It offers the views of a cultural outsider observing waitresses at a Southern United States Waffle House restaurant, where staff often use the epithet "honey" when speaking to customers. The author describes a shift in power where the restaurant staff are in control rather than the customer and the psychological implications, sexual aspects, and relationship defining results of his being called "honey" by the waitstaff.

In this course we seek to co-explore the cultural byways of food, and situate food at center of many core aspects of being human. Thus we will consider food in light of practicing things such as gender, class, labour, nation, state, and industry.

Processes of food production and consumption have the single largest environmental impact of all human activities. The fact that diets have to change into a more sustainable direction is generally agreed upon. However, a shared vision of a sustainable and desirable society to support these changes, is missing. This thesis contributes to the question why we disagree about food sustainability and what different pathways policy makers will need to develop simultaneously to facilitate more sustainable food choices.

This thesis consists of five independent research papers that address this issue from different angles. As a result, the chapters are connected but they also follow their own internal logic. Firstly, the investigation was geared towards identifying cultural currents in Dutch society that incorporate promising elements to question the dominant food cultural paradigm and to facilitate transitional changes. The dominant paradigm can be considered problematic, particularly because it stimulates routinized mass meat consumption, which has detrimental effects on the environment and society, human health and animal welfare. Two in-depth, qualitative studies (chapter two and three) were carried out to understand what deeper motivational drivers could be identified among groups that currently show an increased involvement with food. It revealed that both groups were striving to incorporate a deeper level of meaning in their food choices. One focuses on the personal values of nature connectedness, awareness and purity and the other seeks meaning in food competences, taste and social relatedness. These themes reflect the contrast between purity and ethics versus pleasure and aesthetics. It was shown that the motivations of both groups can be interpreted and understood within larger analytic frameworks of culture and cultural change in the West. Therefore it is argued that policy efforts to motivate more sustainable food consumption among a larger group of consumers may benefit from connecting to these underlying cultural trends, for example by means of framing and stimulating associated practices. 

While theories of cultural change can indicate the nature, direction and dynamics of societal change, it concerns potentially slow and long-term developments. Therefore, policy makers need to address value pluralism and develop varying feasible pathways to stimulate a more sustainable diet. So secondly, three quantitative survey studies were carried out to investigate different types of food-related motivations, incorporating the qualitative findings mentioned above. Self-determination theory was employed to further develop the idea of meaningful food consumption. Thus, a philosophical and social-psychological perspective were combined in order to draw distinguishing parallels between the cultural and the individual level. Varying value orientations were tested in a representative survey in combination with the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which gave rise to different motivational themes reflecting cultural tensions in Western society. These were the degree to which the food-nature relationship was internalized, intrinsic enjoyment of food, extrinsic orientation towards food and ambivalence towards food. These themes were all significant with regards to sustainability relevant topics: the quantities of meat that people indicated to consume, the choice for organic or free range meat or plant-based snacks and the prevalence of a high body mass index.

The study also addresses practices related to meat, meat substitution and meat reduction among Dutch consumers. The practices reflected a cultural gradient of meat substitution options running from other products of animal origin and conventional meat free meals to real vegetarian meals. The results demonstrated that patterns of meat consumption, substitution and reduction are influenced by preferences for meal formats (conventional three component meals versus combined meals), protein literacy, cooking skills, preferences for plant-based foods and motivational orientations towards food. In particular, a lack of familiarity and skill hampered the preparation of real vegetarian meals. Based on the findings a diversified understanding of meat substitution is proposed and four policy-relevant pathways for a transition towards a more plant-based diet are specified, including an incremental change towards more health-conscious vegetarian meals, a pathway that utilizes the trend towards convenience, a pathway of reduced portion size, and practice-oriented change towards vegetarian meals.

The thesis contributes to a better understanding what a culture of food sustainability may entail and it sheds light on the cultural influence on individual food choices. It illustrates how these insights might be utilized by policy makers in government and industry whose goal it is to facilitate more sustainable food choices.

Our body compulsory demands food, water and air to keep its vital functions and yet their economic nature is rather diverse
with food mostly considered a private good, water suffering an accelerated privatization process and air so far considered a
global common good. Food has evolved from a common good and local resource to a national asset and then to a
transnational commodity as the commodification process is rather completed nowadays. Cultivated food is fully privatized
and this consideration means that human beings can eat food as long as they have money to but it or means to produce it.
With the dominant no money-no food rationality, hunger still prevails in a world of abundance. In order to provide a sound
foundation for the transition towards sustainable food systems, the very nature of food as a pure private good is contested and
subsequently reversed in this paper, proposing a re-conceptualisation of food as a common good, a necessary narrative for the
redesign of the dominating agro-industrial food system that merely sees food as a tradable commodity. This aspirational
transition shall lead us to a more sustainable, fairer and farmer-centred food system. The idea of the commons is applied to
food, deconstructing food as a pure private good and reconstructing it as an impure commons that can be better produced and
distributed by a hybrid tri-centric governance system compounded by market rules, public regulations and collective actions.
Several food-related elements are already considered as common goods (i.e. fish stocks, wild fruits, cuisine recipes,
agricultural knowledge, food safety regulations and unpatented genetic resources) as well as food’s implications (hunger
eradication) and benefits (public health and good nutrition). Should food and be consider as a commons, the implications for
the governance of the global food system would be enormous, with examples ranging from placing food outside the
framework agreements dealing with pure private goods, banning financial speculation on food commodities or preparing
international binding agreements to govern the production, distribution and access of food to every human being.

