Gender and Foodways

Food practices, though often constant, mundane, and individual activities, represent a vibrant site to explore gender relationships that transcend functionality. Food studies have gleaned insights from the past and present about the gendered structuring of society and belief systems that prevail as revealed in the activities of daily life. Conceptually, foodways are a network of activities and systems that include physical, social, communicative, cultural, as well as economic, spiritual, and aesthetic values and, thus, deeply inform ideas of personhood and nationhood.

Early scholarship on food and gender emerged primarily out of anthropology that examined exotic far-off cultures and the ways that food was symbolically used and functioned to reinforce certain relations. However, a plethora of scholarly activity has emerged crossing diverse disciplines such as philosophy, political ...