GENDER AND FOOD

GENDER AND FOOD. Across many cultures and epochs, people have constituted, expressed, and bridged gender differences through foodways—the beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Through the division of labor, alimentary exchanges, access to food, and the meanings surrounding eating, men and women have enacted their identity, roles, and power.

Gender and Food Production

In many cultures, men and women define their economic relationships in food-centered productive roles. In hunting-gathering and pre-industrial farming cultures, men and women share in food production but have distinct roles. Among the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, for example, women gather vegetable foods and men hunt animals. Although women produce the great majority of the food, men produce highly desired meat, and thus the contributions of both sexes are relatively equally valued, which contributes to the gender egalitarianism that is a hallmark of the !Kung. In Wamira, Papua New Guinea, men and women contribute to growing taro at different stages in the agricultural cycle: men prepare the soil and plant the tubers; women weed the gardens and tend the growing plants; men harvest the mature tubers (Kahn, 1986). They promote gender interdependence and mutual respect by symbolically linking their complementary roles in the production of taro to those in the reproduction of children. Among share-cropping peasants in Tuscany in the first half of the twentieth century, men focused on producing grain, grapes, and olives, while women took care of the family vegetable garden and the courtyard animals. Women also helped harvest the major crops, gathered wild foods, and preserved and prepared key comestibles. Because women's productive work was associated closely with their taken-for-granted reproductive roles in the home, it was less highly valued than men's contributions to food production.

Around the globe, women predominate in the lowest status, lowest paying, and most servile roles in agribusiness and the food industry as fieldworkers, waitresses, fast-food servers, and cannery and meatpacking workers. In rural Iowa, for example, women were almost completely excluded from the pork-packing industry when jobs were unionized and pay was good. They entered the industry in increasing numbers in the 1980s, when wages were falling, and at the end of the twentieth century they were still almost always relegated to the poorest paying packing and cleaning jobs in the plant rather than the better-paying cut and kill jobs (Fink, 1998).

Women are almost universally in charge of cooking and feeding, starting with breast-feeding the newborn. Through breast-feeding, women forge deep bonds with children and give them the best possible food, yet across the globe, breast-feeding has declined under the flood of commercial formulas. While formula has been beneficial to some women who cannot or do not want to breastfeed, it lacks the many benefits of breast milk and has contributed to the disempowerment of mothers who have lost confidence in their bodies and control of their children's food (Blum, 1999; Van Esterik, 1989; Whitaker, 2000).

Women's labor to produce, preserve, prepare, serve, and clean up food sometimes brings recognition and value, as among Ecuadorian peasants. But often women's food roles are devalued, especially under conditions of capitalist economic development, as in late-twentieth-century central Italy, where women's food roles became isolated in the home and separated from valued, public production. Florentine women struggle to balance their desire to work outside the home with traditional expectations that they prepare elaborate meals for both lunch and supper. They suffer conflicts that men, free from culinary expectations, do not face. As in Italy, in England and the United States women's food roles in the home are sometimes problematic because they are "naturally" assigned to women and the labor involved is both underestimated and undervalued. Women are obligated by custom and culture to cook and please their husbands while subordinating their own desires (Charles and Kerr, 1988; DeVault, 1991). In lesbian and gay households, feeding work is undervalued and confers low status, so many couples tend to minimize its significance and the implicit subordination of the partner who does it (Carrington, 1999).

Gender and Food Consumption

Food consumption signifies gender and sexuality in diverse cultures. Eating often stands for intercourse, foods for sexual parts. Among the Wamira, taro represents male virility, and the size and fullness of the tubers stand for the potency of their producer. Male and female identities are expressed through association with foods and rules about consumption. The Hua of Papua New Guinea classify foods into two main categories: koroko, or female foods, are wet, cold, fertile, soft, and fast growing; haker'a, or male foods, are dry, hot, infertile, hard, and slow growing. Hua men and women believe they can gain some of each other's powers and attenuate gender differences by eating each other's foods (Meigs, 1984). In other cultures, however, rules about food consumption promote hierarchical conceptions of gender. In nineteenth-century American bourgeois homes, women were discouraged from eating meat, which was believed to stimulate excessive sexual appetite. Late-twentieth-century U.S. college students still believed that men should eat lots of meat and women should eat lighter foods, such as salads. They valued hearty appetite and big bodies in men, but preferred dainty eating and small bodies in women, thereby forcing women to deny their appetites and reduce themselves (Brumberg, 1988).

In Western cultures for at least seven centuries, women have much more commonly than men practiced extreme fasting and compulsive eating to communicate unspoken longings for autonomy, control, and power. A significant number of medieval women used food refusal and miraculous emissions of breast milk as expressions of piety and spiritual power. Middle-class nineteenth-century American girls refused food to demand attention and speak their needs for full personhood. Many U.S. girls at the turn of the twenty-first century struggle for control by pursuing excessive thinness through extreme fasting or bingeing and purging, while others eat compulsively to numb the pain of abuse. Yet women from many cultures have forged positive relationships with their bodies that allow different and more ample forms of body beauty. In cultures as disparate as Fiji and Florence, people decry thinness as evidence of social neglect and celebrate women's plumpness as a reflection of wellbeing and fertility.