ÖZ Yemek yeme eylemi, insanoğlunun dünyaya gözünü açtığı andan itibaren anne sütü aracılığıyla tanıdığı ve biyolojik ihtiyacını karşıladığı yaşamsal bir zorunluluktan büyük bir kültür biçimine dönüşecek şekilde genişlemiştir. "Coğrafya, din, mezhep, toplumsal güç, ekonomik uğraş" gibi faktörler yemek yemenin kültürel bir faaliyet haline gelmesinde belirleyici olmuştur. Bu doğrultuda "nelerin yenilip nelerin yenilemeyeceği ve nasıl yenileceği de kültür kapsamına girmiştir. Birçok etmenden oluşan yemek kültürünün psikolojik unsurları bulunmaktadır. "Zehirlenme korkusuyla seçici, çekimser ve dikkatli davranma; etin, kan ve ölümü çağrıştır-ması nedeniyle vejetaryen olma; kilo alma ve kötü görünme endişesi ile fazla yiyememe, haram yeme ve günah işleme korkusuyla bazı ürünlere el sürmemek" bu kültürün-amaçları çeşitli-psikolojik bazı örnekleri-dir. Yemek yeme eylemi içerisine gizlenen ve bilinçaltında oluşarak yemeğin çağrışım sınırsızlığından hareket edip dilin anlatım gücüyle desteklenen "cinsellik" unsuru da yemek kültürünün "özgün, mizahi, imgesel, edebi ve psikolojik" tarafını oluşturmaktadır. "Aç olma, tüketme biçimi, doyuma ulaşma, reddetme, tiksinme, korkma, çağrışım gücü" gibi soyut ya da somut eylemler yemek ve cinsellik ilişkisinin iç içe geçen ortak noktalarını açığa çıkarmaktadır. Tüm bu unsurlar ise psikolojik etkenlerle beslenmektedir. Bu bağlamda bu makalede, bir kültür biçimi olarak yemek yemenin çağrışımlarının sınırsızlığından hareketle, eril kültürün kadın bedeni üzerinden gerçekleştirdiği cinsel kodlamalar psikoanalitik kuram çerçevesinde ele alınmıştır. "Oburluğun cinselliği" olarak nitelendirdiğimiz bu anlayış dilin anlatım gücünü kullanarak "atasözü, deyim-ler, türküler, maniler, yemek adları, benzetmeler ve ikilemelerle" varlık alanı bulmuştur. Bu doğrultuda eril kültürün yemek masasını dolduran kadın bedeninin güzellik kodları tespit edilmiş; şehvet dürtüsü nedeniyle bu bedenin yenilebilir parçalara nasıl ayrıldığı sözlü ifade biçimleriyle örneklendirilerek yemek ve cinsellik arasındaki sembolik ilişki toplumsal cinsiyet yaklaşımıyla incelenmiştir. Anahtar Kelimeler Oburluk, cinsellik, toplumsal cinsiyet, çağrışım, beslenme. ABSTRACT Eating action have expanded to a great culture from a vital necessity that is recognized through breast milk and meets the biological need.. Factors such as geography, religion, sect, social power and economic affairs have been decisive factors for food to become a cultural activity. In this respect, what products should be eaten and how they should be eaten is within the scope of culture. There are many psychological elements of food cultures that are composed of many factors. Being selective and careful for fear of poisoning; being vegetarian because of the association of meat with blood and death; inability to eat due to weight gain and bad appearance, avoiding some product because of fear of forbidden eating and sin are some psychological examples. Sexuality is hidden in the act of eating, and because it occurs under the consciousness, it moves from the immensity of connotations and is supported by the expression power of language. "Sexuality" constitutes the "original, humorous, imaginative, literary and psychological" side of the food culture. Abstract or concrete actions such as hunger, the way of consuming, the attainment of satiation, rejection, disgust, fear, connotation power point out the common points of intercourse of food and sexuality. All these factors are fed by psychological factors. In this context, in this article, based on the immensity of the connotations of eating as a form of culture, sexual encodings which masculine cultures carried out on female body through will be handled within the framework of psychoanalytic theory. This understanding, which we call "sexuality of the gluttony", has found the area of "proverb, idioms, folk songs, food names, analogies and with other verbal elements by using expression power of the language. In this context, the beauty codes of the female body, which filled the masculine culture food table will be identified and in addition, the symbolic relationship

Espresso coffee has become synonymous with Italy, as have
those beverages which employ this as a base such as cappuccino and caffè latte. This article examines the processes by which espresso became “Itallan” over the course of the twentieth century by investigating the way that the taste of Italian coffee has evolved, along with the taste for coffee amongst the Italians. In addition it discusses the ways in which the serving styles of these beverages have been adjusted to make them more palatable to coffee-drinking cultures outside Italy. By focussing on the sensory qualities of the coffee itself, it aims to produce a material history of espresso that can be read alongside that of the socio-cultural conditions that have occasioned its success.