Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race

Description

At supermarkets across the nation, customers waiting in line—mostly female—flip through magazines displayed at the checkout stand. What we find on those magazine racks are countless images of food and, in particular, women: moms preparing lunch for the team, college roommates baking together, working women whipping up a meal in under an hour, dieters happy to find a lowfat ice cream that tastes great. In everything from billboards and product packaging to cooking shows, movies, and even sex guides, food has a presence that conveys powerful gender-coded messages that shape our society. Kitchen Culture in America is a collection of essays that examine how women's roles have been shaped by the principles and practice of consuming and preparing food. Exploring popular representations of food and gender in American society from 1895 to 1970, these essays argue that kitchen culture accomplishes more than just passing down cooking skills and well-loved recipes from generation to generation. Kitchen culture instructs women about how to behave like "correctly" gendered beings. One chapter reveals how juvenile cookbooks, a popular genre for over a century, have taught boys and girls not only the basics of cooking, but also the fine distinctions between their expected roles as grown men and women. Several essays illuminate the ways in which food manufacturers have used gender imagery to define women first and foremost as consumers. Other essays, informed by current debates in the field of material culture, investigate how certain commodities like candy, which in the early twentieth century was advertised primarily as a feminine pleasure, have been culturally constructed. The book also takes a look at the complex relationships among food, gender, class, and race or ethnicity-as represented, for example, in the popular Southern black Mammy figure. In all of the essays, Kitchen Culture in America seeks to show how food serves as a marker of identity in American society.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Similar books

• 

  Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture

  By Sherrie A. Inness

  ... Food and Eating; Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz, eds., Eating Culture; Mary Anne Schofield, ed., Cooking by the Book ... Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts (1985), a carefully researched study of the Victorian period and the complex ...

• 

  Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today

  By Amy B. Trubek

  By looking closely at the stories and practices of American home cooks—witnessing them in the kitchen and at the table—Amy B. Trubek reveals our episodic but also engaged relationship to making meals.

• 

  The Kitchen: A Social History of Cooking and Eating

  By Shirley Wajda

  Emphasizing the kitchen's centrality in the lives of Americans and in American life, this illustrated work reveals how this space shaped, and was shaped by, American thought and culture.

• 

  America's Kitchens

  By Nancy Camilla Carlisle, Melinda Talbot Nasardinov, Jennifer Pustz

  It is amazing what this one room--at times a harried workspace and at others the sentimental heart of the home--has meant to people over the course of more than four...

• 

  Food in American Culture and Literature: Places at the Table

  By Carl Boon, Nuray Önder, Evrim Ersöz Koç

  Carving a unique space within the burgeoning field of food studies, the essays gathered in this volume position themselves at a variety of flashpoints along the spectrum of cultural and literary analysis.

• 

  Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table

  By S. Inness

  From the convenience-food cookbooks of the 1950s, to the 1980s rise in 'white trash' cookbooks, and the surprise success of the Two Fat Ladies books from the 1990s, leading author Sherrie Inness discusses how women have used such books over ...

• 

  African American Food Culture

  By William Frank Mitchell

  Affenito, S. G., D. R. Thompson, B. A. Barton, D. L. Franko, S. R. Daniels, O. Obarzanek, G. B. Schreiber, and R. H. Striegel-Moore. “Breakfast Consumption by African-American and White Adolescent Girls Correlates Positively with ...

• 

  American Cookery

  By Amelia Simmons

  A culinary classic, American Cookery is a landmark in the history of American cooking. “Thus, twenty years after the political upheaval of the American Revolution of 1776, a second revolution—a culinary revolution—occurred with the ...

• 

  How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture

  By Jennifer Jensen Wallach

  While writing this chapter, I examined a number of significant historical cookbooks, including Sarah Josepha Hale's Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1857); Mary Randolph's The Virginia Housewife (Baltimore: ...

• 

  Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960

  By Rebecca Sharpless

  Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives.