Gendered Food Consumption

As one of the many axes on which humans make social distinctions, gender can become closely entwined with interpreting the social meaning of particular foods and food practices. As such, not just particular foods become gendered, but food production and processes of the development of cuisines and the heritage of culinary traditions can also become highly gendered. Attempting to draw the connection between these different planes, this essay will focus first on the Carol J Adam’s understanding of how meat-eating is increasingly painted as masculine in Euro-American societies through commercialism, before moving on discuss Cynthia Enloe’s analysis of how both agricultural production and removed consumption of the banana, among other foods,

While there are many examples from which to drawn, Enloe’s discussion of the banana and agricultural production in Latin America and beyond, highlights the particular way in which the production of bananas has been gendered as male, while the consumption (particularly that of US-American) is primarily construed as female. For one there is the way in which bananas are marketed as inherently for responsible female mothers in places like the United States, who feel the need to provide certain foods deemed nutritional Enloe 1990, PG). As the consumer is female, so too is the gendered construction of the actual object of the banana: the banana becomes marketed and emblemized through American understanding of the highly sexualized and exotic Latina (Enloe 128-130). On the flip side, Enloe argues that larger historical and political work has construed the production and packaging of bananas as inherently male-lead (Enloe 128 ). In Latin America, Central America, the Carribean and the Phillipeans where bananas are largely produced, not only were men doing most of the business negations but male workers are seen as the fittest for the grueling physical job (Enloe 128). In reality, however, we come to see the invisible work of women, so that women are the backbone of many agricultural labor forces. Increasingly they too are doing actual physical work of weeding and preparing bananas (Enloe 136-139), but they also do a plethora of other “work” that made banana planation’s so functional and profitable, often working in brothers and as substitute wives and housekeepers (Enloe 140-142). It should be noted that in the sex work, they are seen as tangential and not directly related to the work of men in the field. In addition, when