The Gendering Of Food, A Feminist Approach To Food

Food. Its one of the most controversial and talked about topics of our generation, whether it is food access, food security, or food prices, the subject of food is one that is prominently promoted. Recently, a new trend has been occurring in society that revolves food that has, in most cases, gone unnoticed; food gendering. In our current society an increase of gender stereotypes has emerged in magazines, cookbooks, and other active forms of media that promote and indicate that there is a difference amongst male and female appetites. This difference indicates to what extent an individual can fully perform gender in accordance to their intake of foods that have been labeled and declared as primarily being consumed as either males or females,

Today much of the food that we see in supermarkets or through advertisements are marketed towards a particular gender that, depending on the gender of the individual, either has the ability to diminish or strengthen their associated masculinity or femininity. It is more so common in todays society that the gendering of foods consists of beef, hotdogs, and potatoes as masculine foods while feminine foods tend to include salads, yogurt, fruit and pasta. The contents of this paper will examine three areas; food gendering and consumption patterns towards men, food gendering and consumption patterns towards women, and an analysis of why we associate with these gendered food patterns and what happens when we rebel against

Food has now become embedded as part of our identity and serves as one of the key ways that men and women display gender under what types of food are eaten and under what circumstances they are done so. What produces this result is the institutions and social structures that project meaning and power to an individual’s identity as it either becomes negotiated or constructed (Nash & Phillipove, 2014, pg.205). Calvert describes a concept where the consumption of meat necessitates the concept of power and domination, as over the centuries the notion of ‘man as hunter’ began to develop through the correlation of men and meat (Calvert, 2014, pg.18). As a result of this meat-eating contributes to the development of a “patriarchal structure of human-male supremacy, celebrating a primitive masculinity and the normalization of the consumption of meat to be a masculine activity (Calvert, 2014, pg.19). As a result of this, when men consume less amounts of meat products they often faced with the misconception seen by their male counterparts that they hold a form of masculinity that is far from one that displays “proper” hegemonic characteristics. This gendering of food serves an important process in describing the presence of hegemonic masculinity as food consumption practices allow men to confirm and subscribe to the