Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food
InCooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food, nine scholars look at the many ways ethnic and regional food traditions, marketing strategies, cultural stereotypes, and economic forces form or entrench gender roles. These often entertaining essays also investigate the ways that women have used the very foods they prepare to resist and redefine those gender roles. Editor Sherrie Inness has gathered essays from specialists in American studies, literature, history, communications, women's studies, and creative writing that focus on particular foods—each food item serving as a location where women's identity politics play out. The essayists mix ethnographic research with history, literary analysis, and personal anecdotes to help us see that foods like meatloaf, fried chicken, tortillas, Jell-O, bananas, biscuits and cornbread, or even an ordinary cup of tea, always contain gender as one of their ingredients. (Anne L. Bower, editor of Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories)