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,

becomes gendered at the expense of the “invisible” labor of women, and finally focusing on the role of gender in the world of recipe-making as a particular feminized mode of culinary transmission that may be juxtaposed to the role of masculine professional cooking in restaurants for developing a particular and stylized cuisine.
Critical of the particular US-American linguistic work of the word “meat”, Carol J. Adams discusses how “meat” and “meat”-eating has become in many ways highly gendered and sexualized. Moving beyond the general historical connection between “meat” and masculinity focusing on its current iteration, Adams aptly notes that commercials and commercialism helps to feed into our collective fantasy of unidentifiable “meat” (or “beef” or “steak”) by appealing directly to an inherently male appetite (Adams 1998, 66). As a consequence, masculinity in the United States becomes closely tied with the eating of meat that the eating of meat becomes synonymous with mainstream understandings of masculinity. Thus, meat-eating then “demarcates individual and societal virility”, both of which are highly desired in the Euro-American cultures (ibid). This too works on the flip side so that the refusal to eat meat can be seen as the reversal of exerting one’s masculinity as Adams states, “Men who decide to eschew “meat” eating are deemed effeminate; failure of men to eat “meat” announces that they are not masculine (ibid).
In this process, one that Adams would argue is deeply embedded in European social relations and distribution of food to the working “bread winner of the household”, it is clear here that commercialism and the need for consumers to buy into the collective language of “meat” plays a huge role in this hyperbolized understanding of “to eat meat is to be male”. What shifts is not the fact that meat has always been gendered but rather the mechanism through which meat eating is considered male: through the consumption of the female, which can bee seen in the commercials that depict (often male in “reality”) particular meats as female, such as cows in commercials with female heads or female voices and the analogy of the turkey hooker (Adams 67). Men are meant to consume meat—the context of which is often specifically gendered as female.
However, it is not just the consumption of (a gendered) food that influences our bias of who should eat particular foods, but rather food production itself can often be highly gendered and often coexists with gendered considerations of the consumer.

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

women are given work in the preparation of bananas, this work is still highly gendered so that one could speak of weeding and cleaning of bananas as “women’s work”. This invisible work of women, Enloe argues, goes beyond just the production of bananas and expands to many realms of agricultural production around the world, especially when the work of women is hidden by politics of land ownership; this is a phenomenon of that Enloe refers to explicitly when she states: “Women grow more food than men. Women buy more food than men. Women cook more food than men. But women own less land on which food is grown. And women eat less food than men” (Enloe 143). In the commercial landscape of things, the production and agricultural work become gendered as male because the contributions from women are invisible. Thus, while focusing on the banana as a particularly (salient) example, Enloe provides insight into an entire system of commercial-influenced conceptions of gendered agricultural practices, some of which do not map onto the reality.
Also facing increasing international commercialism is that of regional recipes, which are strongly gendered as female and considered a part of regional cuisines A prominent example of gendered implications of regional cookbooks is purported by Arjun Appadurai in his text, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India”. Here, Appadurai describes how predominantly middle-class women living in cities and who belong to the “small but important class of consumers characterized by their multiethnic, mutlicaste, polyglot and Westernized tastes” (Appadurai 1998, 5-6) have engaged in the exchange of oral and written recipes with women who originated in regions in India differing from their own. Often these women engage in culinary stereotypes of the Other (Appadruai 7). While there is some discrepancy between cookbooks created by “insiders” or “outsiders” (Appardurai 17) especially in the increasingly commercialized and international realm of English speaking translations or originally published in English cookbooks, the fact remains that women remain the forefront of this movement, due to the particular way that cooking, which predominantly takes place at the domestic level (and not at restaurants as in other cultures), is already gendered as predominantly female (Appadruai 9-10).
In brief, these three examples show us the connection between how certain foods, food production, food practices, and heritages of culinary ideas are actively shaped as pertaining predominantly to one gender, often in light of commercial aspirations. This ranges from the level of commercial-influenced American connotations of masculinity as experienced through eating meat, to both the gendered notions of agricultural production and distant consumption of bananas in Latin America and beyond, and finally the connection between gender and various forms of culinary transmission, centered around the recipe as inherently female as seen through one site (India).