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 "Unlike some other food studies collections, this edited work of original essays is not centered on a single topic or located in a single academic discipline or methodology." -- Gastronomica, Spring 2007
In this book, feminist scholars shed new light on the history of food, cooking, and eating. In recent years, scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to food to gain a better understanding of history, culture, economics, and society.
The emerging field of food studies has yielded a great deal of useful research and a host of publications. Missing, however, has been a focused effort to use gender as an analytic tool. This stimulating collection of original essays addresses that oversight, investigating the important connections between food studies and women's studies. Applying the insights of feminist scholarship to the study of food, the thirteen essays in this volume are arranged under four headings - the marketplace, histories, representations, and resistances.
The editors open the book with a substantial introduction that traces the history of scholarly writing on food and maps the terrain of feminist food studies. In the essays that follow, contributors pay particular attention to the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, class, colonialism, and capitalism have both shaped and been shaped by the production and consumption of food. In the first section, four essays analyze the influence of large corporations in determining what came to be accepted as proper meals in the United States, including what mothers were expected to feed their babies.
The essays in the second section explore how women have held families together by keeping them nourished, from the routines of an early nineteenth-century New Englander to the plight of women who endured the siege of Leningrad. The essays in the third section focus on the centrality of gender and race in the formation of identities as enacted through food discourse and practices. These case studies range from the Caribbean to the San Luis Valley of Colorado.
The final section documents acts of female resistance within the contexts of national or ethnic oppression. From women in colonial India to Armenian American feminists, these essays show how food has served as a means to assert independence and personal identity.
Visit From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food Download Page
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Arlene Voski Avakian, Barbara Haber
Editors
University of Massachusetts Press
PREFACE
When Barbara Haber developed the large cookbook collection at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, many feminists and women’s studies scholars were not supportive of her interest in these works. Cookbooks, they argued, were a mark of women’s oppression and should not be collected in a major American library committed to the history of American women.
The idea that cookbooks are documents of women’s history, a perspective that seems so obvious now, was not generally accepted when Haber made this argument in the 1970s. Decades later when Avakian told colleagues in women’s studies she was working on an anthology of writing by feminists about their relationship to food and cooking, most smiled and changed the subject.
Some would occasionally ask her how her cookbook was coming along despite her repeated attempts to explain she was using food, a constant and necessary presence in human life, to investigate the complexity of women’s intersecting social identities.
She was not, she reminded them, editing a cookbook. They were, however, puzzled. Had she not said she was including some recipes in the book? Yes, she had. Reading a recipe along with an essay, she was convinced, could provide another perspective on an issue, a relationship, or an individual. Much could be learned about contents by knowing both the specific ingredients and the techniques of cooking. To her dismay, when the book was published bookstores often shelved it with cookbooks rather than with women’s studies volumes. ...
Feminist Food Studies: A Brief History
ARLENE VOSKI AVAKIAN
BARBARA HABER
The study of food, cooking, and eating, once a subject limited to nutritionists and a few anthropologists studying the symbolic importance of foodways among “natives,”1 has expanded to include sociology, history, philosophy, economics, and the interdisciplinary fields of Women’s Studies, American Studies and Cultural Studies.
Articles on food have recently appeared in a diverse list of scholarly periodicals and anthologies, while new books on the topic continue to be published in ever greater numbers by both university and trade presses. In the last decade an avalanche of books on food has appeared, and conferences on food are no longer the sole concern of food professionals.
About the Author
ARLENE VOSKI AVAKIAN is professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and editor of Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking.
BARBARA HABER, former curator of books at the Schlesinger Library, is author of From Hardtack to Homefries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals.
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