Gender and Food Distribution

In food exchanges, men and women create meaningful relationships and demonstrate wealth and power. In many agricultural and hunting-gathering societies, men give away food to acquire and demonstrate political leadership. In Wamira, Papua New Guinea, men gain allies and shame enemies through massive food feasts. Women in many cultures exercise influence over family members by giving or withholding food, and they contribute to establishing hierarchy in the family by allocation of delicacies. When serving the soup, Ecuadorian Indian peasant women show favor by distribution of the prized chunks of meat, and they express ire at husbands by failing to prepare dinner, a grave insult and social transgression (Weismantel, 1988). In many cultures, women and men initiate relationships by eating together—whether as a date among Western college students or as a marriage proclamation by sharing yams among the Trobriand Islanders. Feasts celebrate community and gender cooperation across all cultures. For example, in Tresnuraghes, Sardinia, for the feast of Saint Mark, shepherds donate sheep, which their wives cook and distribute—solidifying community, demonstrating wealth, and sharing food widely.

In many cultures, gender hierarchy is expressed through access to food. Often women have less access to food than men, a practice supported by their economic dependence, by beliefs that they need less, and by pregnancy food taboos. The Mbum Kpau, for example, prohibit women from eating chicken or goat lest they die in childbirth or suffer sterility, a major tragedy because of the importance of childbearing to these women. While in practice the prohibitions have little effect on daily consumption, they reinforce men's power by emphasizing their right to meat and other preferred foods (O'Laughlin, 1974). Under conditions of food deficiency, women are particularly vulnerable to hunger, along with children and the elderly, because they generally have less power over food and other resources than men. In Malawi, under normal conditions, women controlled grain stores and lived close to their relatives in matrilineal and matrilocal households. But in the 1949 famine, crops failed and women had no grain to control. Wage labor, exclusively practiced by men, was the only way to gain access to food, but many men left their wives' households to search for food in the villages where they were born, so women lost access to men's labor and wages while still being responsible for feeding children, the elderly, and themselves (Vaughn, 1987). Under conditions of food insecurity, male power over food is particularly salient, but even under conditions of food security, gender relations play an important role in food production, distribution, and consumption across cultures and time periods.

See also Anorexia, Bulimia; Anthropology and Food ; Division of Labor; Lactation; Milk, Human; Sex and Food; Symbol, Food as; Taboos; Time; Women and Food .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Anne. Body, Self, and Society: The View from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Blum, Linda. At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Carrington, Christopher. No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Charles, Nickie, and Marion Kerr. Women, Food and Families. Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988.

Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity. New York: Times Books, 1985.

Counihan, Carole. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power. New York: Routledge, 1999.

De Grazia, Victoria, ed. The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

DeVault, Marjorie L. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Fink, Deborah. Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Inness, Sherrie A., ed. Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2001.

Kahn, Miriam. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Meigs, Anna S. Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984.

O'Laughlin, Bridget. "Mediation of Contradiction: Why Mbum Women Do Not Eat Chicken." In Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 301–318. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.

Paules, Greta Foff. Dishing It Out: Power and Resistance among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986.

Thompson, Becky W. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: American Women Speak Out on Eating Problems. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Van Esterik, Penny. Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Vaughan, Megan. The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Weismantel, Mary J. Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

Whitaker, Elizabeth Dixon. Measuring Mamma's Milk: Fascism and the Medicalization of Maternity in Italy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Carole M. Counihan

Male Cooks in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Insights into the gender-based division of labor in American culture are beautifully illustrated by cookbooks that were written by men for other men in the first half of the twentieth century. Among other things, they illustrate that, just like women, men had to deal with the consequences of being fettered by other people's notions of what was a permissible interest or occupation. Men were expected to do important, well-paying work, and if they happened to be interested in cooking, they were expected to be executive chefs. Men who wrote cookbooks could write without embarrassment about the pursuit and preparation of wild game, perhaps, or the perils of outdoor barbecuing, but everyday home cooking was understood to be women's work.

Nevertheless, men interested in writing recipes for home cooks managed to do so without losing their self-respect, but in order to pull it off they had to set themselves apart from women. Authors had to prove that male cooks were more creative and inspired than women, who were understood to be more concerned with the mundane task of getting three meals a day on the table. Male cooks had to convince themselves and others that, unlike women, their approach to food was spirited and adventurous, not weighted down by frets over level measurements or undue concerns about nutrition. The concern of the male cook, of course, was to appear masculine enough not to be mistaken for a sissy or the least bit effeminate; he would prove his legitimacy by establishing his superiority over women.

Certain American foods have been linked either to men or to women, creating stereotypes that designate light, sweet foods such as jams, jellies, and cupcakes as female, while male food is heavy and spicy, with the only acceptable vegetable being potatoes.

Male gourmets were happy to see the prohibition of alcohol lifted in 1933 so that they could occupy themselves with matching good food to good wines. Seeking like-minded companions, they formed societies to share their interest in fine food. J. George Frederick, founder and first president of the New York Gourmet Society, established his leadership by creating "A Gourmet's Code of Modern Dining," published in his book, Cooking as Men Like It (1939).

Frederick has clear ideas about differences between men and women in their approaches to food. While he credits women with having made some striking advances in their cooking, he finds them too occupied with cleanliness, purity, and nutrition, rather than what is "savory and tasteful" or "varied and succulent," the priorities of men.

While old ways of thinking tend to persist, new styles of eating would suggest that at the start of the twenty-first century, men who like to cook and bake can do so without feeling their manhood challenged, and women who have no interest in domesticity will perhaps no longer be considered unnatural.

See also Cookbooks; Division of Labor; Time; United States: African American Foodways.

Barbara Haber